Health care and road conditions spark debate in Harbour Main district
If the PC Party wants to have a good chance of unseating the Liberals in the October 14 provincial election, it will have to do a good job of holding onto the seats it already has, as well as managing to flip a half dozen others throughout the province. One of the seats it it hoping to hold is Harbour Main district which runs from the west end of CBS through Conception Bay Centre. It is held by Marysvale native and veteran lawyer Helen Conway Ottenheimer who is being challenged by trades instructor and most recently the mayor of Avondale, Don Lewis. By Craig Westcott
Q: Both parties are making a lot of spending promises. Where’s all the money going to come from to pay for it?
HCO: The first thing I would say to that is we need to do more and better with the money that we have. There needs to be more strategic and wiser allocation of the resources that we have. We need to see that the resources and the choices that are made are better choices, and that has not been done under this liberal government over the past 10 years.
DL: Well, I guess, for me, being new in the business, it’s all based on, but just a larger scale, like trying to run a town. I mean, the money got to come from somewhere. The Premier is pushing some projects now, like his MOU and he can generate a lot of funding from that. We got another oil project probably going on stream within the next year or so, and the mining and basically it is just, I guess, tax revenue from the province.
Q: Both parties are making a lot of spending promises. Where’s all the money going to come from to pay for it?
HCO: There’s no question we need to get control over our finances. And you’re right, there is confusion about what that figure is. We don’t know what the true state of the books is. The liberals refused to provide the full financial picture ahead of the election. The fiscal update that was provided back in late August it was rushed and incomplete and was not transparent on the critical financial picture that exists… And of course, once we become government, we will see what that is.
DL: Well, they got to control spending, I guess. I haven’t sat down, I guess officially (to look at it), because I wasn’t a part of the party, but they got to bring things back in line and try to come up with enough revenue to mitigate the dips, and the federal government got to properly come on stream and up the donations to the provinces.
Q: Have you happened to be in an emergency room in the last 10 years and do you think healthcare is better now than it was 10 years ago?
HCO: I have been in an emergency room in the last 10 years. And it is clearly worse. It has declined significantly in the last decade. Healthcare has to be a priority for the government and it will be our priority. We have the worst healthcare in the country and we see that there needs to be a complete overhaul of the system… One of the specific initiatives that we will in the PC government implement is the Urgent Care Clinic that we will establish in CBS. It’s a plan to improve our system. And we will be able to alleviate some of the issues that you alluded to when you asked about the state of our emergency departments. An urgent care clinic will give enhanced access to nurse practitioners, doctors, nurses, other professional healthcare professionals, and it will help people avoid emergency departments. It’ll reduce wait times. And it’ll improve access to care closer to home. So that is, it is a huge initiative by the PCs that we will see implemented and it will impact many of my constituents in the district of Harbour Main including constituents in the CBS area of Upper Gullies, Seal Cove, Holyrood, and even further parts of my district. In fact, it’ll impact the entire Northeast Avalon.
DL: I’ve been in the hospitals quite a bit, and I know a lot of people such as doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, LPN’s you name it, I know some of them very closely. But yes, the hospitals are in desperate need of people. It’s easy to say, well we got to hire 25 or 50 doctors, but come off it, where are we going to get them? That’s the major problem in healthcare, especially in rural Newfoundland, people don’t want to set up there. So, it’s going to be a problem to entice people to go to these places. Yes, we got the hospitals, but the (lack of) staff is the biggest problem… And a lot of them too are blocking up because people can’t get family doctors, so they run to the emergency room because of that…Most of the provinces I worked in, there’s issues in every province. But here in Newfoundland, the population base is after growing substantially on the Avalon Peninsula. You got outport (people) moving into the city. It’s not that the healthcare is worse. It’s just the facilities and the people to run it (aren’t keeping up). That’s all I see happening. I mean, open heart surgeries and hip replacements and all that kind of stuff is still happening. So the healthcare, I don’t think is worse. It’s just that it all goes back to staffing it and getting the people in here.
Q: what issues particularly to your district are you most concerned about and how do you propose to fix them?
HCO: One of the biggest issues that faces our residents is healthcare. And so that’s why I’m very pleased to see that we will implement an Urgent Healthcare Clinic in Conception Bay South.
Another important issue is affordability and cost of living. Everything costs more it seems now, from groceries to gas to housing. And it’s clear from my constituents that too many families are struggling to make ends meet. And so we have a clear plan to, first of all, lower taxes. That is critical. We have many other cost of living reduction strategies. One is to lower the gas tax. We’ll cancel the Liberals’ planned April 1st increase.
Another issue that is really important in my district, because we have a high percentage of trades people that live in the district of Harbour Main, we will implement a tax credit for rotational workers.
And the other issue that’s really important is roads… It’s been something that I’ve been advocating for years. I stood in the House of Assembly 26 times (with) petitions arguing for improved pavement in various areas of the district. And yet it really has not been addressed significantly… Having deplorable road conditions costs people every day, in car repairs, in replacing rims and struts. I was out on the campaign trail and speaking to a man who was actually underneath his car replacing the rims because of the damage that had been done on the roads in the Upper Gullies and Seal Cove area. That’s something that has to be prioritized and it will be under a PC government.
DL: I’ve been knocking on doors for about two months. Our district goes from Kelligrews right to North River, and believe it or not, it still goes back to pavement. People right away say the roads are gone. Well, guess what? Last week the Liberal government started the road up in Holyrood, Route 60. They’re paving and upgrading two and a half kilometres. There was no money spent in the last six years in our district on roads. And if I get on the government side, it will be done. Roads shouldn’t still be a major issue, but believe it or not, it’s a big issue.
The other issue is healthcare. We just talked about that. There’s got to be a way here in Newfoundland and Labrador to get more doctors in rural Newfoundland and outport Newfoundland. The facilities are old, but we got some. The facility is there, but in a lot of cases you got to wait long for appointments, and you can’t get in to get certain things done.
Cell service is a major thing… I talked to a guy yesterday in Seal Cove, he got no cell service. We put everyone in a situation where landlines hardly exist. New homes don’t even install them. So, we put the people in the situation we’re in, but we got to get more towers. And the issue with the towers is the companies that own them… We had people who were getting evacuation notices online and they didn’t receive (them), so that’s a big issue.
And seniors and the cost of living. Some seniors can’t afford to live, they’re just struggling.