Sizzling stories

When Canada’s health ministers left Winnipeg on Oct. 16, they took with them a promise to keep talking. The federal health minister did not commit to long-term funding. She offered one-year extensions for programs that were about to run out, and asked officials to begin work on “the next 10 years.”

The provinces, in the words of Manitoba Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara, wanted to avoid “fiscal cliffs” and needed “predictable, stable, sustainable funding.”

Both sides have a point. And both are talking almost entirely about money — how much, for how long, under what formula.

Missing from the conversation is the question that decides whether any of it works — once the money flows, who must answer for what it does, or does not, achieve? We have been here before. In 2002, a Senate committee chaired by Michael Kirby warned that new federal money “must be used to buy change, not merely to support the system as it is presently structured.” It proposed an independent national health care commissioner, reporting every year to the public on how the system and the health of Canadians were faring.

People over cars — always

Re: Researchers: lights at crossing ‘long overdue’ (Oct. 22)

Maggie Macintosh’s article was right on the mark. The biggest problem with pedestrian crossings is the remarkable inconsistency, but there is also the fact that drivers at every traffic light are trained to keep running through amber lights until they turn to red.

I use the pedestrian crossing at Roblin Boulevard and Hunterspoint Road and drive through it every day. Almost every day I see drivers, from a full block away, who will just keep going through the flashing ambers (at the crossing), especially if there is traffic ahead of them doing the same thing.