Shoot the Liberals into the Fucking Sun

Also the Conservatives and the NDP

My mom’s got a rare and dangerous form of cancer. She’s on her second round of chemo for it. After the first round, the sites on her arm where the IV was connected became infected, and my brother went with her to the emergency room so she could get antibiotics. After her second round, it happened again. Now I’m with her at the ER, waiting to be seen.

The oncology centre isn’t open on the weekends, and her family doctor — which, unlike millions of Canadians, she’s lucky enough to have — is also not available on weekends. Her arm is red, hot, and swollen, and her temperature has been hovering around a fever for a few days, so she needs to get seen. It’s particularly urgent because chemo destroys your immune system, and you need to be really vigilant about infections and illnesses. So: we’re at the emergency room.

We got here at 8 am. The screens in the waiting room notified us of an estimated 10 hour 15 minute wait for basically everyone who wasn’t currently bleeding out from a gunshot wound. All around us, dozens of sick people sat, coughing.

We get seen by the triage nurse, who takes my mom’s blood pressure and temperature and sends us back to the waiting room. I remind the nurse that chemo patients really aren’t supposed to be sitting around in hospital waiting rooms, a fact stressed to us by the oncology team. I know, she says, smiling sympathetically with her eyes above her blue surgical mask. But there’s nowhere else to put you.

Is it better for a chemo patient with an infection and no immune system to wait ten hours in an ER, uncomfortable and hungry and miserable and stressed, around a bunch of people with colds and covid and RSV and brain-eating amoebas, or to just go home and hope the infection doesn’t get worse? It’s a completely insane choice to have to make.

Eventually I complain and they let us wait in a hallway elsewhere. A while after that we are allowed to wait in an unused eye exam room. We are now six hours in. All we need is for someone to prescribe an antibiotic.

I can’t fault any of the people who work at this place. My ex, whom I love very much, is an ER nurse. The job is demanding beyond belief and the entire healthcare system is understaffed, underfunded, and under-resourced. Everybody is on permanent mandated overtime and nobody can remember the last time their unit had a safe level of staffing. Everyone is mad at you all the time and there’s only so much you can do. You have to follow protocols or it fucks everything up.

I do blame someone, though. As far as I’m concerned, everyone in office who has presided over the planned demolition of our public healthcare system is a criminal and traitor. They are responsible for staggering amounts of suffering and death. They have also stolen our birthright as Canadians. We are descended from people who fought and struggled for the right to prompt and high-quality healthcare, free at the point of access. It was one of the most important concessions the working class has ever gained. And a specific group of people, who have names and addresses, took it from us.

Through a heady mix of cold-blooded malice and criminal incompetence they allowed it to be hollowed out from within. They snuck more and more privatization in, siphoning trained personnel away from the public system and forcing working people to either pay for services that should be free or wait endlessly. They failed to fix any of the myriad of problems until it was too late and the system was in free-fall.

During the covid years we were all told that the sacrifices we were making were necessary to ‘slow the spread’ until our healthcare capacity was built up enough to deal with all the extra sick people. But they didn’t build up our healthcare capacity in any meaningful way. They slapped bandaids on some of the most disastrous problems and then kept on keepin’ on. They think that now the worst is over they can go back to letting the whole thing slowly crumble until they can just privatize it once and for all and make their ruling-class friends very, very rich.

They’ve been passing the buck forever, shaking each other’s sweaty hands as they sign the death sentences of working people. And I do mean death sentences. The number of people who die waiting for care in Canada has gone from worrying to unconscionable. Wait times are astronomical. The whole thing is falling apart, as healthcare workers have been saying for years and years to absolutely no effect. And somehow, some way, no one in any of the mainstream political parties appears to have anything resembling a solution.

I simply don’t accept that, and not just because I love my mom. These bumbling lackwits and their treasonous pals shouldn’t be allowed to just fuck everything up for ordinary people forever with absolutely no consequences. The state of our public healthcare system is a ludicrous scandal. We can’t let them spit in our faces as they dismantle our birthright, readying it for sale to the most well-connected bidder. I’m utterly uninterested in their whining excuses and you should be too. Have some dignity, have some self-respect: none of us should ever vote for any party or politician ever again who was involved in any part of this sordid racket. These simpering lackeys for the ultra-rich are at best disgustingly unfit for office; and at worst, they should be in fucking jail.