By Staff

January 1st, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

Theodora Hamilton is the first baby to be born at Joseph Brant Hospital (JBH) in 2025, arriving at 5:02 a.m. on January 1, weighing 6 pounds and 14 ounces.

Gabriella and Thomas Hamilton from Stoney Creek. Theodora seems quite content.

Parents Gabriella and Thomas Hamilton from Stoney Creek were very happy to ring in 2025 with the arrival of their first child and their parents’ first grandchild. Gabriella was also born at JBH.

The arrival of their first child was exciting in many ways for Gabriella and Thomas.

The original due date was Dec. 20, 2024, then changed to Dec. 27. As they got closer to the end of the year, the couple hoped that their baby would arrive in 2025. Gabriella went into labour at 5:30 a.m. on Dec. 31 and – to their delight – Theodora was born on New Year’s Day.

“It was right on time,” said Thomas. “We were excited about that.”

In keeping with a time-honoured New Year’s tradition, Theodora and her parents were presented with a gift from the hospital.

More than 1,600 babies were delivered at JBH in 2024. The physicians, midwives and nurses in the hospital’s Labour and Delivery unit provide excellent, quality care to pregnant, labouring persons and newborns.

After delivery, parents and newborns move to the Maternal & Child unit, which provides a broad range of care and services to address the physical and emotional needs of families before and after delivery

By Pepper Parr

December 31st, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

It was a scene seen far too often.

It would have been a better hockey game if the Canadians had stayed out of the penalty box.

They couldn’t – one player was in the penalty box twice when power-play goals were scored by the Americans.

Not quite the way I wanted to end the year.

By Pepper Parr

December 31^st, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

We are on our way out of a tough year.

What were the top stories for 2024?

In no particular order:

The Ontario Land Tribunal said no to the development on the site of the Waterfront Hotel

The OLT decision to not approve the plans for the Waterfront Hotel site.

Pulling Sound of Music from a near-death experience – and chuckling at the comment David Shepherd made when he said he would like to see the debt “go away”.

Wondering what was really behind the quick as a wink resignation submitted by the then Executive Director of the Performing Arts Centre.  They’ve yet to find a replacement.

Then there was the practice of using a number that isn’t defined to convince taxpayers that they are getting a decent deal.

Nisan and Galbraith seemed to have forgotten who they were working for.

Best performance of the year had to be “the sky’s the limit” dance put on by Councillors Nisan and Galbraith who seem to have forgotten who they were working for.  Link to that story – click HERE

Then there was the “dismissal” of two senior staff members.  The Gazette was alerted to their being shown the door by a tip that came in from someone calling from a phone booth.

By Staff

December 30^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

46% say PM should resign, prorogue House for leadership race; two-in-five want a Feb. 2025 election

In a year-end report the Angus Reid Institute, a multinational public opinion polling company said “… the federal Liberals, they are on the precipice of a very unhappy New Year.

Justin Trudeau.

“Amid growing calls for their leader to resign, the latest public opinion data from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute shows the party’s support among decided and leaning voters down to just 16 per cent.

In the 2011 election under then leader, Michael Ignatieff, the Liberals received 18.9

It represents the lowest level of support for the party in Angus Reid Institute tracking dating back to 2014. It is also quite possibly the lowest vote intention the Liberals have ever received in the modern era. Even in the worst electoral performance in the party’s 157-year history, the 2011 election under then leader, Michael Ignatieff, the Liberals received 18.9 per cent of votes from Canadians, and at minimum 17 per cent in polling leading up to that election.

“Meanwhile, as he mulls his future during his ski in the snow in B.C., approval of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which had been steady in the low 20s, now plummets to an all-time nadir of 22 per cent.

“These latest blows come at the end of a punishing two weeks wherein Trudeau lost his finance minister and lost the would-be replacement star he’d been chasing. This culminated in an open loss of confidence by a growing number of Liberal MPs who are now publicly calling for him to go.

“While Trudeau has said that he would reflect on the growing rebellion within his own ranks, approaching half (46%) of Canadians and three-in-five (59%) current Liberal supporters say it’s time for him to step aside and call for a party leadership contest. Another two-in-five (38%) Canadians believe Trudeau should call for a general election himself when he returns from his holiday break.

For a detailed look at the polling link to the poll here: www.angusreid.org/

By Pepper Parr

December 30th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

It was the one picture that caught my eye during the year.

All that “bling”?

I thought it was the Russians who did this kind of thing; the Americans are pretty good at it.

Pictured here are:Gen. Jennie Carignan, left, assumes command of the Canadian Armed Forces, with Gov. Gen. Mary Simon and outgoing Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre taking part in the ceremony on July 18, 2024. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

By Pepper Parr

December 29^th,  2024

BURLINGTON, ON

The Gazette published an article on December 14^th, about a delegation Eric Stern made at a City Council meeting on November 25th.

Early in the delegation, Eric Stern mused: “It was interesting to watch Mr. Basit present a 4.97% on November 4^th when the Halton Police Budget had been made public on October 30^th.  Did Mr. Basit knowingly misrepresent the truth?”

Mayor Meed Ward wrote the Gazette with a complaint and copied the National Newsmedia Council, complaining about what we published.

This is what happened:

In the article we published we confused what Mayor Meed Ward said in her Spectator letter with what she said at a Council meeting where she used a Personal Privilege to make her point about what Eric Stern said while delegating on November 25th, 2024

We apologize for mixing up the issue.    It was in fact incorrect.  The Mayor’s Letter to the Editor of the Hamilton Spectator referred to an issue she had with a different media person.

Click HERE to listen to what the Mayor did say.

For those who want to read Stern’s delegation click HERE

Link to the Mayor’s Letter to the Hamilton Spectator is HERE

By Staff

December 28th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

Communicating With A Person Living With Dementia

Wednesday, January 15, Time: 6 – 8 p.m.

To be broadcast via Zoom.

We will provide the Zoom link days before the event

Recognizing the signs of dementia.

It’s important to make an effort to engage people living with dementia to reduce their isolation and help them feel included. Yet it can be uncomfortable and intimidating if you don’t know what to say or how to respond – especially if they say things that we consider inappropriate or that don’t make sense to us.

Our Communicating with a Person Living with Dementia workshop will give you tips, tricks and strategies you can use to connect effectively with people living with dementia at all stages of the disease.

The Burlington Gazette wishes the people of the city the very best during what is both a festive season and an occasion to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

Imagine where we would be without him.

By Natalie Mehra

December 24th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

As I sit down to write a holiday message to you that I hope has some meaning, I am thinking about a couple of ground shaking events that have happened in the last few weeks, one in the U.S. and one here.

In the United States, Luigi Mangione has been charged with the shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson. The assassination-style killing has provoked an outpouring from the American public. MEMEs (internet graphics) and videos abound. All over the internet are new folk songs written about Luigi. People have taken to inserting Luigi into photos at their work, school, or home, to provide him with an alibi. Photos have been altered to look like stills from Mission Impossible: there’s Luigi, alert, svelte, young, almost impossibly tidy in his orange jumpsuit, highlit against a phalanx of police escorting him out of a helicopter overlaid with a soundtrack of pumping hip-hop.

Luigi has become a cultural hero.

It is no wonder. Forbes reported that UnitedHealthcare denies more claims than other health insurance companies in the U.S. —  rejecting up to one-third of claims the magazine says. Similar reports have gone viral. (The company denies them.) Thompson — the CEO who was killed — made of $10.2 million annually, including salary, bonus and stock  options. UnitedHealthcare, part of the giant conglomerate UnitedHealth Group, reported more than $16 billion in operating profits last year. That’s $16,000,000,000 in profits. Making millions (or billions) from denying health care to people has them angry. Beyond angry. This week’s events have tapped a vein of seething fury in America, uniting people across political lines in a country that is deeply divided.

In the United States, medical costs are the number one reason for bankruptcy. Fifty-six million people struggle with medical debt each year. That’s more than the entire population of Canada. Ninety percent of them took out a second mortgage on their home to pay their medical bills. Eleven million people last year ran up high interest debt on their credit cards to pay medical bills. The cost of (usurious) interest on those cards will leave them in a cycle of debt for years, if not for life.

Last week the public outcry resulted in Anthem Blue Shield reverse a decision to limit coverage for anesthesia during surgeries and other procedures. Their plan was to cease insurance coverage after a recommended duration of time for that type of surgery. Connecticut’s Democratic Senator Chris Murphy expressed the outrage of his constituents: “Saddling patients with thousands of dollars in surprise additional medical debt. And for what? Just to boost corporate profits?….Reverse this decision immediately.”

Here in Canada, we watched the explosive resignation of Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland after a dispute with the Prime Minister’s Office. Reportedly, Freeland and the PMO disagreed over what she described as the HST tax holiday gimmick in the face of an economic statement that reported a $61.9 billion deficit. Leaked to the Globe and Mail was another claim that the Prime Minister’s people were of the opinion that Freeland was unable to articulate the government’s economic plans effectively. Whether it is the fault of the Finance Minister, the Prime Minister ( and/or the media, the opposition parties, the silent social movements in Canada…) it is definitely worrisome to me that Canadians do not have a clear picture of the economic choices ahead of us.

The government reports about $20 billion of that deficit is one-time spending for Indigenous land and other claims currently in court and special COVID payments. After these, the deficit will be in the $40 billion range. I note this in particular because a few years ago I was writing a report and I remember looking back at the Harper years in government, and trying to calculate the total of his corporate and income tax cuts. Bottom line? Harper’s tax cuts took $41 billion per year out of federal revenues as of 2015. That is per year, each year then and since. It is even more per year in today’s dollars.

Lest you think that you benefited from those tax cuts, let’s take a closer look at the actual evidence.

Corporate tax cuts are usually justified as attracting business investment and funding productivity gains, but in fact these tax cuts have resulted in more than $700 billion in corporate “dead money” not going to anything that benefits the public. In fact, Harper’s record was the worst since prior to World War II on key economic indicators including job creation and corporate investment.

Furthermore, income tax cuts virtually always benefit the highest income earners. Remember, income taxes are indexed. That means, the highest income earners pay the most and the rate of tax goes down as the level of income is less. Income taxes redistribute money from the highest income to the middle class and poorest. Under analysis, almost 80 percent of the Harper government income tax cuts went to the highest 15 percent of income earners.

Years ago, economists Richard Shillington and Hugh Mackenzie calculated the value of public services to the median (dead in the middle) income household. They found the value to that household to be $41,000 (in 2009). In today’s dollars that would be more than $60,000 per year for each household. Their point? Funding public services is a net gain to most of us, not a take away.

You may be wondering what this has to do with health care. The answer is taxes have everything to do with health care. Canada created our public health insurance for all in the 1960s because people couldn’t afford health care on their own. As Justice Emmett Hall famously said:

Justice Emmett Hall

“As a society, [we] are aware that the trauma of illness, the pain of surgery, the slow decline to death, are burdens enough for the human being to bear without the added burden of medical or hospital bills penalizing the patient at the moment of vulnerability. The Canadian people determined that they should band together to pay medical bills and hospital bills when they were well and income earning. Health services [are] a fundamental need, like education, which Canadians could meet collectively and pay for through taxes.”  Justice Emmett Hall, was the Chair of the Royal Commission on Medical Services that resulted in the 1968 passage of the Medical Care Act.

The Canada Health Act, passed in 1984, banned extra user fees on patients for medically needed hospital and physician services. We do not have millions of people going bankrupt to pay medical bills because we have public health insurance – paid by taxes. We do not have profiteering insurance companies denying claims to make billions in profit from the sick and the dying.

At the Ontario Health Coalition we are not partisan. We don’t tell people how to vote and we don’t favour one political party over another.That does not mean that we shy away from telling people the truth about the various parties’ positions and records on health care and we will fight any party or government that threatens our health care.

The federal government floated the entire country in the pandemic.

The truth is this. The federal government floated the entire country in the pandemic. They brought in three new social programs: child care, the beginning baby steps of pharmacare and dental care for seniors.

Every new social program is an income transfer — from the highest income earners whose incomes have skyrocketed over the last generation — to everyone else. They mitigate the income inequality dished out by the private marketplace and support people to live to their human potential. Public health care means that we live without the risk of financial ruin if we have an accident or fall ill.

When politicians like Pierre Poilievre say they are going to reverse those social programs, like the new dental care program for seniors, in whose interests are they acting? (Remember, Mr. Poilievre was in Stephen Harper’s cabinet — a key decision maker in that government.)

Again, this is not partisan and it absolutely is not an endorsement of any political party. I am writing this because I’m worried about what is missing in the debate about the deficit. Costs are already crushing for most of us. Building & expanding our public services are a key way to reduce costs for people. Cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy (which most tax cuts over the last generation have done) increase inequality and costs for most of us. The toxic combination of budget constraints while privateers have moved in and are taking money out of our healthcare system that has been devastating. It has to stop.

In the debate about our choices going forward over the upcoming months in Canada, let us please remember that.

Let us also remember that what we do changes public policy. As we end this year, let’s celebrate the incredible job that we do as a Health Coalition, founded to safeguard our public medicare for all. We have shifted public opinion in our province in a way that is unmatched in Canada. Polls show that the opposition to privatization and support for public health care is far higher in Ontario than anywhere else in the country.

That is our work. The slight wins we have had in long-term care — some fines for terrible operators, reinstatement of inspections — have been are due to our relentless efforts together. We still have public hospitals despite Doug Ford’s attempts to privatize them, and the growth in private clinics has not been as robust as his budget plans indicate. That too is our work. We have  been featured in literally hundreds of media stories this year, effectively setting the key issues and holding the Ford government’s feet to the fire.

Much more is needed and we have much more planned, but as we head into the winter break, I just wanted you to know that we — together — are exceptional. The work we do is vitally important. Thank you to the local coalitions across the province, who are our backbone. You have my heart. You are the best of people and I love working with you. Thank you to the Ontario Health Coalition Board of Directors, a dedicated group of thoughtful people whose commitment to the cause deserves our deepest gratitude. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts to the tens of thousands of volunteers out there who have leafletted, come to protests, organized events, helped to research, put out social media posts, written letters, attended meetings and every other thing you do to make our movement one of the most effective and unique in Canada. Thank you to those of you who have donated to help in our common cause. We could not do it without you.

I hope you are proud of our work. It is the privilege of my life to dedicate myself to the principles of equity and compassion that are foundational to our public health care for all. As we head into this season of light, let us keep the light of those beautiful principles burning for all.

Natalie Mehra is the Executive Director of the Ontario Hospital Coalition