Freedom of Choice in Healthcare Canada - Articles

Read the whole article to see the connection to health freedom and health canada

TheStar.com - Standing up to what is wrong

..........This relates in a general sense to issues of corruption at Health Canada.................Read the whole article to understand what I am referring to.........If forwarding or posting, edit out reference to myself...thanks, Michael

Sep. 25, 2004. 01:00 AM

Standing up to what is wrong South African's life an example for Canada's governing class

JAMES TRAVERS

There are reasons why Canadians who have never heard of Beyers Naude should mourn his passing. Born at the very epicentre of South African privilege and power, Naude died earlier this month a towering monument to a pure form of courage. He was 89. Known to blacks and whites as Oom Bey, or Uncle Bey, Naude spent the most productive years of his life dismantling, brick-by-brick, the culture carefully built by his family and friends.

While Nelson Mandela was serving time at Robben Island for attacking apartheid from outside its racist walls, Naude was held prisoner inside as a pariah and a traitor to his church, party and people. For eight years he was banned - back then, South Africa's particularly cruel way of ostracizing its most effective critics - and forbidden to speak publicly against the raging injustices that since the 1960 Sharpeville massacres had increasingly tested his values and faith.

To meet Naude in the '80s when the regime still seemed impregnable was to enter a zone of animated calm. He was certain in his beliefs, sanguine about his personal suffering and steadfastly determined to do everything that could be done peacefully to force open the doors and windows of a closed society.

To understand his sacrifice, it is necessary to see the struggle against apartheid from the inside out. Unlike Mandela, the 20th century's secular saint, or the militant cleric Desmond Tutu, Naude could not draw strength or comfort from his own people; he could only go forward alone, and as a singular voice his peers were determined to silence.

What that meant for Naude was extraordinary. It meant turning away from his leadership of the Dutch Reformed Church, abandoning the Broederbond, the powerful, secretive league of brothers that controlled much of South Africa and that his father helped found, and it ultimately meant subjecting himself and his family to vicious harassment and public humiliation.

Of course, we know now what he couldn't know then - that apartheid would crumble faster than anyone thought possible and that he would end his life celebrated by those he fought so long and hard to liberate. As Mandela put it on Naude's 80th birthday, the man who pricked the nation's conscience was an "Afrikaner prophet."

"Beyers Naude became an outcast amongst the Afrikaners, amongst many whites and amongst the church that he loved," Mandela said. "Such is the price prophets are required to pay."

It's a profound blessing that for most of the past 50 years Canada hasn't demanded its citizens pay that kind of price.

But it's a shame that those who run the country are increasingly losing sight of the fact that personal sacrifice is sometimes necessary. For proof of that, consider the current and very disquieting inquiry into the Quebec sponsorship scandal. Unfolding under the gavel of Mr. Justice John Gomery is testimony that tells a remarkably sordid story.

Contrary to the national notion that the scandal is just about political sleaze and the apparently endless effort to appease a restive province, the evidence mounting daily speaks to problems that are systemic and deeply rooted in the critical relationship between civil servants and their political bosses. What it suggests is that often well-meaning people, people who are presumably scrupulously ethical in their private lives, have lost the will to say "no" when told to do what is clearly wrong.

One by one, they seem to have fallen by the wayside as those elected to run the country, along with the officials they appoint, crossed the great divide between partisan politics and public policy. With hardly a bleat, they tilted contracts in favour of the ruling party's friends, restructured organizations to make them less accountable, first to mandarins and then to taxpayers, and made it possible for unscrupulous suppliers to effortlessly plunder the public purse.

That's shocking enough. But it is the trend line and the underlying malaise that are more disturbing. What's apparent is that accountability and transparency are on the run and that bureaucrats who once fiercely defended their independence are too willing to accept suspect orders, pick up their cheques and go silently home. Combined with the steady erosion of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, that easy quiescence creates a new and unhealthy status quo that's only good for politicians.

Missing here are enough good people willing to pay the personal price that change, even relatively minor reform, too often demands. Their reticence, no matter how understandable or easily explained away by the need to protect jobs and feed families, removes one of the few remaining obstacles to creeping, endemic corruption.

Societies only occasionally create a Beyers Naude, an Oom Bey, whose selflessness and unflinching morality hold a mirror for the nation. In South Africa, the need was great, and from its old, anachronistic Afrikaner soul emerged a giant.

Canada's needs are mercifully smaller but so, sadly, is the response of those who could, and should, be stepping forward to make a difference. Additional articles by James Travers

Buy the Saturday Star and get Sunday to Friday FREE!

Legal Notice: Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Distribution, transmission or republication of any material from www.thestar.com is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. For information please contact us using our webmaster form. www.thestar.com online since 1996.

Back to top of document