Patrick Monahan, dean of York’s Osgoode Hall Law School, drew the ire of BC nurses Tuesday when he suggested a recent Supreme Court decision endorsing union bargaining will trigger a boom in the private health sector, wrote The Vancouver Sun June 20.
The "unintended consequence" of the high court decision will be that governments will find it harder to restructure the public health care system, said Monahan. This, he told the BC government health symposium, will result in a market for supplementary private health insurance to pay for care in the private sector.
His comments prompted an indignant reaction from BC Nurses’ Union president Debra McPherson. She said she was shocked by Monahan’s comments. "I don’t agree with your sentiments," she said. "In fact I find it quite shocking that you would suggest that unions be blamed for forcing a private system when in fact we’ve been [lobbying] for reforms for years."
Monahan said he wasn’t suggesting that unions were ever in favour of a private tier. "All I’m saying is that there are unintended consequences of the court decision and one of those is that there is a limit to what the provinces can do," he said. "One of the unintended results is that governments don’t have as much flexibility as before. That effect is undeniable and it makes it more difficult for government to act on restructuring, and you can’t deliver care if you can’t restructure."
In an interview with the Sun, Monahan said the government’s attempts to save dollars in one part of the system, so it could spend more money on patient care, backfired.
Osgoode graduate named head of Brockville hospital board
A Brockville lawyer and York alumnus with extensive community involvement is the new Chair of the Brockville General Hospital’s board of governors, wrote the Brockville Recorder and Times June 19. Andreas von Cramon (LLB ’89), 43, was named to the position near the end of Monday’s annual general meeting of the hospital attended by about 60 people. Outgoing Chair Dan Smith said it was a pleasure to work with von Cramon who sat as vice-chair during Smith’s tenure. "He’s a great thinker and he’s going to be a great leader," said Smith.
Offering the caring touch
Providing care to our elders is anyway a noble calling – but if in doing so we also help the economy while carving out a distinct field of endeavour of our own, such care may be deemed to have struck the perfect balance between individual, family and society, wrote Brampton’s South Asian Focus June 20. York alumna Priscilla Fernandes (BES ’03) and her husband Gavin, owners of Home Instead Senior Care, may well have found this balance. "Our aim is to serve seniors with our best in-home service, make arrangements as per their requirements and help with their day-to-day activities," said Priscilla.
E-mail messages sent without thought take toll on firms
While everyone can appreciate the benefits e-mail has afforded in terms of swiftness and convenience, there are serious drawbacks, wrote Stephen Friedman, an executive career coach and trainer who teaches at York’s Schulich School of Business, in the National Post June 20.
One of the most disruptive areas concerns the effect e-mail and the Internet has had on employees who at one time would have been the quiet and withdrawn – and perhaps bitterly angry – colleague, wrote Friedman. People who never used their "voice" in any way in the workplace environment now see the seemingly anonymous and immediate nature of e-mail as quick and effective a way to get heard, but with frequently disastrous results.
New book rounds out research on women lawyers, says Osgoode prof
"For the most part, studies of women in the legal profession in Canada have been quantitative studies," says Mary Jane Mossman, a professor in York’s Osgoode Hall Law School, in the National Post June 20. Mossman was commenting on the book Bar Codes: Women in the Legal Profession, by Jean McKenzie Leiper, professor emerita at the University of Western Ontario. "This is one of the few qualitative studies available. It is unique because it looks only at women and does so in great detail," said Mossman.
The notion that things would change with more women in the legal profession has proven overly simplistic, wrote the Post. "Some things change and some don’t," Mossman says. "What we need to do now is discover the stories of women who are lawyers because there’s no point developing a theory of what’s happening out there until you have a rich or thick description of the circumstances. Ms Leiper’s work rounds out the research in the sense that we can now take the quantitative and qualitative data and see the picture more clearly," Mossman says.
York coach is appointed to lead Canada’s under-22 women’s team
Hockey Canada named Toronto’s Dan Church as head coach of the Canadian under-22 women’s national team for the 2007-2008 season, wrote CanWest News Service June 20. He has been at the helm of the York University women’s hockey team for the past three seasons.
On air
- CFMT-TV’s Portuguese news program “Telejornal” broadcast coverage of the York University Portuguese Students Association awards presentations, on June 19.