In the News
Consequences of Anti-Social Offensive on Health Care Systems
Anti-People Proposal of Saskatchewan Government
The Saskatchewan Ministry of Health is scouring the globe searching for foreign health providers to work in the province. It says workers trained in the Philippines are needed to fill medical staff shortages. The Saskatchewan Health Authority hopes to recruit at least 150 and as many as 300 international health care workers, mostly from the Philippines. The recruitment is to focus on hard-to-recruit staff including registered nurses and licensed practical nurses, medical laboratory technologists and continuing care assistants.
The Health Ministry said workers trained elsewhere are needed to ensure “appropriate staffing levels” during the Omicron wave. Efforts are underway, it said, to “explore opportunities” for foreign health providers to work in “unregulated positions while they await licensure in a regulated health profession.”
The poaching of trained personnel from developing countries is a lingering feature of criminal colonialism. The ruling elite in Canada in both big business and government refuse to pay for the training of workers in Canada and elsewhere. They want those foreign-trained workers for next to no payment. They refuse to properly build education facilities here in Canada and guarantee education as a right for all. They refuse to look at meeting the needs of the country for modern medical facilities and trained personnel as a duty of those in authority to fulfil and maintain. They want to pass the burden of inadequate staffing and educational facilities in this country onto those doing the work in difficult conditions here and on poor countries that need help to develop their countries, not thieves that steal away their trained personnel without even paying for their training.
The authority in control is not in tune with modern conditions. Education is a right that must be guaranteed for all. Scientific planning and building of a health care system must be based on the aim to meet the needs of the people and not on the aim of maximum profit for private profiteers.
The economy is a socialized whole. Each part of the economy must play its role in supporting all the other parts and the whole. Profiteers who only concern themselves with their private interests, which they control and own, without considering the needs of other parts of the economy and the whole are blocking working people from unleashing the full potential of the modern productive forces. This criminal colonial mentality and control of those in authority must stop and working people are those who can do it.
(Workers’ Forum, posted January 28, 2022)