Moore bad news for reeling Liberals

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/04/2016 (3840 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“I only said it … for publicity so people will be apt to listen to me when I speak again. I said what I said yesterday for publicity, and we can go from here with reality.”

<*R><BI>— Brandon West candidate

Billy Moore

The Liberal party election campaign has officially headed off a cliff in Brandon, if it wasn’t already off the rails in the province.

Not only was Liberal Leader Rana Bokhari desperately trying to do damage control yesterday after her party lost five candidates this week — four incorrectly filled out nomination papers before Tuesday’s deadline, and the fifth was disqualified by Elections Manitoba — she then had to publicly defend comments made by a last-minute Liberal entrant into the political arena.

Portage la Prairie resident and political neophyte Billy Moore chose Wednesday afternoon’s debate on aboriginal issues at the Mahkaday Ginew Memorial Centre for his big coming out party as a political candidate for the Liberal party in Brandon West.

While his appearance came as somewhat a surprise, given that his party never announced him as a candidate or even held a nomination meeting to give him a profile boost, even more surprising were the words that came out of his mouth during the debate.

In response to a question on whether his party would commit to core funding for the Manitoba Métis Foundation to pursue an integrated health approach, Moore told the audience that he thought our province had too many hospitals.

“There are too many hospitals and consequently the cost of it, a wait time is very long,” Moore said. “Now, if we can eliminate some hospitals in Manitoba people won’t want to get sick because they have nowhere to go — they will want to stay healthy and work and that’s where the health comes in.”

Once his comments hit the news, Moore, curiously, did not back down as news agencies pressed him to clarify his remarks. To The Canadian Press, he doubled down, saying that the wide availability of hospital emergency rooms encourages people to use them for minor or non-existent ailments.

Moore then said he knows his views are not those of the Liberal party, and had not discussed the opinion with Leader Rana Bokhari, but personally believes two of the six hospitals in Winnipeg should be closed.

That left Bokhari in the unenviable position of trying to defend Moore, all the while distancing herself and the party from the comments by saying that the party doesn’t endorse closing hospitals.

“Just to clarify what he was trying to say, if we focus on preventative measures so people don’t have to use hospitals, we won’t need that many,” she told the CBC. “That’s essentially what he was trying to articulate. Agreed, he didn’t do a really good job of it at the time, but what he’s standing behind is preventative medicine.”

Even Brandon East Liberal candidate Vanessa Hamilton wandered into the fray yesterday, in an attempt to defend Moore and deflect mounting criticism.

“We rely on hospitals too much. Under Selinger more people are ill. Healthcare is $71 million over budget. Bill is an elder so please have respect. He has a lot of wisdom to share,” she said in a Facebook post.

Then things took an even stranger turn. By mid-afternoon, Moore began telling CTV and CBC that his Wednesday afternoon comments were merely a publicity stunt, as his quote above suggests.

If that is the case, it has to be one of the most poorly planned publicity stunts in Brandon history. Why on earth would you want to stun the voting public into thinking that you’re a loon for wanting to close hospitals and put doctors and nurses who save lives and conduct needed surgeries every day, out of work?

Just kidding?

No, more likely this was a desperate attempt at damage control. So let’s take him at his earlier word, and assume that — yes — he meant what he said and that he believes there are too many hospital in the province and that patients could use a jolt of tough love as a kind of negative prevention.

We’re all for preventative medicine and healthy lifestyles. For example, The Canadian Diabetes Association recently estimated that diabetes prevalence among Manitobans will increase by 39 percent over the next 10 years.

Current numbers in the June 2015 Diabetes Charter for Canada report suggest that 8.9 per cent of the population in Manitoba have diabetes. If current trends remain unchanged, that number will rise to 11.1 per cent of the population in 2025.

“People with diabetes are over three times more likely to be hospitalized with cardiovascular disease, 12 times more likely to be hospitalized with end-stage renal disease and over 20 times more likely to be hospitalized for a non-traumatic lower limb amputation compared to the general population,” the report reads.

There are obvious ways to prevent the onset of diabetes. For most of us, that means learning how to control your weight, eat healthier foods, and get off your rear end and exercise.

But that doesn’t mean you close hospitals to scare individuals into being healthier. If we take that same logic, then we should start shuttering fire departments, because people will be more careful about fire prevention if they have no help when their house burns down.

After all, the fire trucks are there to use and our taxes pay for them, so psychologically people think it’s OK if their house burns down.

More to the point, Moore’s comments must have come as an awful shock to a Liberal party that has been reeling from one bad news story to another as the weeks progress. Clearly, with off-the-wall candidates like Moore on the Liberal ticket — not to mention former Southdale Liberal candidate Jamie Hall who used derogatory terms to refer to women in a series of several Twitter comments — the Liberal green-light committee no longer exists.

This party is not properly vetting candidates; either they have lost the ability and resources to do so, or they made a conscious decision to scrap the process.

These are the results, and it ain’t pretty. And as a result they may well have blown the best chance in three decades to capitalize on a seriously weakened NDP.