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15 October 2010 is the date. Have you signed up yet?

Why water?

Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us who are subject to preventable disease and even death because of something that many of us take for granted.

Access to clean water is not just a human rights issue. It’s an environmental issue. An animal welfare issue. A sustainability issue. Water is a global issue, and it affects all of us.

Also:

By a vote of 122 in favour to none against, with 41 abstentions, the General Assembly today adopted, as orally revised, a resolution calling on States and international organizations to provide financial resources, build capacity and transfer technology, particularly to developing countries, in scaling up efforts to provide safe, clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for all.

By a text on the human right to water and sanitation, the Assembly expressed deep concern that some 884 million people were without access to safe drinking water and more than 2.6 billion lacked access to basic sanitation. Bearing in mind the commitment to fully achieve the Millennium Development Goals, it expressed alarm that 1.5 million children under five years old died each year as a result of water- and sanitation-related diseases, acknowledging that safe, clean drinking water and sanitation were integral to the realization of all human rights. [U.N. Resolution GA 10967 28/07/10]

Canada, citing technical reasons, abstained, as did the U. S.

By the way, Have you signed up your blog yet?

All right, I’ll stop nagging already. Enjoy your weekend!

[Cross-posted at Those Emergency Blues]

The story of Sean Bruyea is becoming a train-wreck for the Harper government. Mr. Buryea, you might remember, is the activist-veteran who gained the — how shall we say? — the attention of the Government to the point where his private and confidential medical records were circulated, according to news reports last month, among 614 Veterans Affairs bureaucrats, 247 political staffers of various political persuasions, Liberal and Conservative alike, and three senior civil servants. Somehow — damn those slippery treacherous bureaucrats! — these records ended up in the briefing book of then Veterans Affair Minister Greg Thompson.

Mr. Bruyea was understandably annoyed and upset his private and confidential medical records were being used for political purposes by a government of which he was a tenacious critic. He complained to the Federal Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, who released her report on the affair yesterday.  She was not kind.

The veteran’s sensitive medical and personal information was shared [said the news release] – seemingly with no controls – among departmental officials who had no legitimate need to see it.  This personal information subsequently made its way into a ministerial briefing note about the veteran’s advocacy activities.  This was entirely inappropriate.

The investigation confirmed that the Department contravened the Privacy Act in the way it handled this veteran’s personal information.  The law requires that personal information be used only for the purposes for which it was collected or for other consistent purposes and that it be shared only on a need-to-know basis.

The investigation confirmed that two ministerial briefing notes about the complainant contained personal information that went far beyond what was necessary for the stated purpose of the briefings.  This included sensitive medical information as well as details about how the complainant interacted with the Department as a client and an advocate for veterans.

One of the notes, prepared in March 2006, was to brief the Minister on the complainant’s participation in a Parliament Hill press conference where he was critical of the Department’s handling of veterans’ issues. In addition to describing the complainant’s advocacy activities, the briefing note contained considerable sensitive medical information, including diagnosis, symptoms, prognosis, chronology of interactions with the Department as a client, amounts of financial benefits received, frequency of appointments and recommended treatment plans. [emphasis mine]

The Prime Minister, in response to this embarrassing turn of events, put on his best We-Are-Not-Amused face, and waxed indignant against a bureaucracy clearly out of control. All will be punished, he said. Oh, wait. No, he didn’t quite say that:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper placed the blame squarely on the department’s bureaucrats, saying “the fact that some in the bureaucracy have been abusing these files and not following appropriate processes is completely unacceptable.

“We will ensure that rules are followed, that the recommendations of the privacy commission are implemented [and] that if this behaviour continues, there will be strong sanctions against it,” the prime minister told reporters Thursday at an aerospace announcement in Winnipeg.

Which you will all recognize as the classic Harper response: shift the blame to a convenient (and disliked) whipping-boy. And duck. Nevertheless, a few questions unpleasantly linger. If it is “completely unacceptable” (and it is, thank you, Mr. Harper) for 614 bureaucrats in Veterans Affairs to misappropriate and misuse confidential information, isn’t Greg Thompson’s perusal of the same information equally egregious? And what about all those anonymous staffers, including one, the Toronto Star reported last month, in the PMO’s office?

Further, you have to wonder why Veterans Affairs, theoretically a modern federal department, run by all sorts of clever, intelligent people adorned with all manner of degrees and certifications, is unable to secure with any effectiveness confidential information that physicians’ offices, rural hospitals and Far North nursing outposts manage as a matter of routine. Or why, for that matter, was it acceptable practice in Veterans Affairs to pass on confidential medical records to a politician. To put this violation of privacy in some context, a physician or nurse would be disciplined by their respective professional colleges for doing as much, and might well lose their licences: failing to maintain confidentiality is a gross breach of ethics.

More disturbingly, this affair says much about the security of information that Canadians have in relation to the federal government. We all donate — willingly or no — all sorts of confidential information to the feds, and not just confidential medical records. We are reassured, or should be, by that little notice on the bottom of forms: “Protected When Completed.” But think of the information on your tax returns. Passport applications. Pensions. Employment history. Customs declarations. Maybe the fetishists who want to abolish the long-form census have a point. God help you if you incur the wrath of a Cabinet minister, or even criticize your government: your confidential records will be used as a weapon against you. In the Electronic Age, it’s a question of some urgency.

Public inquiry, anyone?

A little about myself (if you know me from my blog, you can safely skip this paragraph): I’m a slightly cynical Emergency Department charge nurse who has  seen everything from the sublime to the tragic to the tragically ridiculous working in a hospital somewhere in the GTA, i.e. anywhere in the space from Barrie, to Guelph, Hamilton and Oshawa. If you live in the Toronto area I may have treated you. I’m the one with the harried look in the green scrubs and you’ll notice the sharp tongue. Stop and say hello: my bark is worse than my bite.

My principal cyberhome is a moderately prosperous blog called Those Emergency Blues, where I write about practically everything. I’m married, garden avidly, and have a cat. My first political memory, curiously, is the October Crisis in 1970. Being mouthy goes back a long way. I was strapped in school. (A hair across the palm broke the skin and caused bleeding, after which the strapping was supposed to stop.) I wrote to Joe Clark a letter of complaint in 1979 and received a personal, sorrowful, handwritten reply. I was mature enough to be deeply distraught by the election of Reagan in 1980, and even more appalled when Mulroney was elected in 1984. And don’t even talk to me about Harris. Everything, I think, has gone pear-shaped since.

I asked CK for the opportunity to write here for a two related reasons, one idealistic and one, sadly, purely selfish. The pollyanna reason was that as I’ve been writing on my own blog, it was getting harder to not to write about the politics, to divorce my role as a nurse advocating in public spaces from the political sphere. The gun registry debate really brought this problem into focus, and there are upcoming elections (for example), both federal and here in Ontario, provincial, which I will have an opinion about.

Which leads me to the selfish reason: my blog has focussed principally on nursing practice, health care, ethics, personal experiences and so on. Some of the topics I write about, such as state-sanctioned torture and the death penalty will have obvious resonance in both here and on my blog, and I anticipate a small amount of cross-posting. But about 80% of my blog’s traffic is from the U.S., and I know my American readers, while being friendly, progressive types, quickly tire of my excursions into darker realms of Canadian politics and Canada-centric issues, and God knows I weary of explaining the Westminster system and the vaguaries and nuances of minority governments. CK has graciously invited me to vent my spleen and unlease the hounds of snark here, and I thank her. I hope I give her no cause to regret it — but who knows?