Volunteerism can't replace need for good system: Maude Barlow

BY ELYSE AMEND

elyse.amend@transcontinental.ca

The audience at the Days Inn Montreal Airport last Wednesday night may not have been as big as the Sundance Film Festivals’, but the crowd at the West Island Association for the Intellectually Handicapped (WIAIH)’s second installment of their 50th anniversary speakers series hung on to social activist Maude Barlow’s every word.

“You truly, and I mean this with my heart, you people who work in community organizations like this show what citizenship is all about,” said Barlow, the national chairperson of Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, the Council of Canadians, as she congratulated WIAIH for their 50 years of service.

Founder of the right-to-water organization, the Blue Planet Project, and author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, Barlow attended the Sundance independent film festival in Park City, Utah last week to catch director Irena Salina’s film FLOW: For Love Of Water, in which she was featured.

The theme of last Wednesday’s talk, however, focused on another subject close to Barlow’s heart: healthcare, privatization, and the role of community organizations.

Barlow criticized the Mulroney government of the 1980s and early 1990s for placing big business before social services. “Through the years, the needs of big business became the rights of big business,” she said, adding industry began dictating social policy, leading to what she called billions of dollars being slashed from social programs and “a massive assault on healthcare” in Canada.

As a result, Barlow said social support organizations were left to fill the gap without any government funding, relying on volunteers to stay afloat. WIAIH itself depends on about 600 volunteers every year and donations from the community to keep running its services, which support children and adults with intellectual disabilities and their families, as well as promote awareness.

“The values upon which we built our social services in the beginning are eroding,” Barlow said. “Volunteerism should be on top of a good system, but not in place of the system.”

An ardent opponent of private healthcare, Barlow also spoke about her concerns privatization will take away from the public system, rather than compliment it, because it drains public resources, favours only those who can afford it, and promotes corporate profit rather than social security.

“If you look at other countries, the privatization experiment has not worked,” she said, in response to a primary care physician from Pointe Claire who asked if privatization is necessarily always bad.

But according to some, the two systems can exist harmoniously. The Statcare Walk-in Clinic in Pointe Claire, for example, accepts medicare for some services and charges for others. “I think a bit of both works extremely well, private and public together,” said Statcare’s executive director Eleanor Mootoosawmy on a busy Thursday morning. “Nobody wants all private and, in hand, all public, there’s not enough money in the system. There’s just not enough money to cover it.”

Barlow, however, compared Canada to an egg – with the rich at the top and the poor at the bottom – which has transformed into a pear due to the erosion of social services and programs.

“There’s a Third World in North America. There’s a Third World in Europe…It’s a class issue,” Barlow said. “We don’t have to accept this 19th century, road to the bottom, survival of the fittest notion.”

Barlow called on the audience to come together to question the current situation and “start talking the language again” that lead to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the creation of social services following the Second World War. And, most of all, Barlow encouraged the audience not to give up.

“I deeply believe in my heart that hope is a moral imperative,” she concluded.

For more on the Council of Canadians, visit www.canadians.org.