Editorial

Time to fast-track OKs to practice

In recent years Canada has seen a huge influx of doctors arriving on our soils, looking for the promise of a brighter future in this land that’s true, north, strong and free. Many have found precisely that, but only after jumping through an indeterminable number of hoops to prove they are really worthy candidates.
But they’re the lucky ones.
In many cases, professionals who boast shining credentials in their homelands are forced to take menial jobs while they wait to write the many exams and prove themselves in a number of ways.
And while they’re doing that, communities like Slave Lake and High Prairie and their northern counterparts wait with fingers crossed as their search for doctors plods along. Their residents chances of speedy attention hangs in the balance, or other short-handed doctors are run off their feet as they wait for reinforcements.
In recent years Slave Lake, like many of its northern neighbours, has played host to a plethora of doctors from places like South Africa. They’re highly trained and professionally adept, some having worked in several other countries and continents before arriving in Northern Alberta.
But still, Canadian and Alberta standards say these ready, willing and more importantly extremely able doctors have to jump through the hoops before they’re afforded the same employment opportunities as their Canadian contemporaries. They’re already proven themselves capable, if not outstanding, in some areas of the globe, but still they’re forced to spend months, if not years, measuring up in this country -- while hospital line-ups and waiting lists swell into weeks and months rather than days and weeks.
Federal Health Minister Anne McLellan and her provincial contemporaries should be pulling out all the stops and rolling out the red carpet for these very talented new-comers. Or at least reconsidering the rules.
For the good of Canadians everywhere.

Bullying’s a crime
It can happen anywhere -- even in Small Town, Alberta.
That was the startling realization again last week when three teenaged girls from Sylvan Lake were arrested and charged with attempted murder.
Their alleged crime? Putting a chemical -- copper sulphate -- from their science lab into a slushie, then offering it to a one-time friend.
Fortunately, no one died, possibly because several girls took sips from the drink as they tried to coax the intended victim to do the same.
But the event did reinforce our realization of the lengths some girls will allegedly go to in their quest for supremacy -- or boyfriend. What makes this event so much more tragic is the fact that these girls are all junior high students.
We shudder to think what might have happened had their scheme worked. All over a boy that could be forgotten in mere days or weeks. We have to wonder if any of those girls gave any thought whatsoever about what could ultimately happen to their victim.
Perhaps substitute teacher Kelly Row was correct when he suggested that sensational television shows have desensitized teens so much that they don’t think about the real consequences of their actions.
But by the same token, anyone who makes light of the girl-on-girl bullying that happens all too often in places like Slave Lake should sit up and take note: bullying, by any other name can be just as deadly as a defacto weapon when perpetrators act before they think.