LETTER: Salmon Arm hospital story a wake-up call around health care
Published 3:00 pm Wednesday, December 10, 2025
The front page article in last week’s paper (Hospital in need of critical care, Dec. 4 Observer) should serve as a serious wake up call regarding the crumbling and desperate condition of Canada’s health-care system and our hospitals.
This partial list of statistics are alarming:
• 6.5 million people without a family doctor;
• 10,00 deaths annually waiting for treatment;
• 1.3 million people left Emergency Rooms without treatment last year;
• 5.8 million patients on wait list to see a specialist.
Despite these tragedies, the federal and provincial governments have wasted 100’s of billions of dollars on climate change initiatives such as EV battery plants, solar and wind farms, etc., that have done nothing but enrich a small number of people, some of which are not even Canadians.
Now the City of Salmon Arm wants to get on the climate change bandwagon and is asking taxpayers if they should spend valuable and limited financial resources trying to solve a global problem. Ironically, there was also an article on provincial interference in CSRD jurisdiction but the city council thinks it should get involved in a matter that is not civic, provincial or federal jurisdiction, but global in scale.
It would be much more productive and beneficial if the city and all of us paid much more attention to the dire condition of our health-care system and the excellent service of our health care providers in very difficult and trying conditions.
We as a community must rally around the doctors and nurses and everyone else that provides these essential services, not only with lip service but also practically and financially.
We don’t need 30 or 40 year projections to motivate us into action; the real crisis is right in front of our eyes. Money would be far better spent on repairing our hospital and improving the facilities for the people who work in them than on more climate change nonsense.
Vic De Groot