Magic Statistics

The immigration bill now working its way through the US Congress removes restrictions on the number of nurses permitted to immigrate.  The US is facing serious shortages of nurses, but many observers fear that the bill would only take nurses away from poorer countries that need them.

The exodus of nurses from poor to rich countries has strained health systems in the developing world, which are already facing severe shortages of their own. Many African countries have begun to demand compensation for the training and loss of nurses and doctors who move away.

The Senate provision, which would remain in force until 2014, contains no such compensation, and has not stirred serious opposition in Congress.
. . .
Public health experts in poor countries, told about the proposal in recent days, reacted with dismay and outrage, coupled with doubts that their nurses would resist the magnetic pull of the United States, which sits at the pinnacle of the global labor market for nurses.

It is estimated that over 100,000 nursing positions are presently unfilled in the US, and that number looks set to escalate rapidly in the near future.

The critical nursing shortage has been coming for a long time.  For over twenty years, there have been warnings that more nurses are retiring than new graduates entering the work force.  The median age of nurses has been steadily rising for decades.  The cry went out long ago for more spaces in nursing schools and incentives for young people to enter the profession.  Little was done, however, and now the crisis is staring us in the face.

It is ironic that this news story comes out only two days after David Blair of the London Telegraph reported on the emigration of doctors and nurses from Africa to Europe.

[C]ountless European hospitals — particularly those in Britain — are filled with doctors and nurses from Africa.

Many thousands of expensively trained Africans, with invaluable skills, are helping wealthy patients in the well-equipped hospitals of the rich world. Meanwhile, the health services in their own countries are collapsing.

Mr Blair says that most Africans would leave given the choice, but the skilled people who have the wherewithal to get out are the ones most needed for social development and economic growth.  Aid and trade cannot make up for such massive loss of human capital.

This is a real shame and a mess, and I don't know what the answer is.

From a libertarian perspective, the issue is individual exercise of free choice: If immigration restrictions are relaxed as proposed and foreign nurses are attracted by better pay and working conditions in the US, then they should be free to enter.  From a common weal perspective, on the other hand, citizens of poor foreign countries need health care and nurses, too.  Their taxes subsidised the nurses' education in the first place.

Even as far as the West is concerned, hiring nurses and doctors away from poor countries may be counter-productive: Loss of health professionals jeopardises the campaign against AIDS that Western countries say they want to help the Third World to combat.

And why doesn't the US pay for educating the nurses it needs?  Why doesn't the richest country in the world fund more places in nursing schools, increase salaries of nursing professors, and offer more incentives for young Americans to enter the profession?  Is that too much of a long-term view for the politicians to consider?  The nursing shortage was ignored for so long that it’s developed into an emergency, so it’s too late for that now.

Previous related posts:

• Zimbabwe hospital Hell
• Canada wants its doctors back
• BC nurses negotiate big pay raise

Vancouverites are wondering why they’re paying more for gasoline than Torontonians are.

Toronto motorists are paying up to 36 cents a litre less for gasoline than their West Coast counterparts, who have seen the price at the pump climb past $1.21 a litre.
. . .
MJ Ervin's weekly pump price survey — a Tuesday morning snapshot of prices — showed regular gas selling in Vancouver for $1.17.9 a litre and in Victoria for $1.19.9 (and as high as $1.30.7 for premium), while Toronto had a price of 97.2 cents a litre. But consumers looking for cheap gas told their own story in reports to websites like Gasbuddy.com, where Vancouverites reported regular gas up to $1.21 a litre over the weekend while in Toronto, motorists could fill up as low as 84.9 cents a litre. 

Hey, Vancouver, you don’t know the half of it: You’re paying more then I am!  Today's price of regular unleaded along Fourth Avenue, downtown Whitehorse, is $1.11.9.

The best thing Canada can do for the global environment is get out of the Kyoto Protocol. That Environment Minister Rona Ambrose has decided to do just that shows that she is more concerned with substance and effective policy than appearances and empty pledges.  Says Paul Stanway of The Edmonton Sun:

Kyoto's been a huge failure, a complete bust. The accord is a political fiction built for left-wing governments who want to appear green but have actually accomplished little or nothing in the way of greenhouse gas reduction.

Canada is a classic example. Signing on to Kyoto was supposed to be part of former PM Jean Chretien's grand legacy. Because we all know that the Grits are the party committed to saving the planet, with bold promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by huge amounts — except those emissions actually increased by 35% during the Chretien/Martin years.

Liberal environment critic Scott Brison bashes Ms Ambrose for refusing to support an extension of Kyoto beyond its current terminus of 2012.  Mr Stanway points out that, before he jumped from the Conservatives to the Liberals, Mr Brison considered Kyoto worthless.

All the overheated pro-Kyoto rhetoric coming from the opposition benches obscures the fact that the US, which has not joined Kyoto, has had far greater success than Canada in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  Indeed, Canada’s rejection of Kyoto gives hope that our country is about to forego the posturing of the past and tackle environmental issues in a serious fashion.  Rondi Adamson in The Toronto Star:

[Rona Ambrose’s] comments gave me faith that she and her party might take the matter of the environment seriously enough to do something about it.

Other than, that is, "hang in there with the rest of the world," as [David] Suzuki revealingly put it. As though it were about being a good team player (in an already lost match), rather than tackling the problem.

Let’s hope that Canada will move to adopt environmental policies similar to those that have proven so successful in the US.

Paul Stanway link via The Evangelical Ecologist and Acton Institute PowerBlog.
Rondi Adamson link via Western Standard Shotgun blog and wonkitties.

Previous related posts:

• More environmentalist apoplexy in Canada
• India says poverty is more pressing than global warming
• Spot the comedian

Since a teacher in the hamlet of Salluit on the north coast of Quebec said last week that his principal told him not to teach evolution, the regional school board has been in the media spotlight.  The Kativik School Board now says it wants students to learn to think for themselves, but teaching that man is descended from other species is “an issue of respect”.

"The Kativik School Board does not censor its teachers, nor do religious groups dictate to the School Board what can or cannot be taught in our schools," the board stated in a news release Monday.

However, the board says it expects teachers to "respect the culture of the people they are privileged to live with, and to teach."

If the teacher has been instructed not to teach this for whatever reason, then it is indeed censorship, according to my dictionary which defines the verb “censor” as “to ban or cut portions of (a film, letter, etc.)”.  In this case, portions of the provincial education curriculum have been cut.

The school board says it agrees students have the right to the same information as other students, and points out there are books with evolutionary theory in the library, and students have access to the internet.

We just don't want it taught in the classroom.

While saying the board wouldn't censor teachers, a member of the community's school committee told CBC that teachers would be told if they deal in matters sensitive to the community.

"If the town complains and says no, the committee can ask the principal or the director of teachers to approach the teacher and say, 'Look, this is not the subject to be taught here in this town, or in this place, because we know we have been humans from the beginning, '" said Molly Tayara.

"I don't personally accept my children being taught that they came from some species from Africa somewhere.

"Here in the North there is no such thing as monkeys."

Isn't this the kind of solipsistic perspective that public education is intended to overcome?  Broaden the students' horizons and all that.

What’s especially aggravating here is the media’s double standard.  Listen to this clip of the interview with Ms Tayara.  She even cites the biblical story of Adam and Eve in support of Inuit beliefs about the origin of the human race.  The CBC reporter handles her with kid gloves throughout.

I certainly have no objection to a reporter treating an interview subject with respect and deference—in fact, that happens so rarely that it’s rather refreshing to hear it in this case—but imagine what the attitude would be if a school board in, say, suburban Montreal tried to remove evolution from its classrooms, while appealing to cultural traditions and the Bible.  The CBC’s howls of execration would be heard all the way to Salluit.

Previous related post: Parents: Don’t teach evolution to our children.  School board: OK.