(CARLETON PLACE) – With a decisive and rigged vote by the Carleton Place and District Memorial Hospital Board last evening, the community lost their hospital. “It was extremely disheartening to watch a number of anonymous autocrats extinguish community participation in our publicly funded hospital,” lamented MPP Randy Hillier (Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox & Addington). “The community represented, democratic Board was last night fundamentally altered into an unaccountable cartel that will answer to no one.”
In an 8-1 vote, with one member abstaining, the CPDMH Board voted to exclude municipal, hospital auxiliary and business representatives. The surgical removal of these members came with the assistance of Doctors Courchene and Higham, who worked to amputate community oversight and assist in shielding the Board from public scrutiny and participation.
“The vote was akin to a Stalinist takeover, laden with hypocrisy and duplicity,” remarked Hillier. “It was declared with a 9-1 vote that it is a conflict of interest for community Board representatives to participate in the vote for their removal, but that it was not a conflict for largely unknown and clandestine oligarchs to usurp the Board’s authority unto themselves.”
Objections from the public were met with hostility from the Board, especially its Chairman, Mr. Pinon. “At one point, Chairman Pinon requested the police to physically remove me, the Member of Provincial Parliament, from the meeting,” noted Hillier. “He wasn’t successful.”
“Last night’s recorded vote removes accountability to the public; it creates an opaque environment that allows the Board to operate without scrutiny, and creates the potential to permit exploitation, financial impropriety and malfeasance,” Hillier continued. “There are many reasons and justifications that we require that governing bodies receiving public funding must be accountable to the public; with last night’s decision, this Board impudently became a cartel, and voted to become a clandestine operation.”
Carleton Place no longer has a community hospital; instead, a secretive cartel has gained complete access to millions of public dollars to use and spend as they please. Chairman Pinon and his chosen few now determine both who can become a member of the corporation, and who is permitted to seek election to the Board of Trustees.
Hillier encourages the public to voice their concerns with the Board directly; those who supported, or did not challenge the removal of community representatives can be reached via email here:
Marcel Pinon [email protected]
Paul Muysson [email protected]
Janet Foster [email protected]
Gordon MacNabb [email protected]
Terry Cairns [email protected]
Richard Chmiel [email protected]
Wayne Drummond [email protected]
Rob Clayton [email protected]
Peter Staniforth [email protected]
Toni Surko [email protected]
Darlene Mitchell [email protected]
Dr. Rob Courchene [email protected]
Rachel de Kemp [email protected]
Dr. Scott Higham [email protected]
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