Deputy Mayor Ron Aiken chats with Erica Butler about the Perth Andover hospital cuts, his vote on Shawn Mesheau’s drive-thru motion, and his plans for the municipal election, which will happen in seven months’ time, on May 10th.
Transcript:
ERICA BUTLER:
So first off, I wanted to ask you about the recently announced cuts to the Perth Andover hospital, which was one of the six rural hospitals targeted for permanent cuts in February. Horizon announced they are temporarily closing seven beds in that hospital, which is about a third of the inpatient beds. Did that news send a chill down your spine?
RON AIKEN:
Well, it did initially. But I put in a call to the mayor up in Perth Andover. Her name is Marianne Bell, and she’s been doing a lot of work on the forefront of this, fighting these hospital closures. And she told me that the closures that happened up there were worked out in consultation with the doctors and nurses in the hospital. So I felt a little bit better about that, because there’s… at least they’re not imposing it from above. They’re actually you know, talking to the local people and seeing what works best. So it’s heartening to see that happen.
EB:
Now the Sackville Hospital recently had a temporary overnight ER closure due to a staff shortage. Are there problems with staffing rural hospitals? Do you have any concerns that Horizon could be using staffing levels to accomplish what they planned back in February?
RA:
Staffing is a problem in rural hospitals. And I don’t know what they’re doing to address it in a very concrete sort of way.
When I was talking to the Deputy Minister of Health a couple of months ago, they were talking at that time about a shortage of lab technicians. And I said that, you know, if you guys were to go into the universities like Mount A or UNB, or any of them, and go into a graduating biology class, and told people that you’d pay for their training to be a lab tech and guarantee them a job, I don’t think there’d be a lab tech shortage. So, you know, they have to, I think, work on slightly more creative ways to solve these things and not just, you know, wringing their hands.
EB:
I wanted to ask you about Tuesday night’s online council meeting. Councillor Sean Mesheau put forward a motion that would commit council to reevaluating the municipal plan policy on drive-thrus. Council ended up in a tie on that vote, and you had to serve as the tiebreaker. Can you tell us how you voted and why?
RA:
I voted against the motion, because I found it unnecessary. In 2021, we’ll be looking at our municipal plan and our zoning bylaws, again. We do it every five years regularly. And that’s going to come upm and that will be part of that review. So to put forward a motion to do what we’re going to do anyway, just seemed to me to be unnecessary. So I voted against it. But I don’t like these kinds of motions that really don’t go anywhere. Like this one, I just found unnecessary.
EB:
What is your position on that that policy, that drive-thru ban that is in the municipal plan?
RA:
It’s more complicated than just the drive-thrus, I think. Because we have two highway areas, and one has drive-thrus and one does not. And we banned them generally because, you know, there were environmental concerns and so on.
My personal view is that it wouldn’t make much difference here. Because I think… the woman who was putting forth the idea for the drive-thru at the Ultramar, Wendy Alder, brought up a point that I thought was quite valid, which is you’re not really adding to the environmental problems by putting another one in, you’re just distributing what’s there already more evenly the across the town.
Drive-thrus are not something I get all that worked up about. I can see the environmental problem with the idling. But I really don’t think it’s a huge problem. And the problem with the 504 exit, where they all are now, is that if we open it up to make sure drive-thrus go ahead… It’s so congested there now that I think adding another drive-thru capability to somebody else would make the traffic situation worse.
So, like I said, it’s a complex issue I think we’re gonna have to work through fairly carefully.
EB:
I also wanted to touch on the election date announcement. We are heading to the polls again on May 10, 2021. Two people have resigned from council so far during this extra year that’s been added to your terms. Have you heard from other councillors about whether they will stick it out for the next seven months?
RA:
Oh, I think everybody will. Or no one has said they’re not going to.
EB:
Do you expect any issues with maintaining quorum at council?
RA:
No. We would have a quorum issue if, say, two of the current councillors were sick and couldn’t make a meeting. In that event, we’d just postpone the meeting until we could get a quorum. So we’re not in the situation of some communities where, you know, they just don’t have enough people. We do.
EB:
Can you share your plans for the May election? Are you planning to run?
RA:
Yes, I’ll be I’ll be running for mayor.
EB:
Lastly, budget meetings are slated for October 19th and 20th, next week. Are those meetings open to the public?
RA:
They should be.
EB:
And what kind of information do councillors have to consider in advance of those meetings? And would some of that information also be available to the public?
RA:
Well, we get the proposed budgets for every department. And they go over them by category of what what they plan to spend on this, that or the next thing, and what projects they’re looking at for the next year.
We don’t go through them line by line, because that just gets to be a ridiculous amount of time wasted. And they’ve all been gone over by staff… managers, the CEO and the Treasurer. They’ve been through these things four or five times now, line by line. So when they come to us, it’s all been vetted pretty carefully. And I know our Treasurer has given them some pretty strict guidelines on how much they can spend. So I’m confident that you know, what we get has been well worked over.
