Dear Editor:
I recently suffered a cardiac event that sent me to the emergency room at Lions Gate Hospital.
It was more difficult because of the snowstorms. Triage was not full and I was processed within 10 minutes of arriving.
Sitting and waiting leaves ample time to hear conversations from patients and staff.
Overwhelmingly, the staff conversations were about the length of time it took to come to work from Squamish. There were many stories of people stuck in traffic for up to three hours.
Since I was in overnight for monitoring, I asked one of the night nurses: “How many of your staff live in the Squamish area?” He said about 40 per cent. Most cannot afford to live in North Vancouver. The housing cost crisis in Vancouver is driving most employees out of their community.
The impact hit me; it is going to get much worse. Like me, there are tens of thousands of seniors in the Vancouver area that are medically mandated to reside close to a hospital.
Lions Gate Hospital is the only major medical facility serving the area north of Burrard Inlet. Like all the rest of the “working class,” hospital employees, who (as unionized employees) are in the upper wage brackets, are being displaced out of their community to areas quite remote. There is no economic basis for this displacement since there are no factories being built or other industries paying higher wages that are in competition for the available space like there was in cities like New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo or Taipei.
No, what is driving this is speculation from outside the economic envelope that the whole society exists on.
This is an unsustainable economic model in which the leadership of the society have abrogated their responsibility to ensure promised future security for all of its members from cradle to grave. All levels of government seem to blame someone else.
At present there is an enormous economic demand, perhaps 500,000 people strong for housing $700 to $1,500 (in monthly rent) for small one- and two-bedroom dwellings for the working class. Based on their pay scales, that’s what they can comfortably pay for housing.
What is being promoted is the total replacement of older homes and apartment style dwellings with newer higher-density dwellings at much higher cost. There are reportedly some 10,000 new homes that are vacant in the Vancouver area already. That number is about to explode.
In addition, businesses are closing by the dozens. The expected disposable income that normally would be available from the working group to spend on food, clothing, transportation and entertainment is depleting very rapidly.
In many cases, housing (cost) has swallowed the entire budget and the worker is forced out. All the remaining businesses still require employees and they cannot pay clerks, wait staff, maids, sales representatives, etc., huge wages just to satisfy the gluttony allowed and promoted by developers and their government partners.
Don’t just say “it’s the market.” When you can no longer depend on the hospital being staffed, you are in dangerous territory.
Leo Vanderbyl
North Vancouver
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