Baseball Hall of Fame - Gary Carter: Speech 2003

RIP Gary Carter - 1954-2012

Gary Carter was the Montreal Expos.

The health care system in Quebec is broken

The health care system in this province is broken. I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but in Quebec, those who have the financial means to bypass the public system do - and who can blame them? Most can’t, and they are left at the mercy of the system. It is not just the unacceptable wait times, it is the whole mentality of those running thungs that is flawed. Many people are literally being made to feel as if they are being done a favour by being seen by a doctor. There is something terribly wrong with a society where veterinarians are more accessible and compassionate than a high percentage of the people working within the “human” health care establishment.

What the MUHC Superhospital will look like

If you never have to see a doctor, consider yourself lucky. In Quebec, finding a family doctor is excruciatingly difficult. The alternatives are to either head down to an emergency room, walk-in medical clinic or the bureaucratically-heavy CLSC. Whichever one you choose, be prepared to spend countless hours in a waiting room. Once you finally find yourself at the end of the line, you’ll be fortunate if the doctor has five minutes to spare.

The wait times for crucial procedures and tests is also unacceptable, and there is no doubt that people are getting sicker while they wait or even dying as a result. Which brings me to the two-tier system that already exists. People are now being presented with the option to go private for certain procedures or tests. For those who have insurance it may be a viable option, but for those who don’t and cannot afford it, they can do nothing but wait and wait, and wait.

What is the solution? More doctors of course. More money invested in health care? Of course. But the real problem is the way the system is set-up. Too much money is being wasted for things that have nothing to do with actual health care. Money for instance, that is being spent to keep an insanely large bureaucracy in business.

There are now two massive hospital projects being constructed. We hear all sorts of promises about how great they will be. We are being told that once these “super hospitals” open their doors, all will be wonderful. Is that even possible as long as the disconnected mentality of the government and those running the system remain the same?

More about online radio streams

Every radio station needs a live Internet stream. It is a no-brainer in 2012. I was blown away back in 1996 when I heard a far away radio station online for the first time. Before that, you had to play around with your AM dial during the wee hours of the night in hopes of hearing a station. If you were lucky, you'd pick up New York or Detroit, or perhaps somewhere even further away. Sometimes the signal was sporadic. "Outside" local newscasts always intrigued me. Of course, they would have to be in either English or French in order for me to understand them. You could at one time pick up French-language newscasts from other regions of the province. I wonder about how much of that exists anymore past midnight.


Back to online streaming, which I’m sure I have blogged about before… During the early years of the Internet, you didn’t have a technological noose around your computer. If you wanted to listen to say, an American radio station, you could do so. The same went for early American video streaming. Basically, if it were out there, you had access to it. All that has changed. Sites now filter you according to your IP. If you find yourself in Canada, forget about watching your favourite shows off the web on their originating American network sites. And now you can also forget about it when it comes to many radio stations. WCBS is a prime example of a station that now bans Canadians from tuning in online.

Some still naively believe that for us in the “West” the Internet is truly a democratic medium. It isn’t anymore. Just look at the proposed SOPA down south, which our government in Canada already appears ready and willing to go along with. All is supposedly based on copyrights, but in reality it is just another mechanism of protectionism and censorship on both sides of the border. If the Internet were truly a free medium we wouldn’t be filtered according to where we happen to be located. They have been doing it with TV for decades. In many ways the CRTC is nothing more than a mechanism of private sector economic protectionism under the guise of cultural protectionism.

Thankfully, most international audio streams are still available to Canadians - for now. And the biggest winners when it comes to streams are small stations who in the past relied solely on their frequency reach to reach their audience. Broadcasters on a station like Radio Centre-Ville for example, could never have imagined they would one day be able to reach an audience anywhere in the world. We see it with podcast statistics that show where the listeners are geographically located. Podcasts and archiving are also hugely beneficial in this new on-demand and portable technological world. Depending on marketing, promotion and of course, the quality of your program, the possibilities are endless. Translating that into any sort of financial profitability is another matter altogether…

Early 1930s Radio Broadcasting

2011 Radio Musings

2011 was an eventful year for Montreal radio. We saw plenty of big names change positions on the dial and lots of station re-brandings. The Habs also found a new radio home and play-by-play guy. I’m glad to report that at Radio Centre-Ville, the English programming sched remained pretty much unchanged from the year before. In other words, thankfully I’m still on the air!

I can’t help but think about Montreal’s radio past. We lost Ted Tevan in 2011. His influence over an entire generation of Montreal-born radio people cannot be understated. Tevan knew how to entertain and understood that when you make a living on the radio, it's important to differentiate yourself from your competition. Of course, those were the days when they actually allowed you that freedom. It’s rarely about personality anymore - it‘s primarily about the brand.

And speaking of personality and influences. I have a great fondness for overnight announcers of old. I remember listening to Dave Patrick in the 1980s put on a show between 12-4 AM that was better than most of what you will find in daylight hours on many talk stations nowadays. You could have made the same argument when it came to Peter Anthony Holder. His show was less geared toward the “what’s on your mind” crowd though.

I still think the best talk radio is heard after midnight. It’s less inhibited and allows for the more colourful personalities and “regulars”. They don’t count the ratings for overnights, so these kind of shows have become expendable. I was a night shift worker for many years and believe me, when it is gone, it leaves a huge void.

Another year is about to end. Before you soak up the usual predictions for 2012, remember that most of the big news stories of 2011 caught everyone totally off-guard. We’ve got too many talking heads and too many advice dispatchers. Either way there is a lot of money to be made in scaring people or attempting to tell them how to “repair” their lives. I don’t know what will happen next year, I just hope it involves good health, love, and economic stability for everyone.

Canadian Tire Scrooge & Santa commercial (1987)