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Island sleeps sound knowing health care is in good hands
Another tale of everyday life in the Department of Health, Archaeology and Aboriginal Affairs
Carolyn Bertram, PEI Minister of Healthcare and Wellness
by Donnie St Pierre, QEH ER Waiting Room
La Ministre Bien Aimée was in a rage. The 72 inch plasma screen television beside the Canaletto on the south wall of her office was freeze-framed to the moment she so unconvincingly assured viewers that we have a really good health team on PEI. Still reeling in her mind was the incomprehensible gabble which preceded it – incomplete sentences, stutters, false starts, statements without conclusions. Her eyes blinked and swivelled like a frog suddenly caught in the landing lights of a 747. Her glorious smile was nowhere to be seen.
She grabbed the 4th century BC Etruscan vase with the Cloud Forest orchid flown in that morning from Ecuador and hurled it at the screen. Fragments bounced off the Michelangelo bronze of The Hospitalier on the plinth which has come from the Parthenon, and came to rest on the 9th century Isfahani silk rug on which it stood. Read the rest of this entry »
Charlottetown’s homogenized bike rally equals Alanis concert – another Myrtle triumph galvanizes Island tourism industry
Another tale of everyday life under the Ghiz Dispensation
Testosterone-charged drug-crazed hard core bikers terrorized downtown Charlottetown during Myrtle's Rally
By Donnie St Pierre, Charlottetown Bike Park, August 30, 2010
Dozens of middle-aged men in leather vests wandered disconsolately around Charlottetown last weekend, looking for what had been promised as the biggest, baddest, wildest motorcycle rally since Hollister. Unfortunately that rally was taking place several hundred miles away.
What Charlottetown got instead (as exclusively predicted in NJN in July 2009 – see below) was a homogenized affair which might be described as “Bikers made safe for Anne”, in which middle aged ladies with bottoms which stretched their stylish capris and challenged the capacities of their husbands’ Gold Wing special touring seats searched for tasteful souvenirs everywhere except the “Merchants’ Village” set up specially for the event.
Of course, there had been changes in the Ghiz dispensation since the heady days of 2009 when the idea of a bike extravaganza first came to life. Whereas last July Myrtle was running the Department of Tourism and Hat Music on behalf of Val Docherty (and also acting as research and policy chief for the whole provincial government – reshaping education, care of seniors, rural development and support for the disabled), this year Tourism was in the hands of Robert Vessey – ex potato farmer, ex bike racer, ex VP of the provincial Liberal Party and proud husband of the Island’s best-known lady of letters – and Myrtle is reincarnated as Madame Tourism Charlottetown under the increasingly suspicious eye of City Council. Read the rest of this entry »
La Ministre Bien Aimée marks La Fête Nationale d’Acadie alone BFF Cynthia MIA.
Another tale of everyday life in the Department of Health and Archaeology
Eugène Delacroix, The Noble Lions Remove the Screeching Mothers of Rustico from the Pancake Breakfast 1826. From the collection of La Ministre Bien Aimée
By Donnie St Pierre, Cymbria
La Ministre Bien Aimée was in a rage. Picking up the priceless Roman 2nd century BC vase (presented to her by dear Silvio Berlusconi on the occasion of their meeting in St Aubin sur Mer) with the Cloud Forest orchid flown in daily from Ecuador, she hurled it at the wall, spraying Delacroix’s “The Noble Lions Remove the Screeching Mothers of Rustico from the Pancake Breakfast” with the Veuve Cliquot she uses to keep her flowers at their peak. A shard of glass joins the sliver of crystal lodged in the door of the Doge’s palazzo in the Canaletto hanging by the columned portico leading to the inner waiting room.
Fortunately a dreadful week has been marked with one signal triumph. The simpering yes-man Vessey has been stripped of the culture police she had trained to a razor’s edge of efficiency during her tenure as Minister of Cultural Conformity, and they have replaced the sorry platoon of knuckle-dragging enforcers she had recruited from Unit 9 and the clinic at Sleepy Hollow. Now, at last, she was again in a position to seek out and punish dissent and non-conformity. Best of all, Ko-Ko is back, and with him The List.
At the ministerial mansion in the fetid swamps west of Hunter River, the Outdoor (Informal) Ceremonial Thrones have been placed on the front lawn beneath the graciously columned veranda, where she can sit of an evening sipping an ice-cold ’76 Meursault from a hand-cut 18th century Bohemian crystal flute and watch the little people toiling in the valley below, cowed in the shadows of the gallows erected on Hunter River hill, at both the entrance and the exit to the village. Made from the finest flame maple recovered from early 19th century shipwrecks in Lake Superior, the Adirondack Thrones have been carefully glazed with a white finish to accentuate the grain and tastefully show off the inset pearls. Read the rest of this entry »
La Ministre Bien Aimée rages Tracey Vessey faces intolerable wait in QEH ER
Another tale of everyday life in the Ministry of Health and Archaeology
Thank God for transparency and accountability. Democracy at work at Health PEI and in the Department of Archaeology Attend their next meeting and ask what went wrong.
By Donnie St Pierre, QEH ER
La Ministre Bien Aimée was in a rage. Both the Grauniad and the CBC were running headlines about the intolerable wait suffered by a resident of York in the QEH Emergency Room.
Tracey Vessey suffered a hangnail and had a totally unacceptable wait of 15 minutes before a top surgeon could be called off the golf course and flown by helicopter to deal with the emergency. Suppose she emails her sister?
As the scandal builds, it appears that the accountant who purports to run the QEH is missing in action and Dr. Rosemary Henderson, acting executive director of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital blurted out that a “full investigation” was taking place. Mme La Ministre was enraged.
There will be no such thing. A full investigation would ask intolerable questions such as “Why was a new ER opened without the staff to man it?” and “Why has the province refused to fund the positions necessary to man the new expanded ER?” Read the rest of this entry »
Groundbreaking career of La Ministre Bien Aimée mysteriously misses a beat
Another tale of everyday life under the Ghiz Dispensation
Politicians conspicuous by their absence at groundbreaking of Rustico school, PEI
By Donnie St Pierre, The Smelt Shack, Cymbria PEI
Truth can sometimes be found in what didn’t happen, as Sherlock Holmes showed us with the dog that did not bark in the middle of the night.
In the political lexicon, groundbreakings are second only to the unveiling of cornerstones in the list of opportunities to which politicians devote hours of planning and huge budgets for photographers and media kits replete with 8×10 colour glossies of architects’ renderings and politicians jostling for glory (there is usually an unseemly struggle for the credit among the three layers of government) and expensively produced brochures, the total cost for all of which often exceeds the total value of the project being unveiled.
Imagine then our surprise to have missed the invitation to the groundbreaking for the new École St Augustin in Rustico. Read the rest of this entry »
Cat on a hot tin roof Mme La Ministre
Another tale of everyday life in the Department of Health and Archaeology
Strangers intrude as Health and Archaeology Minister Carolyn Bertram tours through a new, $3-million health care centre in O'Leary on Friday. Image: Guardian Heather Taweel
By Donnie St Pierre, O’Leary, PEI
La Ministre Bien Aimée was in a rage. On the gold inlaid green Italian marble of her desk lay screen captures from The Guardian’s website.
Before her grovelled the duty clerk who had printed them off. Insufferable!
She seized the priceless Quattrocento Florentine goblet with the Cloud Forest Orchid flown in that morning from Ecuador and hurled it. It shattered on the Lorenzo Ghiberti bronze of the young faun and a shard of crystal lodged in the door of the Doge’s palazzo in the Canaletto hanging by the columned portico leading to the inner waiting room.
Were they tormenting her deliberately? Or was she just surrounded by hopeless incompetents?
Island Grits play on world stage, but fame eludes La Ministre Bien Aimée
Another tale of everyday life in the Ministry of Health and Archaeology
The minister responsible for archaeology, Carolyn Bertram, joined provincial archaeologist Dr. Helen Kristmanson at the Pointe-aux-Vieux archaeological excavation site this morning.
By Donnie St Pierre, Low Point, PEI
La Ministre Bien Aimée was in a rage. She had schlepped all the way out to some God-forsaken spot near Lennox Island – quite correctly called Low Point – having been promised the possibility of a photo op which could go national.
Admittedly it was all on the totally improbable grounds that because in PEI the Ministry of Health no longer actually has anything to do with health (which is now looked after by some little grey man whose job it is to take responsibility for all the inevitably unpopular decisions during the process of cutting Island health services back to meet the new promise: “One Island Community: One Island Hospital”) it does actually take responsibility for Archaeology of all things.
Presumably because archaeology is concerned with things that are dead and Health with those which soon will be. By much the same logic the Minister of Education is responsible for Autism.
So as Minister of Archaeology, Mme la Ministre was to be present for the announcement of a major new find – an announcement of the sort routinely – if incomprehensibly – covered in detail by the national and international press. The thought of her radiant smile gracing the front page of Macleans was enough to compensate for the horrors of trying to navigate the back roads west of that dismal pit Summerside.
But when she got there, instead of finding the dignified ruins of a Presbyterian church as she had been led to believe by some cringing bureaucrat, she was in fact shown some holes in the ground that purported to be part of a pre-deportation Acadian community.
The Lion, the Witch and the Cabinet: CS Lewis and Lewis Carroll intermixed.
Another tale of everyday life in the Ministry of Health
Health Minister Carolyn Bertram or a mysterious charwoman?
By Donnie St Pierre, Cymbria
The Stanley Bridge Resort is a magnificent structure, although of course it lacks the artistic and architectural splendour of Bertram Manor, which graces a hillside west of Hunter River, on the same ley line as the ancient feasting hall of the Noble Order of Lions of Cymbria.
Legend has it that La Ministre Bien Aimée’s distant St Clair ancestor arrived in a coracle that had been blown off course when he and a half dozen Templar comrades escaped from the clutches of Philip IV of France on Friday, October 13, 1307.
It is an interesting fact that Rustico Bay has collected an extraordinary range of historical flotsam and jetsam as the result of a mysterious current which begins near the straits of Gibraltar, gathers warmth and strength along the coasts of Spain, winds across the Bay of Biscay (carefully skirting Anjou and Charente, ancestral home of the troublesome Acadians), washes the mystic coasts of Cornwall and the shore of Tintagel, reputed home of Arthur, and thence flows across the Atlantic to lap the shores of Cymbria.
La Ministre Bien Aimée accepts the burden of accountability
“My people deserve no less than what I choose to tell them” she avows.
La Ministre Bien Aimée
Par Donnie St Pierre, Oyster Bed Bridge, April 14, 2010
On a lonely hilltop outside Hunter River, the gales of April howl around Bertram Manor, which rises above a sea of mud, making a mockery of Mme la Ministre’s plans for orderly rows of terraced vines tended by sweating peasants under the sort of sun that Camus wrote about.
La Ministre Bien Aimée was in a rage. Her bureaucrats were quite rightly refusing to release any information about piffling sums which might or might not have been spent on electronic records systems which might or might not not have functioned quite as well as some possibly overly optimistic manager-contractor had promised. Surely the whole point of giving contracts to former employees is to keep the whole thing in-house and streamline decision-making processes by allowing the people actually doing the work to decide how much to pay themselves. After all, who would know better how much their work was worth? And who else would be in better position to know whether what they produced worked as they had originally planned?
Read the rest of this entry »
Mme la Ministre rages at Opposition challenges
Madame le Ministre, I'm the boss of me
I’m the boss of me, she tells Crane in another tale of everyday life in the Ministry of Culture
By Donnie St Pierre, contributed NJN Network, Miscouche, Prince Edward Island, Canada May 13, 2009
A weak and watery sun barely registers on the priceless Isfahan carpet which lies in front of the gold inlaid teak wine cooler with its collection of mid-century vintages from some of the better, English-owned estates of the Bordeaux. Behind the fortress walls of her desk on its raised dais, Mme la Ministre seethes with rage.
That frumpy Crane woman has had the sheer audacity to question her on why the miserable French students of Rustico go to school in the basement of a bar. Worse, she went on to question why Mme la Ministre has broken her solemn promise of August 15, 2008 that each French community – including Rustico – has the right to its own centre scolaire-communautaire. Intolerable! Read the rest of this entry »
Mme la Ministre’s fundraiser at Cymbria Lions Club is precursor to St Aubin triumph
Par Donnie St. Pierre, Saturday, April 18, 2009. Anglo Rustico, Prince Edward Island, Canada
Carolyn Bertram, Je suis la Ministre. La cuisine des Templiers m’attend.
Just like every day, Saturday, April 18th dawned bleak and miserable over slate grey Bertram Manor. The shattered earth has been dressed once again, but nothing but tangled weeds seems able to grow. No sooner is the ceremonial carriageway scraped than it is again deeply rutted by vehicles dragging reluctant callers to be upbraided, chided, instructed, criticized, corrected or dismissed from the scowling presence of the Minister of Culture and Most Other Things. Read the rest of this entry »
Satirists live in dark and dangerous times, part 2
La Bertram, Je suis la ministre. L’éclat, c’est moi.
Our hero is visited by the present and future of satire
Par Donnie St Pierre, special to NJN Network, somewhere PEI, Canada, April 8, 2009
In our first episode Parkdale Doris saw the writing on the Fifth Floor wall, René de Tignish sits in the Tignish Legion with his head bowed in his arms. A couple of tables over, the Gail-Shea-After-the-Recount party is still going strong. “What can you do when the actual facts and deeds are wilder, weirder and even less rooted in reality or logic than even the wildest satire? How can you mock a mockery?” All of sudden a ghost appeared to him Parkdale Doris. “I am the Ghost of Satire Past. I am the very late purveyor of the prestigious Stunned Arse Award.” Read the rest of this entry »
Satirists live in dark and dangerous times
Parkdale Doris, the ghost of Cynthia past
Parkdale Doris saw the writing on the Fifth Floor wall
Par Donnie St Pierre, special to NJN Network, somewhere PEI, Canada, April 6, 2009
It hurts to see a grown man cry. René de Tignish sits in the Tignish Legion with his head bowed in his arms. The blonde wig, sunglasses and “Islanders First. For a Change” T-shirt serve to disguise him from the Fifth Floor agents seeking to identify and silence the West Prince mole. Read the rest of this entry »
