Coe urges persuading Japan that Tokyo Olympics will be safe

Time stops for no one. It keeps ticking away like a perpetual motion machine erasing our youth. Aging is entropy inevitably moving us into a state of disorder.

We wake up one morning and say, “What happened?” Our friends ask us: “Are you living the dream?” Retirement is supposed to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Except it often doesn’t feel like that.

Suddenly, we are contending with hip and knee replacements, angioplasty or by-pass surgery, chemotherapy and cancer surgery, cataract surgery, emergency visits to the hospital, not to mention cognitive and physical decline associated with degenerative illnesses.

And then there are the numerous medications we are required to take to help us cope with these various medical disorders, all of which have side effects. To counter these side effects, we need to take a different set of medications. We live a life of neverending alarms going off telling us which meds we need to take and when.

A Manitoba pharmacist who made complaints against a colleague that led to sanctions against him has now also been fined due to her own conduct.

Portage la Prairie pharmacist Caitlin Giercke was fined $15,000 for dispensing prescriptions for drugs to patients on multiple occasions early and without prescriptions.

The investigation by the College of Pharmacists of Manitoba into Giercke’s conduct was triggered by a complaint she made about her colleague, Glen Pauch, who in June was fined $100,000 after the panel found he had dispensed a massive amount of drugs that could not be accounted for.

On Oct, 25, 2021 Giercke reported concerns about Pauch’s treatment of a patient who was regularly receiving refills of an opioid 17 to 18 days early without authorization. Giercke also said she was concerned Pauch had been misusing prescription medication.

For years, the Manitoba Association of Crown Attorneys (“MACA”) has been engaged in a dispute with the Manitoba government over the workload of its lawyers. That dispute is expected to come to a head at the end of November, when two weeks of grievance hearings are scheduled.

We remain hopeful that we can reach an agreement with our employer. But if we cannot, our union’s lawyers are prepared to make our case. As those hearings approach, we want to explain how we got here, what is at stake, and why this dispute matters beyond the working conditions of our members.

These problems are longstanding and predate the election of Manitoba’s current government. Our concern with the current government is not that it created these problems, but that it is now responsible for addressing them.

Despite the evidence before it, the government has not meaningfully addressed the workload concerns we have raised throughout its time in office.