(31 August 2009) At least two Ontario Liberal health ministers have misled journalists and the public about the findings of a 1985 Ministry of Health committee report.

In three news releases, Murray Elston and Elinor Caplan invisibilize the two most important findings of the Thomson report. They also repeat a mistake the report cautions against making. Worse, Elston and Caplan set the Liberal Party and the Ontario Ministry of Health on a course of causing preventable deaths.

Since then, persons with sensitivities have discovered that there is nothing more powerful than the need to cover up colleagues' lethal mistakes, the need to “stick to the story,” no matter what the costs.

The Ontario Ministry of Health committee was set up in 1984 when consumers and health professionals complained to Conservative health minister Keith Norton about preventable harm being caused by serious abuse in the health care system. Norton apparently did not notice that there was an existing, legally obligating, publicly insured method of diagnosis, one that is still encouraged by the College of Family Physicians of Ontario. He was certainly unfamiliar with the history of sensitivities as described in mainstream medical literature. His officials were apparently unaware of scientific and clinical articles then held in the Ontario Ministry of Health library, containing supportive references back to 1700.

Canadian health authorities and politicians are hiding past efforts to protect people with sensitivities, especially undiagnosed sensitivities, from being unnecessarily injured or killed by imprudent acts of commission in health care.

Public servants and politicians hide these protections and the knowledge on which they were based behind debate about a revisionist history provided by “doctors of environmental medicine.” Thousands of Canadians, including children and other vulnerable persons, who were to have been protected by measures that Health Canada was encouraging until the 1993 election, are being injured or killed instead.

Conservative Health Minister Tony Clement created legislation that directs Canada Vigilance to merely document the consequent injuries and deaths, while continuing to invisibilize Health Canada's previous work. Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, new to the scene, has been offered an opportunity to respond.

Read how federal officials acknowledged and then betrayed Canadians, as documented by the Advocacy Gateway for Environmental Sensitivities.

Iggie