It was at the University of Waterloo’s April 3rd launch of its new “Future Cities Institute” that I heard one of the guest speakers make that statement. He described himself as a community builder – not a developer. And describing the way cities are being planned and built he referred to those ways as long out of date. He proclaimed, “City building is full of silos”.
Silos! For a minute I thought that I was at a healthcare meeting here in Stratford, or London, or Toronto. Because that same claim has been made about our Ontario health system for … decades. And the silos play out because we put hospitals here and organized medicine there and homecare out there somewhere. Too often it seems that the powers that be are out to thicken the walls of their own insulated silo…their comfort zone, their regulated zone, their professional zone. But the evidence keeps piling up that the system is quaking under its own weight from sacred cows.
And what is a sacred cow? Oxford says, “an idea, custom, or institution held, especially unreasonably, to be above criticism”. Well don’t tell Robyn Urback who in the April 19th Globe and Mail said, “Canada’s health care system is a disgrace”. Robyn goes on to breathe the reality, “In our stupor, we accept this trade-off because the alternative – admitting that we need to totally overhaul the way health care is organized, funded and delivered in this country – is too scary to consider, and too fraught politically to propose.”
Well, where do we start? Here in my home, where I live.