Monday, October 27, 2008

Patient waits for hours in Ontario hospital while having a heart attack

Jeff Blay wrote in “Better investment is needed in our health-care system,”
(St. Catharines Standard, Oct.20, 2008):

“Re: Health-care services a federal campaign issue, candidates say,
The Standard, Oct. 9.


Health care in the Niagara region (especially St. Catharines) should no doubt have been an issue in the federal election.


It's amazing how poor emergency room health care is -- in this city especially. I am a St. Catharines native, but I am currently a journalism student at Humber College in Toronto, and I have had experience at hospitals in the GTA. In my experiences at emergency rooms in Toronto and St. Catharines, there is no comparison.


It's appalling to see what kind of attention people get in the emergency room in St. Catharines


Something that disturbed me greatly was an experience this Thanksgiving weekend, when a relative was experiencing chest pains and was sure he was having a heart attack.


Family members rushed him into the St. Catharines General Hospital at 5 p. m. Saturday, and didn't receive any attention, or even get a room, until 1:30 a. m.


It was later discovered he was suffering a heart attack for the whole duration of the wait.


This is truly unacceptable and heartless. Although we have what is considered to be a privileged health-care system in Canada, and it is understood many other people are in need of emergency care, this cannot go on.


This is human life we are talking about!


It would be worth it for the government and citizens to put a little more money into the system, so that when people are on the verge of dying, they get the attention they need and deserve.”
*
The attention at the federal level should be on reforming the Canada Health Act, shouldn’t it?

Health-care is primarily a PROVINCIAL responsibility and obligation. Why aren’t the McGuinty Liberals reforming their disastrous Commitment to the Future of Medicare Act? Why aren't Liberals held accountable for incidents such as the one documented by Blay? Liberals like to pretend that these kinds of incidents are merely anomalies; they are just hearsay, just random, anecdotal stories! Liberals don't want to acknowledge the kind of health-care horror story which Blay wrote about!

Local St. Catharines MPP Jim Bradley ran in the 2007 election pretending there were no problems with health care in Ontario! Now Blay - along with so many others - is discovering the charade of relying on the Liberals for health care; and of being prevented by Liberal provincial law from being able to choose other health care provider options when the government fails to deliver timely care.

Why doesn’t Blay ask where the billions from Dalton McGuinty’s Health Tax have gone? How much "more money" should "government and citizens" have to pay? Why is Liberal-run health-care poor and appalling? Why isn’t Jim Bradley held to account to explain this – yet another – embarrassment in his Liberal-run health-care system, right here in Bradley’s own city? A patient sits waiting in Jim Bradley’s health-care system, having a heart attack, and is essentially ignored for hours - and this is the wonderful single-payer, universal health monopoly which Jim Bradley approves of?

Shameful - and probably unconstitutional as well. McCreith/Holmes, where are you? Ontario needs your decision now! We can no longer succumb to Liberal health-care hostage takers like Dalton McGuinty and Jim Bradley and their dangerous monopolistic ideology.
*
update, Aug.30, 2011:
I hope Jeff Blay noticed how, since he wrote the above letter, 32 C.difficile infected patients ended up being killed in Jim Bradley's Liberal health-care prison-monopoly, right in Niagara.
I hope Jeff Blay writes another letter about that.
I hope Jeff Blay contacts Liberal Jim Bradley, and asks Ole Jimmy why he and his McGuinty Liberals were hiding from being made the subjects of scrutiny during the outbreak that was going on in Liberal-monopoly-run Ontario in 2008 - when Blay was writing his first letter!
Yeah: I hope Blay then asks Jim Bradley why the Liberals shouldn't be held responsible for homicide in the subsequent 32 Niagara C.diff deaths in 2011.
The St.Catharines Standard or Niagara This Week sure won't be asking their buddy Ole Jimmy 'bout that!
*
*

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Liberal Jim Bradley shoots crap

Norm Kalmanovich wrote in “Debunking global warming”, (National Post, Oct 24, 2008):

“Re: Skeptics, Unite!, Lorne Gunter, Oct. 20.
Global warming is first and foremost about global temperature, so it raises the question: Why is this the first time that actual global temperatures have been shown in the media?

Why is this critical temperature data [shown with this column] not readily available on the taxpayer-funded Environment Canada Web site? More importantly, why hasn't Environment Canada informed Canadians that the globe has been cooling since 2002, as is shown in the raw monthly temperature data underlying the smoothed curve?

There has been no actual global warming since 1998, yet Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol four years after global warming ended without doing any independent scientific investigation that could have prevented this costly mistake.

Lorne Gunter and the rest of the National Post should be praised for exposing this fraud.”

*

Regarding Environment Canada, here’s what Tim Ball wrote in “Environment Canada's Climate Change Fiasco, Global Warming rivals Sponsorship Scandal” (Aug.24, 2007, Canada Free Press):

“Many years ago, I warned Henry Hengeveld of Environment Canada (EC) that, if he thought it was difficult to convince ministers and MPs that global warming was due to human carbon dioxide (CO2) production, it would be twice as difficult to change their minds once they were convinced. The theory was, and still is, unproven of course, but by adopting it so completely so early on, Hengeveld would find himself on a treadmill virtually impossible to get off. After all, it would be very dangerous for a bureaucrat to go back to those same politicians with the message that their political positions were wrong because they were based on wrong information.

Yet Hengeveld made a career out of CO2 by producing a monthly magazine on the topic. Instead of following the scientific method of trying to disprove the hypothesis that human CO2 was causing climate change, Hengeveld and other EC employees were essentially directed to find evidence that it was correct--despite increasing indications it wasn't.

The person mostly responsible for the singular and devastating direction the department took for several years was Gordon McBean. He came to EC with a PhD and so achieved high rank quickly, bringing to the department a particularly skewed view of environmental issues and particularly. McBean spent his career promoting dogma, wasting billions of dollars ($6.3 billion between 1997 and 2005 was committed to climate change programmes by the Federal government, according to former Environment Commissioner Johanne Gelinas) while virtually destroying the Canadian weather service.

There are less weather stations in Canada now than in 1960, and many that remain are merely Automatic Weather Observing Stations. These were so bad that when NAV CANADA was formed to take over the airports they refused to accept them, triggering a Senate investigation under Senator Pat Carney.

While EC was awash in money for global warming work, many other important activities and data collection practices were abandoned. For example, when I chaired the Assiniboine River Management Advisory Board in Manitoba the worst flood on record occurred. When we asked the Water Resources Branch why they didn't forecast the event, they said they had no data on the amount of water in the snow in the valley. We learned EC had canceled flights that used special radar to determine water content of the snow. Savings, as I recall, were $26,000. The cost of unexpected flood damage was $7 million to one level of government alone. The loss of basic weather data means the long term continuous records essential to research into the patterns and causes of climate change are completely unavailable.

Climate is different than weather. Weather is the atmospheric conditions at any given moment; climate is the weather in a region, or how it changes, over time. Climatology was a very minor and unimportant part of EC's operation until very recently; government 'climatologists' were usually people who wanted out of meteorological forecasting. People hired into meteorology were required to have a Masters in Physics because meteorology is the study of physics of the atmosphere, a very small component of climatology. New recruits received a brief, (I believe ten- week) training program in Cornwall, Ontario, in which there was apparently very little climate instruction. This means most EC employees have little, if any, training in climatology. The most extreme example of this ironically involves the person with the highest public profile, David Phillips. He is listed as a Senior Climatologist by EC but actually has a BA in Geography.

McBean established his new post-government career by using $61 million of government money to set up the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS), a climate research organization that he took over as Chair with a salary of $140,000 a year in the month he retired. From that position he directed funding and resources into studying global warming mostly intended to support the alarmist hypothesis. I realized what was going on when EC spent $300 million on computer modelling incapable of accurately simulating global climate or climate change. In addition, they spent $2 million trying to produce better long-range forecasts but abandoned the idea when they achieved less than 50% accuracy.

Another egregious example of EC's failure under McBean was the canceling of support for "Climatic Change in Canada During the Past 20,000 years", a joint program run under the auspices of the National Museum of Natural Sciences (now the Canadian Museum of Nature). This program brought together a multitude of experts in various aspects of climate and climate reconstruction and produced volumes of collected papers that put Canada at the forefront of climate research and reconstruction. To my knowledge none of these experts were ever called to testify before Parliamentary hearings on Kyoto or climate change. EC followed a deliberate policy of excluding most Canadian climate experts – something that continues to this day. Consequently, the issue became purely political, controlled entirely by bureaucrats at EC.

McBean's influence went beyond his role with EC. He was a principle participant in the formation of the highly political UN body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), at Villach, Austria in 1988. Of course, only those scientists who supported the alarmist view of climate change were selected to participate, a practice that continues to this day.

Fortunately, the present government has cut off funding to the many of the Canadian agencies McBean helped establish, groups which had few, if any qualified climate experts on staff. Their role had been to support EC's position through public propaganda and so it is appropriate that they have been disbanded.

McBean, Hengeveld and others at EC led the department to take the singular and unsupportable position that climate change due to human CO2 was established fact. They were a perfect example of MIT Professor of Meteorology Richard S. Lindzen's observation that the consensus was reached before the research had even begun. They, and many of their EC colleagues, effectively thwarted the standard methods of science to promote a political agenda at taxpayers' expense, causing extensive damage to the entire environmental program, leaving much important environmental work inadequately funded. Diversion and misuse of funds meant EC didn't even achieve their own pollution reduction targets, especially in Southern Ontario.

Environment Canada's climate change saga makes the activities of Chuck Gité and others exposed by the Gomery Commission look tame. It is time for the Government to step back from the abyss – withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol in February 2008, as we can do legally under the terms of the treaty, suspend all activities to "fight climate change", a ludicrous objective, and commission a full enquiry into Canada's climate change fiasco. Only then will we have a chance of developing environmental policy our descendants will respect.”

*

For Phillips, the climate is a crap shoot…as he likes to say. Or is it?

Tamsyn Burgmann quoted Phillips (in “Winter forecast could go either way, says Environment Canada climatologist”, Canadian Press Aug.28, 2008) saying:

"We never really advise people in our seasonal forecast to bet the family farm on it, because it is a bit of a crapshoot, especially here in Canada."

A bit o’ the crappe shoote, eh? Who’s really shootin’ the crappe?

Continues Burgmann: “Still, Phillips said, Environment Canada uses a massive supercomputer to crunch data such as sea surface temperatures, ice and snow conditions and soil information for 10 days before forecasting weather for a coming season.”

Ahhh…  yes… the massive supercomputer – of shooting CRAP, is it?!
Is this the computer, by the way, which Stephane Bumbledore Dion may have perhaps used to formulate his super crappy Green Shift debacle?

Does Phillips really come out and say that global warming is anthropogenic, or, does he let others take his “data” and his 'crapshoot' predictions, and run with them to their own conclusions, as they see fit?

Here’s a report by Nicole Trask, “Atlantic Climate Change Conference gets green.Climate change conference puts local spin on a global crisis” (The Coast, Halifax, Feb.28, 2008):

"In the weather deck of cards, there is a joker around every bend. Our weather is dangerous and volatile. We have to come to this less romantic conclusion that we are going to have a different climate and now is the time to prepare for this," explains Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips.

Phillips will host a lunch at the upcoming Atlantic Climate Change Conference, taking place at the Westin March 3-6. The conference will feature lectures on topics such as energy choices, carbon markets, greenhouse gas management, corporate and public policy and land use planning. (See esans.ca for conference info.)

As Phillips demonstrates, it is now accepted that "climate change" is not just some zany myth made up by modern-day hippies and fervent environmentalists, but that it's really happening and our planet is sporting the bruises to prove it.

Halifax is certainly not immune, so the conference will take an in-depth look at some of the startling figures and issues at hand. Sponsored by the Environmental Services Association of Nova Scotia (ESANS) and Dalhousie University, the conference will be a Mecca of information for the public. Screenings, lectures and discussions will reveal the damaged, but not yet broken, state of the earth.

But should we simply acquiesce to this looming catastrophe and hope for the best, or do we still have a fighting chance?

"We have seen the future and there is no way to reverse what will happen but we can learn how to cut back and buy ourselves some time," says Phillips. "In terms of weather, there is no 'normal' anymore. It's all a crapshoot and there is no way to figure out what the next season will bring."”


What the hell is Phillips actually saying in this stilted article? For that matter, what is the reporter extrapolating from Phillips’ utterances? “As Phillips demonstrates, it is now accepted that “climate change” is not some zany myth made up by modern-day hippies and fervent environmentalists” writes Trask – but is this what Phillips actually said?!

What did Phillips actually “demonstrate”? Trask really doesn't mention that!

Did the Environment Canada spokesman demonstrate that “climate change”, or global warming, or whatever he’s calling it, is man made? And, how did Phillips demonstrate that this thesis is “accepted”?!

What does Phillips specifically recommend we “cut back” on… does Trask take Phillips to task asking for specifics? (nope)
Maybe we should cut back on, say, collectivist green shift crap?

In this article, Phillips - Canada's Cagey Climatologist - again used his “crap shoot” catch-all-don’t-blame-me phrase. (Is it any surprise that this conference also included a screening of Al Gore’s film, Inconvenient Crapshoot of Climate Deception?)
Where is Phillips’ ‘looming catastrophe’?
How can anyone “reverse what will happen”… what freakin' dimension of the space-time continuum is Phillips prognosticating upon?!?
 “There is no ‘normal’ anymore” says EC’s man – but, was there a ‘normal’ before?!
 “Now is the time to prepare” for a “different climate”… Different from what, Dave?!
 “Our weather is volatile and dangerous”… but, when has it NOT been so, Dave? Come on…!! Crap shoot, indeed.



Speaking of Cagey Crap Shooting, Jim Bradley, the St. Catharines, Ontario Liberal MPP, badgered the Ernie Eves Conservatives in Ontario in 2002 to ratify the Kyoto protocol. (see also: Jim Bradley, Kyoto's pipsqueak; see also: Liberal Dalton McGuinty's environmental position of hypocrisy)

I wrote in Liberal Jim Bradley and the "Mystery of the Secret Kyoto files:
“Bradley dismissed Kyoto-skeptic experts as "rogue scientists". (Brock Press, Nov. 19, 2002) What are Bradley's scientific credentials? Is this guy fit to pontificate on the science of climate change? In 2002, as Bradley shrieked about his alleged Kyoto "secret" documents, what actual science was he basing his beliefs on at the time - the Mann "hockey-stick" graph, since discredited? Should we believe a "pipsqueak" politician like Bradley, as Ralph Klein once described him (St. Catharines Standard, Oct. 23, 2002); or, should we believe scientists around the world (lovingly known as 'deniers') who question the climate models, methodology and data interpretations used by fear-inducing, pro-Kyoto tax-grabbers?”

Jim Bradley has still not publicly answered on what scientific basis he was pushing Ontario into his collectivist Kyoto scheme in 2002. Was it the Mann graphs? The ice-core data? What??

On what basis did Bradley blithely dismiss the concerns of, as he smugly says, “rogue scientists”? Could it be that Jim Bradley was fear-mongering based on dogma supplied by rogue socialists?

Does Bradley think that all the scientists listed in The Bluster in Bali: Kyoto-crats posture while 'a new call to reason' is made are “rogue scientists” as well?

Does Bradley still believe in his shifty green man-made global warming malarkey?
Or is Bradley just a windy, crap-shooting joker in a weather deck of cards?
*

Friday, October 24, 2008

Liberal health-care in Ontario: pay more, get less

All the recent Niagara Health System (NHS) debate has unfortunately focused on where the new hospital is to be, but we should be looking at what the NHS is.

It is a failing, Liberal government-run, unaccountable monopoly.

There is no patient choice in this system. There is no competition for its services.

There is no other alternative available. Ontarians are forced to take whatever the government deems fit to give.

Patients are at the mercy of bureaucrats and their political masters.

There are systemic problems with our health care system which are inherently related to the fact that it is a failing, government-run, one-tier monopolistic construct. The patient is at the mercy of a government more interested in single-payer ideology than in patient health.

The concept of universal health care is not synonymous with single-tier, government-run monopoly health care - but that is what politicians want us to believe. When government decides to cut health care (as the Liberals just did by cutting $50 million from nurse hiring; or by amalgamating and consolidating health care services; both under the guise of 'saving money') the patient suffers: yet, we have no other choice elsewhere in Ontario to obtain our health care when the government fails to deliver.

The NHS is solely funded by Dalton McGuinty's majority Liberal government. The LHIN is a Liberal-government created, appointed, and funded construct as well. The Liberal government and the Minister of Health are responsible for the conduct of the NHS.

The two local pointmen in all this, St. Catharines Liberal MPP Jim Bradley, and Niagara Falls Liberal MPP Kim Craitor, are strangely quiet on the NHS consolidation plan. Back in late 2007 - when this was only an 'organizational review' (remember that?!) - Jim Bradley at the time simply dismissed what eventually came to be today's HIP, calling this review - before it even started - just “routine stuff” (St. Catharines Standard, Dec.7, 2007)! [see also: High patient death rates deserve only "routine" Liberal review ]

But why isn't the press discussing WHY this 'organizational review' was called for, in the first place?

Why isn't anyone mentioning the Nov. 2007 CIHI report (conveniently released shortly after McGuinty's 2007 re-election!!) which revealed that the NHS's St. Catharines General Hospital had the third-highest patient mortality rate in Canada? (see St. Catharines Standard story, "NHS review pondered", Dec.7, 2007)

Despite my repeated requests, a smug, secretive Jim Bradley has refused to answer or publicly explain why this occurred in his Liberal-run health monopoly - under his watch, and right in his own city.

Why isn't anyone asking why Jim Bradley and his Liberals did not immediately launch an independent investigation into the 2007 CIHI results? Then later, in 2008, we saw the Liberal majority government of Ontario again hide from scrutiny and accountability, by denying the ombudsman the ability to investigate McGuinty's health monopoly - which killed nearly 500 people (that we know of) in a system-wide C. difficile outbreak.

We have also seen the Liberals deny that there is any link to the CIHI-uncovered death-rate and the Liberal's health care funding. On the other hand, the NHS consistently says that they are rationalizing to save costs, to meet budgets, to eliminate deficits - which all link back to funding!

Yet - who set those guidelines, if not McGuinty's Liberal government ?!

Where are the billions raised from McGuinty's Liberal Health Tax?

Once again, to the detriment to patients, McGuinty is cutting health care to ostensibly ‘save costs’ – yet his Liberals still continue to chain patients, forcing them to wait in Ontario’s no choice health care monopoly.

This is patently unfair.

Perhaps soon the court decision in the McCreith/Holmes charter challenge will be announced, showing the unconstitutionality of McGuinty’s single-tier health care monopolism.

In a Oct.21, 2008 story, “Report warns of rising costs for health care; ‘Canadians need to consider alternatives to the status quo’”, the National Post wrote (red emphasis mine):

“Soaring costs could force most provinces to spend more than 50% of their revenue on health care by 2036, says a new report, which urges Canadians to consider alternatives to the status quo if they "want a sustainable, high-quality health care system."

"Over the past 10 years, health care spending in nine out of 10 provinces has grown at an unsustainable rate," said Brett Skinner, the lead author of the Fraser Institute report. "Unless governments find a better way to finance health care, then provincial governments will likely be looking at tax hikes, further rationing of medical goods and services, or ugly trade-offs with other important spending areas."

According to the study -- "Paying More, Getting Less" -- provincial spending on health care is growing faster than revenues with six of 10 provinces projected to disburse more than 50% of all available revenue on health care by 2036.

Leading the way is New Brunswick, which is expected to reach the 50% threshold within 11 years. Manitoba could hit that target within 12 years.

Newfoundland and Labrador will likely reach the 50% point within 17 years, followed by Nova Scotia in 19 years. Saskatchewan could take 25 years to reach the 50% point and Ontario 28 years.

The report recommends several changes to Canada's public health system, such as legalizing the right of patients to pay privately for all types of medical services and permit for-profit and non-profit health providers to compete for the delivery of publicly insured health services.

Canadians need to consider alternatives to the status quo if we want a sustainable, high-quality health care system. Doing nothing means that Canadians will continue to pay more and get less when it comes to health care," Mr. Skinner said.

(click graph to enlarge)
The report by the conservative think-tank predicts that British Columbia will likely take 31 years to reach the 50% point, followed by P. E. I., 61 years and Quebec, 86 years.
Alberta is the only province where total revenues have grown at a rate comparable to health care spending during the past 10 years.
According to the Fraser Institute the peer-reviewed study uses Statistics Canada data from the past 10 years to project growth trends in government spending on health care versus total revenue.”
*

Funny, but Dalton McGuinty has ALREADY said - during the 2007 election - that his government is already spending half of its budget on health care! [see video: Was Dalton McGuinty fibbing about Ontario's Liberal healthcare spending during the Sep.20, 2007 CTV televised Leaders' Debate? ]
The Liberals should have long ago acknowledged that both their health-care ideology and their health-care monopoly are failing. The Liberals should have long ago planned for a phased-in and tempered transition to a moderate private/parallel system, rather than play with patient health by gambling on winning the McCreith/Holmes health-care court challenge.
We can't rely on McGuinty's political health-care pipe-dream promises much longer.
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Thursday, October 23, 2008

Liberals cut nurse funding; break another health-care promise

So the Liberal liar Dalton McGuinty is now cutting some fifty million dollars in funding for new nurses. Remember, this was the same sanctimonious McGuinty who during the election (just one year ago) was bragging and promising that he would be ‘hiring another 9,000 nurses’ - but he didn’t even hire the 8,000 nurses which he had promised in his first term, and now we see the Liberal Healthcare Duplicity starting all over again. Liberals are also "delaying" 50 proposed family health teams, to "save" another 3 million dollars.

McGuinty says this will ‘save money’ - but he neglects to mention how much harm his Liberal health-care cuts will cause to patients who have no other choice but to be forced to wait longer for treatment in his Liberal government–run health monopoly. What a scam this McGuinty is running.

Where did the billions of Liberal Health Tax dollars go – wasn’t nurse funding supposed to be included in that?? Why isn’t the Health Tax specifically allocated solely to health? Or were McGuinty’s Liberals just using the Greg Sorbara Health Tax as 'extra' revenue to coast on over the last few years?

Of course last year during the election, McGuinty was warned - and chose to ignore - that the economy was faltering: he kept on making his outrageous election spending promises nevertheless. As McGuinty continues to whine about his equalization payments, he gave away over a billion of 'no strings attached' infrastructure money to cities several months ago: now he’s forecasting a deficit! McGuinty’s Liberals have not dropped the rate on their high provincial sales tax, nor on their corporate tax.

The Ontario manufacturing sector has crashed under five years of McGuinty Liberalism. Ontario health care will also suffer due to McGuinty's ideological health-care monopolism.

McGuinty and his Liberal government should cut their ideology, not health-care.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Niagara Falls Then and Now: Falls Mist Motel falls for a Tim Hortons

The old Falls Mist Motel (a U-shaped building sporting an outdoor pool in the centre of its parking lot, merely a "stroll to the Falls" as their old sign below said) on the north-west corner of Stanley Ave. and Murray St., was torn down in the summer of 2008, to be replaced by another Tim Hortons chain coffee outlet.
There just aren't enough Timmy's built yet, I say.
But at least from the front of this one, looking straight down Murray St., you will actually be able to see a bit of the American Falls, as well as the upper Niagara River.
Photo Series taken by R. Bobak. (click on photos to enlarge)
above: Aug.5, 2008. Looking east along Murray St., towards Stanley Ave, the Falls Mist Motel is under demolition. The Skylon Tower is in the background.
above: View of motel from across Murray St., July 29, 2008.
above: Same view on Aug.11, 2008. Only a partial wall of the motel's ground floor remains.
above: July 29, 2008. You could relax by the pool as cars backed up around you! above: Same view on Aug.20, 2008: The pool was located by the mound of earth, which is now in front of the new building, whose foundation walls can be seen at the left.above: same view, Nov.3, 2008: the pool used to be just left of the crane truck being used to install new sign. above: July 29, 2008, the Falls Mist Motel as seen looking west across Stanley Ave (Murray St. is on the left)
above: Same view on Aug.11, 2008: the Falls Mist Motel is demolished.
above: July 29, 2008 closer view at the NW corner of Stanley Ave. and Murray St.
above: same view on Aug.11, 2008 - motel has been knocked down.
above: July 29, 2008. View of motel site looking east along Murray St. Note mature tree in front.
above: Same view on Aug.11, 2008. Motel is gone.
above: Aug.20, 2008. Same view - note now the tree has also been cut down. above: Aug.20, 2008. The forms are in place for the new building's foundation.
above: Aug.25, 2008. Concrete walls have been poured.
above: Aug.26, 2008. Gravel fill delivered inside foundation walls.
above: Aug.28, 2008. Gravel being compacted.
above: Sept.2, 2008. Trenches cut for pipes.
above: Sept.4, 2008. Pipes installed.
above: Sept.8, 2008. Structural steel installed. Gravel laid on exterior grade.
above: Sept.11, 2008. Roof trusses installed.
above: Sept.17, 2008. Roof sheathed, wall framing in progress.
above: Sept.22, 2008. Inside concrete floor has been poured, insulation underway.
above: Sept.24, 2008. Glazing and doors installed, vapour barrier being installed, upper canopy facade framed.
above: Oct.2, 2008. Canopy ready for stucco application. Brick piles ready for installation.
above: Oct.17, 2008. Stucco and brick being installed. above: Oct.22, 08. Concrete curbs installed.
below: The new Timmy's street sign arrives ready for installation, Nov.3, 2008above: Nov.3, 2008. Logo installed on canopy. Equipment and supplies arriving. Lot is paved.
above: Nov.13, 2008. Grass has been placed. Street sign is now installed and glowing in the misty Falls night. Soon will we raise a cup of java in warm memory of the good times at the old Falls Mist Motel.
below: The store opened for business on Nov.15, 2008. Another Timmy's clone is born!
above: **** Sipping from the mighty Chug-a-Lug Mug . . . **** {hey: I was supposed to get free drive-thru Timmies java in this thing when I bought it... but now when I show them this, the punks look at it and ask 'wuts dat'.}
above: Dec.13, 2018. The same Timmies is now undergoing a renovation!! Well: it has been exactly 10 years since the place was built! They have cut off the beige upper canopy on most of the facade, leaving some at the left side; they've put some brown wood horizontal paneling around the middle door, and added a fakey stone veneer over the previous brick veneer. The store's still open during the reno. Back in 2018, a lot of the workers were coming in from the Hilton construction which was occurring across the street. Now, in 2018, a lot of workers are coming in from the new concert hall which is being built across the street, right beside the Hilton.
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Niagara Falls Then and Now: Fallsview Plaza construction (part 2)

Above: The rear (west side) of the Niagara Falls Fallsview Hotel (Ontario, Canada) with its surface parking lot in the foreground; view is looking south-east from Stanley Ave, Apr.9, 2008.
*Photo series by R. Bobak (click on photos to enlarge!)
above: same view, Aug.26, 2008; as an underground parking structure is being built.
above: same view on Oct.20, 2008: the parking structure has reached back up to ground level.
*
below: Fallsview Hotel parking lot as seen Apr.9, 2008. View is looking south; Stanley Ave. is along the right side of photo; the fencing at the far end of the paved lot faces Dixon St. The city sidewalk and one lane of road along Stanley Ave., which can be seen at the right, were fenced off during the excavation. The excavation went right up past the grass strip to the lamp posts on the curb, yet the curb and the lamp posts remained at the edge of the steep slope untouched for the duration of the excavation, as seen in the following photos.
above: same view; the excavation is underway, as seen May 13, 2008.
above: May 26, 2008; the tiered-excavation deepens; forms have been placed along the Stanley Ave. side for concrete walls.
above: Jun.6, 2008. Concrete walls already poured along Stanley Ave., more forms are in place along the north side of the excavation. Note lamp posts remaining at edge of slope.
above: July 29, 08, the outside trench is slowly back filled. Inner tier of structure under way.
above: Aug18, 08
above: Aug.25, 08
above: Sept.2, 08
above: Sept.4, 08
above: Sept.11, 2008
above: Sept.30, 08
above: Oct.9, 08
above: Oct.17, 08
above: Nov.18, 2008, the trench has been backfilled, and construction vehicles can now drive from the road right onto the new deck.