Keith will be hosting a forum tonight on the care of our Canadian Forces Members and Veterans. Special guest Dr. Atholl Malcolm will be speaking on the effects of PTSD.
Keith would also like to hear your thoughts on:
- our Public Service Pension System
- helping those who support our CF members
- the issues you feel Parliament should address when it returns on March 3.
We look forward to seeing you there. Please bring a friend!
7:00 – 8:30pm
Archie Browning Sport Centre
Crowsnest Room
1151 Esquimalt Road
VICTORIA – Dr. Keith Martin, MP for Esquimalt – Juan de Fuca commented today on the announcement of a new national park reserve on the East Coast. The governments of Canada and Newfoundland and Labrador have announced the establishment of a new National Park Reserve. The new reserve will protect more than 10,000 square kilometres in Labrador.
“If Newfoundland and Labrador can get this done, then certainly the Province of British Columbia should also be able to protect our west coast,” said Dr. Keith Martin. “Time is of the essence. If we are going to protect these lands we must act now before they are sold to the highest bidder.” Read the rest of this entry »
G8 Summit Needs International Action Plan To Reduce Childhood, Maternal Mortality
In a National Post opinion piece, Canadian Member of Parliament Keith Martin, “who chaired the drafting committee at the 2009 G8 International Parliamentarians’ Conference in Rome, which put together a plan of action to reduce maternal and infant mortality,” welcomes the recent announcement by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper that maternal and child mortality will be a focus of the G8 summit this summer. Martin asserts that “the summit cannot be just another milquetoast, feel-good document. The leaders must announce a comprehensive International Action Plan to reduce childhood and maternal mortality.”
Martin outlines the plan to reduce maternal mortality that he and other parliamentarians crafted last summer, that included, as he writes, calls “for strategic investments in access to primary care: basic surgical facilities, medications, a full array of family planning options, diagnostics, adequate nutrition, clean water, power, and most importantly, trained health-care workers.” Martin suggests, G8 leaders “can use this as a template to mobilize the world’s most powerful nations when they meet in Ontario this summer to end this global tragedy” (2/4).
Every minute of every day, a woman dies giving birth. The toll is staggering: 530,000 pregnant women a year perish, 95% of them in developing countries. Remarkably, 80% of these maternal deaths are from five entirely preventable or treatable causes: sepsis, hemorrhage, eclampsia, obstructed labour, or as a consequence of a septic abortion.
For every death, dozens of women sustain life-altering and irreversible injuries. Many develop obstetric fistulae that leave them incontinent of urine and feces, and pariahs within their own developing-world communities. Read the rest of this entry »
The world needs a central command-and-control centre to respond to disasters quickly and orderly.
Five days after the massive earthquake hit Haiti, little aid was reaching the beleaguered people on the ground. Access to crucial medical care, food, and water was scant. Extractive efforts beyond what the people were doing with shovels and their bare hands were largely non-existent. Haitians, starving, dangerously dehydrated, and exposed to a withering sun, were dying by the thousands. This, despite the fact that large quantities of donated emergency supplies were sitting on the tarmac of the country’s main airport in Port-au-Prince.
PM shutting down Parliament is a symptom of a much larger problem
By Dr. Keith Martin, MP
On December 30th, Prime Minister Harper prorogued Parliament without reason for the second time in just over a year. This is an affront to our democratic principles, a gross misuse of the power of his office, wastes the efforts of public servants, MPs and Senators, and is an enormous waste of the taxpayers’ money as all government legislation automatically goes into the garbage can. The total cost to the taxpayer is over $130 million. This act also neutralizes the voices of our citizens…
NOTE: Keith will be speaking at a rally on Saturday against this abuse of our democracy.
Saturday, January 23, 2010 – 1:00pm
Centennial Square, Downtown Victoria
Yeah, the perils of being an opposition leader. Rex, most underrated [politician this year]?
…
REX MURPHY (REPORTER):
Peter Stoffer and Keith Martin. There are certain backbenchers who, by virtue of their personality, their tone, they’re civilized people that do a lot to ransom all the other activities on Parliament Hill. Those backbenchers, like the one that Allan mentioned, they do a lot to keep the system in motion. And these two, in my mind, Martin and Stoffer, are fairly equivalent.
Government is refusing to look at the facts and the science
By Dr. Keith Martin, MP
The rush to choose a sewage treatment site for Victoria before all the facts are available belies a much larger problem. This initiative to spend $1.2 billion to build one or more sewage treatment plants in Victoria is based on myths, fear, perception, and an appalling lack of due diligence on the part of both the federal and provincial governments. It entails the deliberate refusal to listen to the science. Indeed, the facts are being ignored…
G8 Summit Needs International Action Plan To Reduce Childhood, Maternal Mortality 
