A false economy  Both the Liberals and the Progressive
Conservatives are promising to reduce the administration for
hospital services, each with a mainly similar plan to amalgamate
them into two or three centralized administrations. I feel this
is a backward way to improve health care. I’d like to provide
the following example to show my point.  In 1996, the cities of
Halifax and Dartmouth joined with Bedford (and much of Halifax
County) to form Halifax Regional Municipality. This was done to
reduce staff and costs associated with them. I don’t remember
the exact figures but many firefighters were laid off, as well
as more than 200 police officers. Our city politicians claimed
it was due to boundary overlap. I found this reasoning to be
lame and even ridiculous.  Whether the boundaries overlapped or
moved, the geography and population remained the same, and thus
both the hard working members of the police force and the fire
department had to do more with less. Since then, we’ve had to
bring back some of those