PUBLIC REVIEW OF NO-FAULT INSURANCE IN SASKATCHEWAN page 2
	(Hearing reconvened at 1:40 p.m.)
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, we are right on schedule, and that is because of the phenomenal cooperation we've got from everybody here. Before we go to Gordon Adair, we're going to make sure that this afternoon has some time for people to ask questions, to speak, so those mikes are live on each side, and at this time if anybody's got any questions of Dr. Gale, you're welcome to come up to the mike and ask the questions.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Take me home with you.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	I do want to remind you that those people who do want to speak, get in charge of Patty. She's on the mike right now. Patricia, I'm sorry. She's the executive manager director in charge of audience communication. Give her your name. She'll check what party you're with, and then she'll let you speak. Are there any further questions of Dr. Gale?
THERESA CHARPENTIER:	Yes, I would like to ask one.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Sure.
THERESA CHARPENTIER:	Hi, Dr. Gale. I'm Theresa. I'm the one that's referring people to see you here.
DR. GALE:	Hi.
THERESA CHARPENTIER:	I just wanted to find out from you once we get a report back and you've found the problems with pain -- and I'm having in particular one problem with one gentleman where the medical consultants are saying that the process that you have recommended is too severe for the treatment, the denaturation is too severe and that their medical consultants have consulted with other doctors in here doing pain management and they totally disagree with the procedures.
	Now, how do we -- how do I appeal that further and how do I help the person bring credibility? Like I need to bring credibility to this whole process, and because it's so new in our province and not many of the physicians have heard about it is they tend to believe the Quebec Task Force. They tend to believe that there's nothing more that can be done for these people and they are pain focused, so maybe you can address that for me.
DR. GALE:	I think the problem -- the problem is how do you educate doctors. I think one method of education is to download the website of Harold Merskey and give publicity to his publications because for at least 10 years he has written very good publications that have educated me a great deal, but, you know, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, and I don't really have a total answer for your question.
	I think there are a lot of vested interests which don't want to change the system, and even in Ontario we live with this kind of problem. For example, in Ontario you can get diagnostic facet blocks positive on a patient, and then we can have trouble finding a surgeon to do the facet intervention surgery. Of course, if you've got $10,000 U.S. you don't need, you can always go and see my colleague in Minneapolis, but not everybody can do that.
	I saw a patient just this week, and he said, Oh, that's no problem, I'll -- I'll go down immediately if you'll refer him, so I referred him to Kurt Schellhas and he'll be going to Minneapolis probably within a few weeks, so I think it comes down to money, and money is one of the resistances in the system, but the lack of education of some of the doctors is another problem in the system, and I'm afraid that's going to be with us a long time.
	I don't know how much that answers your question, but I don't really have all the answers to the political system.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Any further questions?
PATRICIA SCHRYVER:	Yes, I have one.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Oh. Your name, please?
PATRICIA SCHRYVER:	Patricia Schryver. When you have a whiplash injury can that cause stroke-like symptoms?
DR. GALE:	Yes. There's -- there's a condition called hemiplegic migraine. I don't know if you've heard of it. If you read the literature on pain in the arms and legs published before 1914, there were a number of papers that attributed limb pain to migraine, and the condition called hemiplegic migraine is -- is a condition with arm and leg pain which is said to be due to a form of migraine, so I -- I think with any head injury it's possible that you can get a post-traumatic migraine from it, and the way I come across this is that I find a patient who's been whiplashed who has a headache, and then I try some of the triptan medications such as Sumatriptan or Rizatriptan or Imitrex and I find that part -- the headache is partially relieved by these drugs so that I think that a head injury can lower the threshold for migraine and bring these conditions on.
	It's not very common, but I -- I saw a patient recently who developed numbness in the right face, the shoulder and the right arm two weeks after a whiplash and the numbness only partially waned off. The patient was left with permanent numbness in the right cheek and the right upper arm, and I think that this was a post-traumatic migraine which came on two weeks after the whiplash so that I think it's possible to get limb symptoms from a whiplash but it's unusual, and I think the patient needs to be very carefully evaluated neurologically before one makes that diagnosis.
PATRICIA SCHRYVER:	Would that occur months after? Would that occur months after the fact, like after the accident?
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	The question was would -- would that occur months after the accident?
DR. GALE:	It's hard to give a blanket answer to that. I think one would have to review the overall situation and see what else is going on. I think a lot of neurologists would probably deny the connection, but as I say, I had a patient who developed the numbness in the right cheek two weeks after the accident, and I think it was due to a focal cerebral ischemia due to a migraine-like condition which was brought on by the whiplash, but these are fairly unusual things, and unless there's a clear temporal relationship between the whiplash and the onset of the hemiplegic symptomatology, then I think most neurologists would deny the connection.
	If you understand the connection between the causality or the connection between the injury and the symptomatology, I usually feel there needs to be a temporal connection; that is, the symptoms follow shortly on the injury because if they don't, I don't know how else you can establish the connection.
MARILYN FABISH:	Hi, my name is Marilyn, and I was wondering can whiplash cause a person to have really high blood pressure or very low blood pressure?
DR. GALE:	It's not very usual I would say. I think if there's focal damage in the brain stem, then you might get alterations of blood pressure so that if there's damage to the vasomotor centre in the medulla, then you might get fluctuations of blood pressure, but I think in the majority of cases blood pressure is not affected by whiplash. I'm not saying it's impossible.
MARILYN FABISH:	Would it be then more a cause from pain for your blood pressure to go either higher or lower?
DR. GALE:	Yes. Severe chronic pain will cause fluctuation of blood pressure, and also severe pain may cause alterations in regional blood flow, which is part of the aetiology of RSD, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, or complex regional pain syndrome type 1, so there are vascular changes secondary to neurological changes because the control of vasomotor tone is neurological. The chronic pain, there's an increase in the excitability of the nervous system.
MARILYN FABISH:	Thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	It's the subsequent dealing with SGI that causes the blood pressure problems.
MARILYN FABISH:	Very much so.
YVONNE DAGENAIS:	I have RSD. Would it cause my blood pressure to remain low?
DR. GALE:	I find it difficult to answer that question. I'd have to look at the overall picture, and, you see, there's two ways to make a diagnosis. You can look for positive signs of a condition and say, well, we've got the positive signs so this is probably it or you can look for the absence of negative signs so that I'd need to know more information. I think in the majority of cases of RSD, the blood pressure isn't seriously affected, but if it became severe and widespread, there's a probability it would go up.
CAROL:	Hi, my name is Carol. With RSD, if it has already gone into all four limbs, in your opinion is there any preventable treatment from it going internally and taking your life?
DR. GALE:	I didn't quite hear all your question, but I think --
CAROL:	Okay. If you have RSD and it has spread already to your four limbs, is there any treatment available to prevent it from spreading to the internal organs, which in turn can take your life?
DR. GALE:	I think there is a good deal of treatment for RSD, but even with the best treatment in the world, the condition may still deteriorate, but I think until someone's tried the most effective modern treatments, you don't know that it won't work so that someone with RSD should try regional nerve blocks, try cyclic antidepressants, Neurontin, and then regional intravenous bretylium blocks, which have a way of vasodilating the affected limb which has a prolonged effect, reversing the condition. Then should that fail, calcitonin injections, one every day for 20 days, in studies in France has produced very good results, and I've had encouraging results with that in some of my patients. The calcitonin treatment is somewhat unusual, but the -- the work done on it in France was quite encouraging.
CAROL:	Thank you.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Any further questions? Please.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	I have a good question. Can a person walk away from a major car accident and not get TMJ?
DR. GALE:	And not get what?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	TMJ.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	TMJ pain.
DR. GALE:	Yes.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	They can?
DR. GALE:	The mechanics of the accident will account for what particular injuries occur, and the mechanics may be many and varied so that my earlier comments about post-traumatic syndrome and TMJ problems were regarding what often happens, but there's no guarantee that a TMJ problem will occur in every whiplash, and, in fact, it probably doesn't, but, you know, it just depends what happens.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Okay. Thanks.
DR. GALE:	I might also add my -- my nephew is an oral surgeon, and he says that TMJ is a can of worms. By that he means it's very difficult to treat when you get a TMJ problem, and the more operations you have, it does not necessarily mean the better you get so that oral surgeons have become particularly conservative with regard to the treatment of TMJ.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Okay, but I've always -- I've also had -- I also had a herniated disc between 4 and 5.
DR. GALE:	Well, there's no law that says you can't have both.
DR. DARYN MINTZLER:	Dr. Gale, I just think that some of these folks here have been through Fit and all this prescribed rehab. You alluded to it in your talk, but you didn't go into the Quebec -- the Quebec Task Force recommendations on rehab and how shaky of ground those really are on. I think people here would really like to know what all that is based on so at least when they're talking to an adjuster they can say but it's just consensus and it's really not been tested on anyone. We're the guinea pigs.
DR. GALE:	Thank you for that question. I've got Nikolai Bogduk's paper here in front of me entitled Who Let The Cat Out Of The Bag, which is Bogduk's comments on the Quebec Task Force, and with regard to the routine treatment of whiplash injuries, Bogduk's comment is nothing works. The regular treatment of whiplash that's usually prescribed, the -- all the treatments that have been used don't work. The fact remains that 80% of cases are going to get better with no treatment so that the advice that the patient is given just to go on and live with it will work for 80% of patients. Without rehabilitation, without exercise, 80% of them are going to get better whatever you do, and there's no evidence in the literature that physiotherapy and the other rehabilitation activities are going to make much difference to whiplash.
	The -- the problem remains, however, in the 10% or so of cases that don't recover spontaneously in the first year, and at the time of publishing the Quebec Task Force, there was no good evidence in the literature that any rehabilitation that was then available made much difference.
	However, in the last five years there's been some success with precise diagnosis of spinal pain, and also our studies with palliative nerve blocks have had some significant benefit in the palliation of severe chronic pain so that there's no cure for the 10 percent of people who are still in pain after a year, but the present rehabilitation that's prescribed in the first year is probably not making a significant difference to the outcome, and indeed in many individual cases, when the money's cut off and the rehabilitation exercise stops, the patients often feel better because the continual reinjury with the exercises ceases.
MARILYN FABISH:	It's Marilyn again. I was wondering if it was a good idea that -- like SGI sent me to a rehab. They knew that I had fibromyalgia. They put me in a gym five days a week eight hours a day doing weights and everything. Is that a smart idea to do?
DR. GALE:	My comment is this: Diagnosis comes before treatment. If you fail to make the right diagnosis, the probability is you will prescribe the wrong treatment so that in your case, you probably had an exercise program, but since Bogduk has stated that nothing works in regard to exercise programs, then you were set up to fail. You were set up with an inappropriate treatment, and it was inevitable that this would not cure yourcondition and might even make it worse so that the doctors often conclude that since you didn't respond to the treatment, the problem was psychological.
MARILYN FABISH:	Yeah.
DR. GALE:	So my comment is if you prescribe the wrong treatment and the patient fails to respond to it, you're drawing the wrong conclusions if you conclude that it's a psychological problem and it's conversionary disorder, and then the question of malingering is often raised but usually dismissed because you can't prove it, so -- so I think this is just a way of ascribing the blame for your problem to you and cutting off your money.
BILL:	My name is Bill. I got a question for you, Dr. Gale. Doing nerve blocks for C2 or facets or anything, how reliable is it from one physician to the other? Who can reliably do this? I've heard recently there is a rheumatologist in Saskatoon -- am I speaking too close?
PATRICIA SHRYVER:	No.
BILL:	There is a rheumatologist who's presumably doing this in Saskatoon, and I don't know whether to refer there. I mean I've only dealt with one patient so far, and that was this man back here sent to you, and I'm wondering what is the inter -- examiner reliability on such diagnosis?
DR. GALE:	The false negative rate is 23% if you just do the diagnostic block once --
BILL:	That's high, isn't it?
DR. GALE:	-- facets -- actually in legal terms it's not. Probability at law is 51% so that if I sent a patient to a doctor who does diagnostic blocks and he says it's a positive after only doing the injection once, there's a 77% chance that he's right. In law that's a very good probability, and, in fact, most of the diagnostic blocks we done -- do are only done once because you have to look at cost/benefit ratio.
	In Australia it's worth doing the diagnostic blocks with two different kinds of anaesthetics. That's Marcaine and Lidocaine, and when you do these differential blocks, the Marcaine should last -- give longer relief than the Lidocaine. This is considered the best confirmation that you've got objective evidence.
	However, you've still got a 77% chance of being right if you just use Marcaine and only do it once, and in view of the benign nature of the facet intervention surgery, generally speaking in the United States that's considered acceptable, and some of the operators are even doing the facet intervention and not bothering to do the diagnostic nerve blocks because the procedure is so benign and the results are so good.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Thank you very much. We're going to have -- we know we're going to have some time for further questions later on, and because we are running on schedule and slightly likely ahead, the executive manager director in charge of communications has just informed me that Joanne Pearsons -- Pearsons? Have I got --
JOANNE PERSON:	Good afternoon. It's Person with no "S". I'm relatively new to the pain and suffering that SGI is causing a lot of people. However, my dander is up.
	I was in a single-vehicle rollover February 4th. I rolled 3 1/2 times. I knew I had tipped. I didn't know I had rolled. The seat broke loose, but the seat belt held me in. My passenger that was to be with me was not and probably would not be here today, so I'm thankful for that.
	I'm going to touch on just a few really -- because there's so much to this story and I only have five minutes before I get the sword. My adjuster came out to see me the week after the accident and told me, I am your best friend, you can trust me. Can I say his name?
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	No.
JOANNE PERSON:	Okay. Anyway apparently he's the same guy that followed the people to get doughnuts this morning. At that point it was more than a month before I could wipe my own rear end. I forced myself to get dressed every day thinking that I'm a very positive person and I just -- I'm not going to roll over.
	I was given home care for 20 hours for a period of two weeks, at which time an occupational therapist from the EHS clinic, who I understand is also SGI-funded, came out, and I was so happy to report that God, I got my socks on today and it only took me 10 minutes and I was only sweating a little bit, and my home care was pulled back down to two hours a week, at which time I had a little temper tantrum in my doctor's office and he reinstated it.
	When I was tested -- when I was sent for the two-day assessment in Saskatoon, at that point I had maybe an arm motion like this if I could scratch my eye, was still rolling a towel and pushing it into my stomach to have a bowel movement, not walking well. I sat in a chair for two days, a chair incidentally which is really built to hurt the lumbar. I'm sure they do that on purpose. I got back to my hotel room the first night and took a herd of painkillers and cried myself to sleep, went the next day, and do you know that then you meet with the team and how positive, gee, you're such a fighter because I have questions. I'm an educator myself and I need to know everything.
	My goal at that time was to travel out to Salmon Arm mid-June for my brother's fiftieth birthday. What a great goal. Good for you. We're going to help you all you can -- all we can. I was sent to the EHS clinic where I was placed on a table laying flat, which was excruciating, with my head in a little hole that didn't fit my rather round face and which the therapist would push on the C4, 5 and 6 in my neck to the point of making me nauseous. I had several bouts -- just the sound of my neck, I would be walking through my kitchen and I would just throw up. She told me to breathe and relax. I said, I cannot lay on this table.They put me in a chair, which if any of you have have ever been in the massage chair, you're kind of like a monkey wrapped around a football, not really good on your back, which she continued to manipulate my neck -- no -- no movement in my lumbar yet -- to the point where I was getting migraine headaches and losing vision.
	I still have problems. People think I'm drunk I'm sure because I do this little vaudeville step to the right or the left or I'm constantly scraping myself down walls or banging into stuff or tripping over my shadow. Of course it has been stated that, you know, my attitude is bad in Fit because I have too many questions and I don't agree with some of the things that I've gone through, and therefore I am my own block to my own healing. I will let you know I teach drama and movement, so I am very aware of what my body can do and that I can stand on one toe if I want. I need all 10 of them spread out at this point.
	I will share with you also that I went to SGI yesterday because my doctor prescribed massage be reinstated. The only therapy I've had to date since they pulled me out of EHS for manipulation on the neck -- which incidentally was against the neurologist's report which stated absolutely no treatment or manipulation to the cervical spine because I have also been diagnosed with a narrowing of the spinal column, which I can never receive treatment on my neck.
	In going to SGI yesterday, I once again begged for massage to be reinstated because the therapy I've given myself has been in water. It's low impact. For those of you who are really suffering, even if you just get in water and take the weight off, get yourself some flugels and float there and see what you can do. It really feels really good. That has been my therapy treatment, and when -- being the determined person I am, I worked myself really hard, and I was going for massage to take the strain out that I was putting in getting my muscles back. That -- I've been begging now for two months to get something back. SGI has said that Fit is in charge of recommending my massage treatments.
	I found out yesterday on tape by the way -- my tape recorder goes everywhere with me -- that it is indeed SGI who can reinstate the massage therapy.
	We are now leaving Monday for Salmon Arm, B.C. I still have a tolerance of about an hour and a half in a vehicle. I requested a letter stating that if I have to stop somewhere and have somebody treat me that I can have that. They have granted me five.
	The one last thing I would like to share is while at SGI yesterday, I did have my tape recorder along. I didn't pull it out of my purse and nor did I turn it on, but I had my daughter with me also and I sat in my adjuster's little room, and he had granted me five massage treatments over the period of two weeks if I need them but I'm not to be abusive with them, and then he said -- I had asked for a cab whatever you call it so that I can just take a cab when I have to go somewhere rather than walk out by myself at night into a dark parking lot. I'm just really a little leery about that, so he stated to me yesterday, Yes, of course, the -- we would be happy to give you a cab chit; however, the cab company will require a list of all addresses you plan on visiting, and I said, Just a minute, just a minute, and I dug in my purse and I got out my tape recorder and I turned it on, and I was just shaking, and I said, Now say that again, and he said, I'm not talking, I'm not saying anything on tape, turn that tape recorder off, and I said, Did you or did you not just state that the cab company will require a list of all addresses I may be attending while I'm in the city? I'm not answering. So I turned to my daughter and I said, My daughter is sitting here with me, Suzanne Person, did he -- and I repeated it, and she said, Yes, he did.
	Well, he was red in the face. He stormed out of the office. I am now a real thorn in their craw, and I have volunteered -- and I just see him reaching for that. I have volunteered to be a part of the Coalition and help people that live to the east of where I live, the Humboldt area and east, so you have my total permission to give my name and number out, and good luck to all of us.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Hear, hear, Joanne. Our next -- now, our next speaker needs the mike a little higher. It is with great pleasure that I take this opportunity to introduce to you a Saskatchewantonian. His name is Gordon Adair. Gordon is a chartered accountant from British Columbia and who is an expert on no-fault insurance, and when you hear him talk, you're going to know the definition of expert.
	He was born in Swift Current. He's lived throughout the province for about 15 years including Prince Albert. Mr. Adair's an executive director of finance for the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia. Was, I'm sorry, from 1974 to 1979. He left ICBC to become a partner in a chartered accounting firm and now owns his own consulting practice. Mr. Adair was the coordinator of the successful anti-no-fault insurance coalition in B.C. His address today is entitled No-Fault, An Insurance Company's Dream, A Victim's Nightmare.
GORDON ADAIR:	Thank you very much. It appears that when you have whiplash and no-fault insurance that you get a pain in the head, a pain in the neck, you get a pain in the back, and dealing with SGI, I would think the proctologists are really getting rich.
	I want to thank you very much for laying on the rain to make me feel at home because it is -- I really hate to admit this -- 50 years since I've lived in Prince Albert, and I have spent many of them in Vancouver and I get lots of rain. In addition to that, we used to get a lot of fog when the pea-soup fog used to roll in, but we sort of cleaned up the air a bit, but now I've found that we've exported it out here, just changed the name a little bit. It's now the Larry Fogg.
	Anyway, the citizens of British Columbia would like to thank Saskatchewan for going ahead and getting no-fault because a couple years after it happened here, they tried to introduce it in British Columbia. We saw the kind of sneaky way that it was snuck in here, and the Coalition Against No-Fault, which was made up of over 200 organizations, got together and the trial lawyers who were part of that, and we had a long drawn-out nearly two-year fight, and luckily we beat it back and the government decided in their wisdom that they didn't want to continue the fight forever 'cause we said it would go on forever if they -- and make sure that they didn't get elected. Well, it doesn't look like they're going to get re-elected anyway, so it was a -- as I say, seeing what happened in Manitoba and Saskatchewan was very valuable to us.
	In British Columbia weformed a coalition that had over 200 groups including Mothers Against Drinking Drivers, B.C. Coalition of People With Disabilities, B.C. Brain Injury, Surrey Crime, chambers of commerce and -- and the trial lawyers, and the -- one of the -- the Mothers Against Drinking Drivers put out this newspaper, which I brought a few wit me, at the time about MADD against no-fault, and it was a very effective document at the time. I should -- I'm not sure I should share this. No, I won't. I would hate some of the strategies that we used against poor old ICBC to get -- get into type here, so I'll ignore what I did with some of the stuff.
	So what is a no-fault system? Well, basically a no-fault system is one that treats cars better than it treats people. It encourages bad driving. They'd like to use all different names other than no-fault, the Personal Injury Protection Program, because we found in British Columbia that generally people just don't like the name no-fault no matter what, so we made sure we've made that label stick, and when you refer to dealing with SGI and the Personal Injury Protection Program, you should make sure you label it no-fault.
	It's also a system where the good drivers are paying for the bad. Basically the bad drivers get everything looked after and the good drivers pay for that as part of the process. You wind up on the -- what we refer to a lot as the meat chart system, which basically they say you have injury X, there you are on the meat chart, this is what you get, and if you don't fit very well on the meat chart then go away.
	It puts the insurance corporation in charge of your life. Most of you people know that better than me, and why is it that -- that people want no-fault? Well, basically it's driven I think by some ideology and also the insurance corporation, and it's not only government insurance, but no-fault has been pushed by private insurers in Ontario and in other places in the United States, and it's really about power of the insurance company not wanting to have people tell them where they're going wrong, not wanting to give you an avenue for independent legal advice and independent power with the courts if you need it, so they don't like to be -- they don't like to be shown they're wrong. I don't think they mind being wrong. I think they just don't like to -- anybody to take them on about it.
	The -- basically the situation is that some people will take advantage of any system, whether it's a no-fault workers'-compensation-like approach to insurance or whether it's the tort system, and so it's -- the issue that they think -- when I was on the inside at ICBC -- and we used to talk about it, and you get this kind of policeman feeling, which is some people are trying to rip us off. Therefore if you only gave us -- there's say a few percentage, five percent, two percent, but if you only gave us power, total power, dictatorial power over the other 95 percent so then we could get rid of these people who may be taking advantage of us, so it's -- but this flies in the face of democracy to me, and I don't see how a -- I mean a -- how in Canada we can allow the rights of individuals to be taken away.
	I mean if we -- if they treated our automobiles as bad as they treat our bodies under no-fault, we'd be up in arms, and Ithink the case that I saw in the newspaper here -- this is this morning's newspaper. I always like to clip out things, and this is about the potholes. You know, I think that the circumstances here are that, you know, they were thinking about the road problem here in advance, so they felt that what they needed to do was get no-fault insurance ahead of time so they let the roads go to hell so that nobody could sue the municipalities, which I guess they've disagreed to, and is that going too far for the government and SGI to think that that's the case? I guess it is.
	But one thing I notice here, I used to live in Eyebrow, Saskatchewan, and they're talking here about the road between Brownlee and Eyebrow and that the local administrator suggesting that they let the road go back to gravel, which is great for me because actually when I lived there 40 years ago or whatever it is, it was gravel, so I guess it's -- they laid this on especially for me coming to town.
	The -- basically the SGI, and during this process how do they go about getting anything? Well, to start off with, they can outspend you a lot with your own money, so they can wind up spending thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to convince you that what they're doing is right, and they co-opt the MLAs into this process.
	I think the socialistic governments tend to be predisposed a little bit to circumstances around no-fault, but certainly it's the power position of -- power-wanting position of the insurance corporation that drives it, and I think that's proven in other states in the United States where the private insurance companies have also driven the no-fault referendums.
	So how do they go about the process? One, they start talking about the sky is falling routine. If you don't have no-fault, your rates are going to go through the roof. We can't sustain the current inflation in costs. They usually bring in a big accounting firm who will study it with them, and they did this in British Columbia. They had -- KPMG was in. They did a report at the cost of 1 1/2 million dollars that projected the current -- they called it the status quo position, and them along with our independent commission, the Allen Commission Report, which I have here, predicted that over the next years -- now I'm leading through the years '96 through the year 2000 in British Columbia if we didn't get no-fault that we would sustain losses in the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia of 2.3 billion dollars. That was their projections up to the end of the year 2000.
	Well, we didn't get no-fault. No-fault disappeared. They said we didn't need it after the big discussion, and over that intervening period rates have not gone up. Rates have gone down, and low and behold, we actually had accumulated profits of 181 million dollars during this period of time, so if you take those two together, that adds up to 2.5 billion dollars, a slight discrepancy in their projections.
	So the whole arrangement of talking about if you don't have no-fault was proven wrong in British Columbia. It's been proven wrong throughout the United States where the no-fault states have a -- generally have higher premium rates and have larger increases in rates in the United States than the tort states, so the premise under which you got no-fault was most likely -- well, I would say forget the most likely. It was false here also.
	They run a lot of ads, newspaper ads. Are they giving you any full-page ads to help you make up your mind? A lot of bashing lawyers. It was interesting in the discussions in British Columbia. Because we had such a large coalition and the lawyers were a part of it and the lawyers didn't want to necessarily be up-front in it, but how often the people that were involved, the coalition people, disabilities and brain injury groups to say that the lawyers had nothing to be ashamed of in this process, and, you know, it's okay for them to say that they help people in this process, but it -- but it's a very easy group to pick on it seems, the lawyers, and they certainly appear to use it here, and also the government and insurance corporation tried to put a lot of pressure on groups that they dealt with to not join up with our coalition. They did it -- I'll call it ineptness -- so poorly, I used to joke all the time that if we had trouble with a particular coalition member who was having trouble staying in the group, what we'd do is we'd get the insurance corporation and the government to go and talk to them because as soon as they did that, then they'd be back in the group really solid.
	In -- so what are the facts leading in British Columbia? Well, basically in B.C. we didn't get no-fault. Our rates, as I mentioned, didn't go up. They went down. We avoided the 2.3-billion-dollar loss, and rates have actually went down in one year so far, and the year 2000 the rate -- they've just announced the rates are steady for the year 2000, not going up again, and, of course, we get a lot better benefits in British Columbia than you have here.
	In Saskatchewan, of course, the rates went up in '97 13%, in '98 12 percent, so they've gone up at least 25% since the year of '95, so -- pardon?
DAN SHAPIRO:	35%.
GORDON ADAIR:	35%. Again, it's sort of like they try to blame -- they're trying to blame it back on the years prior to no-fault, but you can only keep that up for so long, and I don't believe it anyway.
	Also, I notice that there was another little newspaper article about how rates were going to go up this year. This was in January I saw it that there'll be a rate increase because they're now charging PST on repair, on labour repairs. Well, in British Columbia we charge seven percent on our labour repairs and we've been doing that for some time, so it hasn't impacted our rates so I think that again where they come up with all these numbers is an interesting problem.
	The -- another thing is the tendency of no-fault to support bad driving, and one of the direct evidence pieces of that is death rates, and in British Columbia since 1995 our fatality rates have gone down since 1995 to date. In Saskatchewan where you've got no-fault since '95, your fatality rates have gone up. At the same time your population has stayed the same. Our population has gone up in British Columbia, so even taking that into consideration, it makes more of a difference from the point of view that we have more people but our rates have gone down, how many fatalities we've had, so I wonder -- you know, you think about that, how many deaths has no-fault contributed to in the last five years in this province.
	The other thing that no-fault does is creates kind of a two-tiered health-care system. Basically those people who have the money can afford to get other insurance, can afford to carry themselves, go to the United States, get treatment if that's what they want, and they're -- the impact on them, they have ways of dealing with it so -- but those that can't afford it wind up under the thumb of SGI, and so you wind up with supporting through no-fault a two-tiered system.
	Also, you know, it leaves the -- the injured innocent victim to the whims of SGI in that basically most of the no-fault benefits are set up in a way that leaves it kind of arbitrary. They just tried to change our no-fault benefits recently in British Columbia. They're trying to change the wordings from what's -- that you get treatment what's fair and reasonable or what is likely to promote, and they were trying to get those changed to in the sole discretion of the insurance company they could decide it, and I was thinking to myself, God, this seems familiar to me somewhere because I was out in Regina just recently, and so, you know, you can see the same issue happening in ICBC with regard to the no-fault part of our benefits. We have actually quite liberal no-fault benefits within the tort state, tort position in British Columbia.
	Another thing that struck me as part of this process was that -- that probably there should be signs at the border of Saskatchewan saying driving on these roads -- and now you have a pothole issue too -- driving on these roads is likely to be hazard to your -- a hazard to your -- hazardous to your health, hazardous to your financial position and perhaps you should -- if you're coming from Alberta and want to go east, you should drive through Montana. I think that people from the United States should know that, and I would highly encourage you to put signs up at the border.
	SGI has -- another thing they've done, which is kind of sneaky, is they've created two insurance companies. They have one that does the optional insurance, at which they manage to make money and pay dividends to the Province, and another which is the auto fund, which has lost money and still is in a deficit position, but the money that they've managed to pay in dividends out of SGI Canada, which is the optional coverage, the amount that relates to the auto cover I think would more than make up for the deficit. In fact, they've paid something like 27 million dollars in dividends to the government over the last few years.
	What to do about the no-fault position here. Well, all the arguing in the world with SGI is not going to change this. They've made up their mind. They like it the way it is, and you really have to understand that this is a political issue, that you have to go after the MLAs. The independent commission review that's coming up, I think you could assume that the report's probably already written, that you're not going to get much of an answer through that approach, and I think everybody should identify the MLA closest to you and should be in their office every second day and hammer on their president of the constituency association and make sure they know you're not going to go away until they deal with this because that's the way you're going to get some answers as part of this process.
	You can fax them, write them letters, make it a high priority and make sure they're thinking of this every day. If you're not in their face every day, they're going to forget about it because they're stuck down there in Regina and they're not really too worried about it.
	We did a lot of polling in British Columbia as part of the fight there, and we found that generally something like 95 percent of the people didn't like no-fault, and we actually filed those reports with the MLAs as part of our process, and I think that went a long ways to helping them decide that it wasn't a good thing for us.
	So I can only say that one thing you need to remember is that most -- a lot of people here have been directly impacted by no-fault because they've been injured as part of -- during this process, but over time there'll build up to be more and more, but it's a shame to have to wait. Maybe in five years --one percent of the population each year is impacted, so now you're up to five percent. Another five years, you'd be up to 10 percent, but it seems to wait while more and more people get injured and get hard done by as part of the process, it's a shame to see that happening, and so it's up to the small minority of people that have already been impacted to try to protect the others who haven't had an accident, and when I came out here on this trip, I actually bought extra insurance to travel in this province, and so it's up to you to make sure that you try to protect those people who haven't been injured yet, and as I said one time before, those people that haven't had it yet, to hear those familiarwords, hi, I'm from SGI and I'm just here to help you, and I think that there's a real issue around getting out in the face of -- I know it's always hard to deal with politicians and everybody doesn't like them, but now is a chance to take on your favourite politician and make sure he sees you every day, hears from you, fax -- we jammed up the faxes in British Columbia sometimes. We used to get the private fax numbers of the Premier's office, and we'd send them a fax for two or three days. We had continual people sending faxes.
	We -- trying to think of one other -- one other thing. Well, I should tell you. I will share this little bit about the MADD magazine that we did. Basically we produced -- produced a lot of these, the MADD people did on their own, and then we produced some more and I made sure that I distributed within a 10-block office of the Premier's house and within a 10-block radius of the Minister's house and a 10-block radius of a whole bunch of other people plus in every office in the legislature during a period of time, so it's -- it's getting this to be the number 1 thing they think about when they wake up in the morning, when they're having lunch and when they're going to bed at night that this will get changed. If you don't do that, I think you're stuck with this until you've got probably another 15 years -- let's say you wait until 20% of the population, so that's another 15 years, and then maybe you'll have a chance to get rid of it because it'll be a much larger group of people who are kind of cheesed off with the whole process, so that's all I had to say, and I'm willing to take questions if anybody has any questions.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	What's the premium difference between B.C. and Saskatchewan?
GORDON ADAIR:	Right now -- and you have to -- I took the total premium, and you divide it by the population is probably a safer way to do it because there's a different mix of commercial and how much private insurance there is and -- but if you do that, it works out to about $100 difference per year. It's about -- on that average, it's about $450 a year per person in the province, and in British Columbia it's about 550, but our coverages are probably 10 times as good. You know, it's hard to say exactly what it is, but it's a much -- it's a very large difference.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	(INAUDIBLE)
COURT REPORTER:	I can't hear him.
GORDON ADAIR:	The risk is much higher in British Columbia and the wage rates, so the resulting costs of the claim are much higher in British Columbia too, so I, you know, think based on that it's -- the rates probably are cheaper in British Columbia based on those kinds of things. Yes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	I was wondering if you noticed a strong correlation between Workers' Compensation Board treatment and policy along with the SGI.
GORDON ADAIR:	Yeah, and certainly I -- everybody I talk to in every province, the people don't like Workers' Compensation Board, and certainly in B.C. we used that. We drew an analogy a lot of times that what you're going to get is the Workers' Compensation Board approach to auto insurance if you get no-fault, and sometimes when I used to talk to groups of auto insurance brokers during this fight, they used to -- 'cause they were kind of under the thumb of the insurance corporation. They used to take me on about what would be good for them, how it's going to hurt them, and so I used to refer to them, you know, in Workers' Compensation situations where the injured party winds up driving the truck through the front door of the Workers' Compensation office -- which probably has happened in Saskatchewan. It happened in British Columbia, and then I said to them, Well, you know, when we get no-fault auto insurance and the people in ICBC are in their tower downtown and then it's hard to drive through the front door, who's on the front line and whose door are they going to drive the truck through? So they thought, well, yeah, maybe we had to think about this a little harder, but certainly -- of course Workers' Compensation is always under some royal commission it appears, studying them, and they don't seem to change because I think it's the same thing that happens in no-fault. It's -- it's sort of part of the process, which is the adjusters. The system is one of trying to grind you down to say that you're not injured, and so that same problem applies in Workers' Comp. that applies in no-fault.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Workers' Compensation is a done deal.
GORDON ADAIR:	Workers' Compensation is a no-fault system, and it's a done deal across -- across Canada basically. Now, I guess the circumstances you could say there are that if -- you know, if you're working and you can buy extra insurance for disability knowing your circumstances, and so it's much less likely that you're going to get injured by someone who's drunk and driving through your front door kind of thing, so to the extent that -- that in given industries there is kind of this -- well, I would say the chances are some injury is going to happen to you, you know about it, you can buy private insurance and try to protect, and most companies do carry extra insurance above Workers' Comp. for coverage, a lot of them anyway.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Most of them only last two years.
GORDON ADAIR:	Most private insurance?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Most of these coverages are like one to two years coverage.
GORDON ADAIR:	Well, it depends I guess, but, you know, it's --
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Would the same tactics work with Workers' Compensation Board across the country that you applied to --
GORDON ADAIR:	Boy, it would be tough. It's ingrained a long time but --
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	It's the same thing, though.
GORDON ADAIR:	It is. It would be very difficult to reverse Workers Comp., but I think you can start with no-fault auto insurance and then take that on next.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	All right. Thank you.
GORDON ADAIR:	Yes?
MARIO de SANTIS:	It is my understanding that --
PATRICIA SCHRYVER:	Could you come on down to the mike, please, and say your name?
MARIO de SANTIS:	Mario de Santis. It is my understanding that in Saskatchewan the Workmen Compensation Board provides dividends to the same employers for contributing to the coverage of the employees who are going to be injured. Does it happen in British Columbia as well? My -- my question perhaps is this: How can you justify a social governmental type of service whereby you provide dividends to the employers?
GORDON ADAIR:	Well, my guess is that -- I don't know how it works here, but in B.C. if you're an employer who keeps a safe workplace and therefore your claims are lower, then you get a lower rate in the future in that Workers' Compensation assessments are normally paid a hundred percent by the employer, not by the employee and that that savings to the compensation system is reflected in lower rates for those employers who do a good job of keeping a safe workplace.
MARIO de SANTIS:	It's a matter of a pooling and not a pooling, it is my understanding, among the employers.
GORDON ADAIR:	There is a pooling, but hose people who keep a -- within their pool can get usually a lower rate, and secondly, if -- if everybody does a good job in that particular one, the pool would go down eventually at some time too.
MARIO de SANTIS:	Do you feel that maybe there will be a trend whereby such coverage would be -- will be more broader if I can say?
GORDON ADAIR:	British Columbia has just expanded the Workers' Compensation Board coverage to nearly everywhere, even one-person firms. If you're a consultant like me and I have a company and I employ myself, where before those type of people, you were considered self-employed and therefore not coverable by Workers' Comp. Now you can -- you get Workers' Comp., and they've really expanded coverage. It's causing a lot of trouble because they didn't think of the rate structure very well, and a lot of people are little mom-and-pop shops that they stuck them in quite a high rate structure, so they're having their problems right now but --
MARIO de SANTIS:	Thank you.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Are there any further questions?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Is there a law in Canada that if you pretend to be a doctor you can be arrested? Like is there a law against somebody pretending to be a doctor?
GORDON ADAIR:	Depends how old you are. I would assume there is. I'm not a lawyer. I'm an accountant, so I would assume that you can't practice -- you can't practice medicine without a licence.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Okay. Now, to go to a physiotherapist or a chiropractor, don't you have to be referred to that by a doctor or can SGI play doctor and send you?
GORDON ADAIR:	I don't know.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Chiropractors and medical doctors are referred to as primary care practitioners, so you don't need a referral to go to see a chiropractor. You just go see a chiropractor.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Okay. What about a physiotherapist?
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Physiotherapists usually have to be referred and they have to be recommended.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Okay. I was not referred. I was sent. I was demanded to go by SGI, who are -- to me -
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	That seems to be a common protocol when a bureaucrat plays a role in your health care, and I'm going to solve your problem a little bit 'cause I hear where you're coming from. I see it a lot in my office. We use the word bureaucrat a lot, and sometimes do we know the definition of it. So where do you go to get a definition? Where do you go, Doris, to get a definition?
PATRICIA SCHRYVER:	Dictionary.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	To a dictionary. If anybody has a Random House dictionary around, you open it up. "Bureaucrat; an official of a bureaucracy; an official who works by fixed routine without exercising intelligent judgement." Now, there's your definition, and that comes out of a dictionary.
DORIS LUND:	You don't have to be referred to a doctor. The legal onus is on the victim, the patient to do everything possible to try to get better, and with me it was a chiropractor 'cause physiotherapy did nothing.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	That is -- Doris had a very important issue -- and I mentioned it before -- when it comes to health care. It is the opportunity for a claimant or a victim to have a choice is almost the first step to a recovery. What works for some people doesn't work for others.
	Are there any further questions because we have some excellent speakers coming up. We will have some time -- just one moment. We will have some time later, 'cause we're running on schedule, for some more questions and answers. We want to make sure so, Barbara, you know, you're on next, but do you have a question?
BARBARA NETMAKER:	Yes, I do. I have some people from my community where they go in to see SGI agents. There's a deal as soon as they walk in which physiotherapist they see and how long they can see that physiotherapist. I'm wanting to know like what is the step that you would take to avoid this when you go see your SGI agent?
GORDON ADAIR:	You mean the SGI adjuster.
BARBARA NETMAKER:	Yeah, tells you -- tells you you have to see this physiotherapist, and the problem that we're facing right now is we're not allowed to see chiropractors no more.
GORDON ADAIR:	Well, having had some experience from the inside of an insurance company for a while, having watched it, but my thought is that if I was injured, if that bus had crashed today and I was, I would make sure that I took my tape recorder to every session, took lots of witnesses everywhere and demanded everything in writing. Every time they wanted me to do something, I would be documenting the hell out of everything that they wanted me to do. I think that it appears from things I've heard that you get blindsided by the fact they're documenting away in their files, and they catch people because they've got this selected documentation they've done and you don't have documentation on your side, so when you're on the phone to them, tape it. You're allowed to tape it. I'm not a lawyer. You're -- one person -- you can audiotape any conversation. You don't have to tell them. As long as one person has knowledge, yourself, is in the conversation, you can tape it, so I would be documenting my position in this as I go along, and I think if you've got that documentation -- the other thing I would be attempting to do -- and I recommend this many times in B.C. even though without no-fault because we have problems -- is make sure that as soon as you're unhappy, start pushing it up to the next level, start documenting the case, writing and getting the paper in front of the managers up above the adjusters because they don't want to deal with you if you're going to deal with them that way. They'll -- I think they'll ease up. At first they'll probably get harder to deal with, but I think eventually they'll give up a bit so -- but that's personal experience, but anybody else got any better idea?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	I have a question. We found the adjuster referred on to the primary, secondary rehab programs. They were the ones who dictated all the calls, not the adjuster, and are those not funded by the government so they're very biased, and at the end of six weeks, you're ousted out of that program.
GORDON ADAIR:	I think the same thing applies is making sure that you're documenting what's happening through taking your taperecorders, through taking whatever you need, witnesses as -- if you're not happy with the way it's working, then you've got to have evidence or you'll wind up with the evidence on the other side that they've been gathering on the case, so I was recommending someone -- talking about the surveillance situation, I was wondering why we didn't put surveillance on Larry Fogg and on the Minister for a little while, let them see how they liked it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	The other thing is documenting and even taking it to appeals doesn't seem to work because we did that.
GORDON ADAIR:	Yeah. It is -- you know, it's -- it's a case here of the mouse and the elephant. It's very difficult to fight the elephant, and it's a matter of getting enough mice together eventually and getting enough documentation that I think you can make a change, and certainly in the case of one individual, you're probably going to lose in a lot of it, but eventually over time you get the documentation, and my guess is that there will be a change in government here at some point, and it's, you know, having the evidence that you can use during election and go to the MLAs during that period of time or go tomorrow with them. I would take my documentation and go sit in the MLA's office if I wasn't happy and would be a real pain in his you know what. Make him pay.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Let him develop chronic pain.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Why can't we collectively sue the government and SGI for a violation of our human rights and freedoms --
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Could we just --
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	-- collectively?
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Stand up. I'm sure the people in that end don't hear. Just come on down and use the microphone.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Why can't we collectively as injured people sue the government, SGI for violation of our human rights and freedoms?
GORDON ADAIR:	You don't have a class-action legislation in Saskatchewan. There is class action in British Columbia legislation. In fact, we were talking about this last night over dinner about whether we could launch a class action in British Columbia on behalf of Saskatchewan citizens or not. B.C. legislation does allow for people outside the province to be involved in class actions, but generally the thought is that you have to have some interest to the province of British Columbia involved, and right now there is no class-action legislation in Saskatchewan.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	How do you go about getting it?
GORDON ADAIR:	Well, I understand the government has been talking about it, but I think they're watching what's happened in other places, and the class actions sometimes are going against the governments too. There was a case, a class-action case just recently in British Columbia with regard to radiant heating panels, and they sued the Province as well as CSA as well as the installers as well and they won. Well, actually it got settled out of court, so the Province, I think they're going to have to watch that it exposes the Province to have class-action legislation too, and they may be resistant somewhat.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Thank you.
GORDON ADAIR:	That's an accountant's opinion, by the way, not a lawyer's opinion.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Thank you very much, Gordon.
GORDON ADAIR:	It's nice to come back after 50 years, and I'm hoping that I can go see if I can find my house, see if it's still standing, if I can ever -- if I can recognize it
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Gordon's going to be around. We're still going to have more questions. He said 50 years ago. See he left here when he was only two years old, so that's why.
GORDON ADAIR:	Minus 15.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	And when Patricia said this would be a learning experience, you weren't kidding, Patricia. We've still got some more excellent speakers, and I'd like to -- someone I just met on the telephone here a few days ago, and she's not very bashful when it comes to speaking -- take this opportunity to call on Barbara Netmaker, and she'll be representing several people from her particular community. She's got 10 minutes. We might even give her a little more. Barbara Netmaker.
BARBARA NETMAKER:	I'm a member of the Big River First Nations. I've been widowed since December 1997. My husband was killed instantly -- instantly in a motor-vehicle accident, and my oldest daughter was also a passenger in the vehicle and she died one week later, leaving me with a three-week-old baby, and I've come a long way since. I've had to deal with SGI. Right from the beginning when I went to my adjuster's office, he told me like I had to sign these forms. Like he did not even give me the papers, the book on my entitlement, which he was supposed to do, which I'm slowly learning all the procedures that I was supposed to have all these information.
	I used to work for the Indian Affairs for 3 1/2 years. I got a call from my ex-coworker. Her name is -- I will not say her name because I think she wanted to keep it confidential. She phoned me up and said -- said that she had recently heard about my husband's death and she was sorry and all, but she got a call from my adjuster saying there was no surviving relatives and that the government should handle these estates, and from there I knew that I was going to be scammed from SGI, so I called on a lawyer, and my lawyer is still working on this. I still haven't received any money from SGI. I was left -- I was left with four kids, which I'm still providing for. Like I'm -- I'm in a struggle financially, but the longer it takes, I just keep thinking it'll come but --
	My family has been through motor-vehicle accidents. I've got an older brother that's permanently disabled with a head injury, and he's also in assessments, a lot of assessments, and they haven't really really covered all his entitlement. He's pulled out of Prince Albert. Like we've -- I don't know why we're stuck with the same adjuster. His name is Tom Avey, and he hasn't fully -- I'm sure somebody's familiar with this adjuster. He's my best friend, I'll tell you, but I also have a younger brother that has went in to see this guy, and every time my brother goes in to pick up his mileage claims, this guy says, Now you can go to the casino, you know, comments like this, which I don't like.
	The reason why I asked this guy that question is they should have had him on tape and everything, and without -- without -- without any -- any -- like with -- just out of the blue he pulls out his files saying that you're healed and everything, and my brother has been unable to work because of his back injury, and right from the start as soon as he goes into his office, okay, you see this physiotherapist, you're not seeing any chiropractors, and like it's open-and-shut case right away, and it's been about six years since he had his back injury and he hasn't been able to work and he doesn't know where to go from here, and then I have another auntie that's dealing with the same adjuster.
	She gets the comments, now you can go and play bingo, comments like it's costing them a lot of money to have to pay another bus driver while she's out -- to come in and see the adjuster while she's out in town to come and see the adjuster to see him. You know how much money it's costing me, this guy will say, just like it's coming out of his own pocket, and she's just afraid, the fear of just going into his office 'cause of the kind of comments she gets. Like how far -- how much longer are we going to take this, you know? It's like from my community a lot of people take this, but they don't come forward because of the low self-esteem that people like this adjuster has given them. I just -- I just left there really really --
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Excuse me. It's just not your people. They do that with everybody.
BARBARA NETMAKER:	Pardon me?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	It's not just with the native community, it's everybody.
BARBARA NETMAKER:	I'm really glad to hear that there's people going through the same -- same -- like you know, it's just unreal.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	It's a person asking for welfare.
BARBARA NETMAKER:	Yeah. Anyways, my brother with -- with the permanent disability has been following through with everything, all the assessments, all the -- all the visits that he's supposed to make, and from -- he was injured in '95. He was injured in '95. We just about lost him. We all got called in. We were only given 24 hours to wake him up, and we did. We managed to wake him up, and it's just like we raised him from infancy back to -- he's 42, and with the tolerance that -- his wife had to quit school just to stay home and look after him, and they didn't know about the benefits that they were supposed to receive for maintenance and all that. Like the packages were never ever given to us what we were entitled to, and so they took the case out of Prince Albert. They -- since it was permanent disability, they took the case out of Prince Albert and started dealing with Saskatoon. They're getting a little more understanding over there like on the hardships that they go through. They're getting a little more remorse because here they were dealing with a guy. Over there it's a woman that went through the same thing. I don't know if that made a difference, an impact on it, but he's still -- he's still fighting. They're down to 75% on his salary replacement, but apparently they're supposed to be getting 50.
	See all these benefits -- even me, I don't even know if I'm going to be getting 50% of my husband's salary because of the fact they tried to hand over the estates right to the government. Like I don't even know where I stand with it. My lawyer gives me -- keeps me informed. The more paper -- the more paperwork that they ask for, the more I bring in, it seems like I'm more losing my entitlement. It's like unreal.
	The only thing that I have -- the only thing that I have to be thankful for is to have my grandson because I never had any of my own boys. My oldest girl was only 17. She had just graduated that year she died, and I just wish that there was people in that office like to walk a mile in my shoes so they would, you know, feel the hurt and pain that I go through, and I'd like to thank you guys for listening to me.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Thank you, Barbara. I know you're a very busy lady from talking to you. Thank you for taking the time and sharing this with us. Thank you.
	At this time it gives me pleasure to introduce a gentleman that's very well-known in the community, very well-respected farmer, game rancher, raises quarter horses, who's had a little run-in with SGI, and it gives me great pleasure to introduce a well-respected man in this community, Mr. Tom Cartier.
TOM CARTIER:	Thank you, Dr. Martsinkiw, for those kind words. I've been involved with SGI no-fault for over four years. It's four years and four months I think. I was in an accident on February 21st, 1996, and at first I didn't think I was hurt very badly, but I did -- a lady in there asked me to report that I'm -- was injured, so I did, and I wasn't hurting too bad at first, but about four or five days after it started to bother me and it got worse and worse, and anyway, I went to the adjuster, and I didn't think that I'd be laid up more than three months or so, so -- but anyway as time went on got worse. My neck and my back, my lower back was injured, my neck, and eventually I lost all the muscle in my legs, and with exercise and with my chiropractor's advice, I gradually come out of -- out of that part, but with the pain --- and the worst part of the accident was dealing with SGI. That was the worst of the accident.
	And anyway, I dealt with it the best I could. In 1997 I got depressed, and I was depressed from May 'til January of '98, and that was -- that was one of the worst things that happened to me also. I wouldn't recommend anybody ever having to go through that but -- so then eventually after three years doing everything that SGI wanted me to do, I went to their doctors, and the one doctor gave me sleeping pills, and I tried them for two nights and they didn't work, so then he said, Well, double the dose, so a couple nights later I tried them again and they didn't work on me, so I didn't take them anymore. Then they sent me to another doctor in Saskatoon, and I gave them a list of all the medication I was taking. I included that in it, and he gave me another prescription and that was sleeping pills, so if I'd have taken the first ones, I'd have been taking another set of them, and they'd have -- they probably wanted to put me to sleep both day and night, which they probably would have done if I'd have taken them.
	So I phoned my SGI rep intown here and I told him what happened, and I said, What would happen if I'd have taken them and they put me to sleep for a couple years? I'd either be in a wheelchair or I'd be dead. So I said, What do you call that? But he wouldn't answer me. So anyway, those are the kinds of things we go through, and I've listened to all the people here that's been talking, and I'm no worse off than most of them but --
	And then after -- after three years after that incident with the sleeping pills, I told them they could go to hell, I wasn't going to go to any more of their doctors and I wasn't doing anything they told me to do but I wasn't going to quit trying to get what was entitled to me and I was going to help anybody else I could, and while I was in exercise --
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Thank you.
TOM CARTIER:	When I was exercising at the hospital last year from January 15th to the end of April, I talked to different people there, elderly people that was going through the same type of thing that I was and saw the rest of them were, and they're supposed to give you a guide, an information guide on what you're entitled to at SGI, and I talked to five or six different people there that never got that guide, so I told SGI to get one for them and give it to them. Well, SGI didn't like that either but -- and then I talked to some -- like one fellow I talked to, I said, What happened to you, and he said he got cranked on the bridge. He was stopped by the police -- the police were stopped in front of him. He had to stop. A bunch of cars -- a car ran into him from behind and two or three more ran into that car, and it bothered his neck. He walked with a cane. He could hardly walk, and I said, Well -- and then he had a heart attack after that, so then I said, What are you living on? He said, Well, I'm living on my savings that I had for retirement. Well, I said, Don't you get anything from SGI? He said, No, I'm not entitled to anything. I said, Well, yes, you are, so I went and got him one of those guides and I gave it to him and I said, Go home tonight and read that, so he did, and the next morning he was back, and I said, Did you learn anything? He said, Holy cripe, I didn't know I was entitled to all those things, so then I said, Well, go home tonight and read it two more times, so he did. He come back the next day, and I said, Did you learn anything more? He said, I missed a whole bunch the first time, so anyway he -- he's got along a little better since then, but they're still giving him a rough time, but anyway, I won't go into all the details that's happened to me 'cause it's similar to all the rest, but one thing I do want to say, I farm, I raise horses like Dr. Martsinkiw said and I have cattle, and in my lifetime I've done a lot of different things. I've trained horses, I've raised the cattle and I have always done most of my own vet work, and then when I got hurt, I had to hire somebody to do my work and it was a young fellow off the farm, and he -- he was taking -- going to welding school. He had a wife and a kid and he had no income so I hired him, and SGI would pay $6 an hour, so I hired him for three or four months, and he wanted a raise, so I went to SGI and I said, This young fellow working for me would like to have a 50-cent raise, and he said, Well, we can't do that, and I said, Well, how come you can't? And he said, Well, that's all we pay, $6 an hour, and I said, Well -- and I said, Why is that? Because that's farming.
	So then I said, Is that right? So then I said, Well, what do you get an hour? But he wouldn't tell me, so then I said -- so then I said, Well, can you calve-out a heifer or cow that has about a 140-pound calf and you've got to take it and -- I said, And you've got to lift it over the fence so that the mucous drains out of its nose so it can breathe? Well, he said, No, I don't know how to do that. So then I said, Well, can you treat an animal if it's sick, if it's out in the pen? Can you go look at it and treat it? No. No, I can't do that either. So then I said, Well, how about horses? Can you break a colt to lead? And he said, No, I don't know how to do that either. So then I said, Well, can you break them to ride when they're two years old? No. And I said, Well, how about seeding? Do you know what to put in the ground and what fertilizer and chemicals to use? He said, No, I don't know how to do that either. So I said, Well, what the hell can you do? So then I said to him, I said, You know, I said, I could go to school for a couple of months and do your job but, I said, You can come out to my place for the rest of your life and you could never do my job, and I know damn well he couldn't.
	So that's the kind of treatment that I've got, and the last time I talked to him on the phone, he won't -- they won't see me anymore, and so I told --
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	Must have been something you said, Tom.
TOM CARTIER:	Pardon?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	It must have been something you said.
TOM CARTIER:	I don't think so, but anyway, the last time I phoned him, I was on the way to -- to Kinistino for some seed barley, and I phoned him and said I want to see him 'cause I had some slips to turn in for travel and expenses to the chiropractor and to the gym 'cause I went to the gym about four or five different places in the last four years, which I like doing. I like exercising. I did it all my life, so I know how to exercise, but anyway, the exercises they gave me there -- they gave me at the one place, they gave me exercises and they they didn't give me the full amount that I needed. Like they had none for the back of my legs and my hamstrings, and I told them, I said, I'm not getting the proper exercise. Oh, yes, you are, and I said, No, I'm not, and so I said, I'll just keep exercising over my plan for exercising, and he come back and said, By God, we didn't give them to you, and so anyway, they did and it worked out better after but -- so then I -- when I was through that, that was last spring, a year ago last spring, they cut off all my benefits because they said, Well, you got to go home now, you can work four hours a day for two weeks, then the next two weeks you work six hours a day, and the following -- after two more weeks you got to work eight hours a day, and so I went home and I was exercising and doing part of the chores, and they sent a lady out to do an assessment on me, and I don't know where she come from, but she came and she asked how I was doing. I said, Well, pretty good. I said, I'm doing my exercises every day four hours a day and two in the morning and two at night and I'm doing some chores. She said, Well, you don't have to exercise, why are you doing that? So I said, Well, I just come home from the hospital doing four and five hours a day. Why wouldn't I do it at home? She said, Well, you don't have to. So I said, Well, maybe you think I don't, but I'm going to exercise and try and get better, not stay -- or get worse, so anyway that's --
AUDIENCE MEMBER:	We all do that too, take care of ourselves.
TOM CARTIER:	She writes in to SGI, and I don't know what she told them, but then again they cut my benefits back again after she wrote, so I don't know what was -- but anyway, another thing what happened is I was going to Kinistino, and I phoned my adjuster and I said I want to see him to bring in these slips. That was just two weeks ago, and he said, Well, I won't see you, and I said, Well, how come you won't see me? And I said -- and he said, Well, I just won't, so you've got to send them in through your lawyer or through a representative, so then I said, Well -- I asked him what his boss's name was and he told me. Well, I knew his name, so I said, Well, I got his phone number, so I kept asking the bosses 'til I got up to the Minister, and I said, That's the one I wanted. I said, You won't see me but, I said, One of these days you will 'cause I'm going to start at the top and work down, and by the time I get to you, you're going to lose your job so -- and my opinion is this is the kind of things we got to do. We got to get somebody fired and maybe they'll start listening, and I will work at it.
	The other thing I'd like to say is we've got to stick together and we've got to work at this, and I think they're getting a little bit scared now, but I think we've got to keep at it and we'll kick them out of there. Thank you.
DR. REG MARTSINKIW:	Thank you, Tom, and don't you -- and don't you for one minute think he's not going to do it 'cause I've known Tom for 30 years. Thanks, Tom.