GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

55. Enlarging my horizons

copyright © 2015 WandaS All rights reserved

IN JANUARY 1980 I MET CANADIAN DOCTOR magazine's deadline for 3,000 words about the fire a year earlier in a converted four-storey mansion at 200 St. Clair Avenue West. It was my first opportunity to write a major feature article, allowing a thorough study of the subject. During several on-site visits I interviewed about 30 persons including the building's manager and accountant, wives of doctors, even doctors and assistants in nearby buildings who had invited some of those displaced from 200 to share their space. 

"COPING WITH DISASTER" began

"What would an office fire cost you?

"Twenty-eight physicians and their assistants lived answers to that question after a 5 a.m. fire in their offices on Jan. 10, 1979, caused $900,000 worth of damage to the building and its contents. Yet any dollar figure would tell little of the stories, for the real cost included personal stress and time, and who can calculate those?

"Only a few doctors' records were destroyed or even damaged, but they all suffered disruption of communications with patients."

(Before computers, the bureaucracy of Canada's universal health care was separate from patients' confidential records. These were kept on unique sheets of paper in folders in lockable steel cabinets. When I broke a wrist recently, every phase of my treatment was automatically copied to my physician's files. "Unauthorized persons" can access the new software, and that has happened.)

The fire was a "three alarms plus help" event, involving 19 trucks and about 80 firemen. They were praised "for their urgent concern for patient records," spreading tarpaulins in every office they could reach safely. The flames were extinguished by 9 a.m. Shortly after 10, firemen, "with doctors and secretaries, were sloshing through ankle-deep water...to search by flashlight amid warm, reeking, filthy debris for appointment books."

Two or three doctors found temporary locations so quickly that their secretaries merely phoned patients who had appointments that day and told them to come to a different address. A doctor who lived a block away asked clients to go there. Others used their hospital facilities. Only a couple moved permanently. One retired.

The fact that at least five physicians had no insurance on their practices surprised me.

Photographs were taken by Bernard Abrams, the management's accountant. He was young, just starting out, very generous with details about the building. Since 1958 I'd made out my tax returns and then Charlie's too because it was easy mental exercise. But then an accountant became Canada's Minister of Finance.

Freelancers had been allowed to claim one-fifth of "housing cost" as office space, and write off supplies and other incidentals, all without receipts. That lasted only s long as most Canadians were honest. Auditors found the number of cheaters growing, kept changing rules, until finally I began paying Bernie to do our tax returns.

In Wanda 1's office at United Co-operatives of Ontario (UCO) I used a huge AES Electronics desktop computer, my first. After she awakened it each morning all I had to do was type and remember not to hit 'return' at the ends of lines.

I had visited the farming world a few times in childhood, but otherwise I merely drove through it on the way to and from somewhere. Thanks to Wanda 1 I learned about it. The first words I wrote for UCO's Cornerstone magazine, Spring Edition 1980, were:

"FLORIDA IS FUN, report the two Ontario couples who went there in November for an all-expense paid week. The winners of UCO's contests to design a new symbol and name for this publication usually spend vacations camping, so luxury hotels, meals out, and sightseeing in a sub-tropical climate provided a rare treat. Neither of the couples had ever been to Florida."