I am following with great interest a health care issue here in New Brunswick. Following a bad incident in 2005, the province has realized it needs a provincial trauma centre to deal with seriously injured people. The Saint John Regional Hospital is the largest hospital in the province, and an independent report has named it the “best option” to become the trauma centre. It already has a heli-pad that the other large hospitals don’t have, which could allow helicopters to land at an accident scene in bad weather to pick up a patient.

“The Saint John Regional is already recognized as one of only 13 top-tier trauma centres in the country, he said, and is the only provincial hospital with cardiac, neurological and orthopaedic specialties together — all needed in a trauma centre,” according to CBC News.

This should be an easy decision, right? Wrong. Moncton is lobbying to have the trauma centre placed there, and now this health care issue has turned into a political issue, which is nothing new here in New Brunswick. Too often, the cities in this province are fighting with each other trying to steal resources and jobs from each other. CBC Radio piloted a mini-series about cities in Canada, with their first topic of discussion being the unusual rivalry between New Brunswick’s two largest cities, so this clearly is not something that every city faces the same way.

I just hope that the right decision is made with this issue, and that the Saint John Regional will win this battle that it should have logically already won. Someday this province will realize that this internal fighting does not help anyone, and that none of cities rank highly on a national or international level of importance, unlike Halifax, Nova Scotia which has successfully created an identity for itself worldwide because that province does not seem to play politics as much between its cities.