Sometimes you can't even find the brass on the sinking ship

In the Northwest Territories news today: "An organ donor registry for the territory is long overdue, said Range Lake MLA Daryl Dolynny" (NNSL). Because according to him, the lack of organ donor registry is "truly hampering our ability to help those who need organ transplants".

Yeah... Well that's why you shouldn't elect pharmacists with no relevant experience to government, yes? And maybe also not ones with personal agendas? Not that organ donation isn't generally considered an admirable personal agenda. And yeah, it's very sad that Dolynny's buddy's young son died for lack of a heart transplant. (I know that because the buddy is the miserable scum I was working for in Yellowknife three years ago. See, NWT politics are such a cesspool of personal allegiances and rancour.)

Ok, but let's be realistic.

First of all, the Northwest Territories has no capacity to harvest organs. In British Columbia, which has 107 times the population of the Northwest Territories and 31 times the budget (but only 7 times the federal transfers, mind you), organs are collected by the "organ retrieval team", a highly specialised mobile unit which is on call round the clock and travels to whichever hospital has the donor, because even in BC, most hospitals do not have the personnel and equipment to perform the organ procurement surgery. The Northwest Territories could neither afford such a team, nor mobilise it quickly enough, nor contract a team from south. You're not gonna get BC's team to fly to Fort Resolution to source organs.

Second, you pretty much have to die in hospital if your organs are going to survive long enough to be transplanted. And generally you have to die suddenly, not after years of degenerative illness. According to statistics from Organ Donation New Zealand, nearly 80% of organ donors die of trauma (i.e. "accidents") or intracranial hemorrhage or thrombosis. If any of those happen to you in the Northwest Territories, you're almost certainly not going to live long enough to reach the hospital, because the response time from emergency services is far too slow.

Third, once you're in the hospital and your brain is dead, your body is maintained with drugs and machines while the paperwork gets done and the organ team scrambles. Somehow, I think a medical team that can kill someone with a colonoscopy is not gonna be super successful in keeping the dead alive while doing paperwork really really fast. (Actually, the paperwork itself would be a stumbling block. GNWT employees aren't noted for their speedy and accurate completion of paperwork.)

In the real world, according to BC Transplant, less than 1% of deaths can result in potential organ donation. Taking out the 80% who would not have made it to the hospital in the NWT, that's less than 0.2% of deaths. The Northwest Territories have a death rate of approximately 3.9 per thousand per year and a population of 43,300 (Statistics Canada) so that gives us about 0.33 eligible donors per year. Of whom zero can actually be accessed by an organ collection team.

So yeah, let's spend a pile of money on an organ donor registry so that once every three years or so, a doctor can tell himself "hey, we could have used these organs if only we had an organ team."

Seriously, Northwest Territories, you should really start electing people who have some kind of understanding of reality. And who can think of something beside themselves. Oh wait... All those people moved south. Oops, sucks to be you! Haha.