If this doesn't fall under "irony", I don't know what does.
In reading this Montreal Gazette article, please keep in mind that Dr. Jacques Chaoulli is the man who got the Supreme Court of Canada to strike down a Québec ban on private insurance covering medically essential procedures - on the grounds that people would have to wait too long for treatment. Typically, the news item doesn't even correlate that this is the same Chaoulli:
No one is sure just how long Jean-Jacques Sauvageau sat in the clinic's waiting room, dead.
His head was slumped over and his dentures had fallen out onto the floor when a doctor came and took his pulse, then left him there a while longer.
But it seemed like an eternity to the three witnesses testifying yesterday at the coroner's inquest into the man's death - and his disturbing after-death. ...
Jacques Chaoulli, the doctor who took Sauvageau's pulse around 4 p.m., testified that he also spoke to Sauvageau, listened for a heartbeat and pinched him. He examined his eyes and his extremities, which were blue, while his face was now white.
But Chaoulli said he did not try to resuscitate him.
"I concluded that this patient must have been dead already a long enough time - I had no way of knowing how long - but long enough," Chaoulli said.
Chaoulli told a nurse to call 911 so that they could declare him dead officially, he said.
As for why Chaoulli left the body there for what he says was another 10 minutes - he explained he felt the waiting room had become akin to "the scene of a crime." The death in a public place would require an investigation, he explained, and "the police wouldn't want us to touch the body."
[u][b][url=http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=00e6b3d2-f97f-4... Gazette[/url][/b][/u]
