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“It’s absolutely unacceptable,” Dan Holinda, executive director of the Canadian Cancer Society, told Postmedia News about the revelations.

The inquiry, which had been poised to wrap up, has now scheduled an additional seven days of hearings this month.

Yet the kind of incidents being aired by the commission are hardly unique to Alberta, says one Montreal doctor who now runs a company that helps patients better navigate the system. Physicians everywhere are routinely asked to expedite care for relatives of colleagues, politicians, sports stars and other prominent citizens, said Dr. Jeff Brock, head of MedExtra.

He said he would get such calls frequently when working as an emergency physician in the past.

“In theory everyone’s equal, but we know everyone’s not equal,” he said. “It’s naive to think that Stephen Harper’s wife is going to be treated the same way as the woman on welfare.”

It’s naive to think that Stephen Harper’s wife is going to be treated the same way as the woman on welfare

It is another question, though, whether such preferential treatment is merely distasteful, or actually hurting the people who urgently need medical help. Dr. Brock said it generally does not, and some observers question whether the inquiry itself has uncovered evidence of real harm to patients, helping justify its $10-million pricetag.

“Do you take out a bulldozer when you could use a hammer?” asked Tracey Bailey, former head of the University of Alberta’s Health Law Institute, about the process. “So far, we’ve heard a couple of really limited examples where perhaps people have been put in the lineup where they shouldn’t have been.”