The continuing fuss on both sides of the Rockies about bringing people to B.C. for joint replacement surgery is all based on wait times.

Saskatchewan residents are waiting too long. British Columbians less so, but they'll be quick to complain if outsiders start lengthening the lists.

A Victoria resident who's been watching the contretemps over the past few days has a question.

"What wait lists?"

He's 60 years old, semi-retired and still active, although by the summer of 2008 injections and drugs could no longer maintain his knees.

When he discussed the idea of knee replacement with a Victoria surgeon, he braced himself for the idea of waiting quite a while.

Instead, the doctor told him; "You make the call, we'll make it work."

He procrastinated until last spring, then finally told the doctor he'd be ready to go in any time after May 1 to have one knee done.

On May 5 he was told to start the preliminary work of orientation meetings, blood work and X-rays. He had the surgery on May 27 and followed it with several weeks of careful rehab.

During a mid-July checkup, the doctor asked him about the other knee. He decided to go for it after Thanksgiving and told the doctor so.

Two days after Thanksgiving he was given a date and had the surgery on Oct. 29.

"I didn't experience any 'wait times,' " he said yesterday. "My procedures were done on my schedule, at least they politely gave me the impression it was."

He never got a date that was subsequently cancelled. He never got jerked around by the system. He stayed organized, followed all the protocols and both operations at Royal Jubilee Hospital went smoothly.

The first knee is fine and he's just starting rehab following the second procedure. "I couldn't think of it working any better," he says.

All of which makes you wonder whether B.C. doesn't have a bit of room after all, when it comes to the backlog of people from Saskatchewan.

The recovering patient said other people are in different circumstances. He'd hate to see a taxpayer in severe pain bumped down the schedule to make room for a premium patient from elsewhere.

But for people in his specific circumstances, at least, it seems the system isn't particularly overloaded.

That impression doesn't find much favour with Opposition critic Adrian Dix, though.

He took another run at Health Minister Kevin Falcon yesterday over the Saskatchewan plan. It appears to be steadily unravelling even without the NDP's input.

It apparently started with a brief conversation last summer between premiers Brad Wall and Gordon Campbell about Saskatchewan's long waiting lists and B.C.'s capacity to do joint replacements.

It started going sideways when the idea of a premium price was broached. That prompted some back-and-forth claims about when the premium idea came up. B.C. says it was implicit from the start. Saskatchewan said they only heard about it last week.

Dix stuck his oar into these troubled waters this week, saying Falcon is so driven to sell access to public health care that he's trying to organize a queue-jumping program.

"Organize" is the wrong word in this context, because the entire loosey-goosey idea seems to be going sideways at a rapid clip.

Dix is fixating on Falcon's role in the controversy, saying he has gotten well ahead of his own story.

Falcon told reporters last week that Saskatchewan offered to pay the premium. But the Saskatchewan premier and health minister deny offering to pay a higher rate for the surgeries. In interviews with media there, they appear to be mystified by the B.C. version of the story.

Saskatchewan Health Minister Don McMorris said: "I don't know why [Falcon] is saying that, because we, I have had no conversations with the B.C. health minister."

There's also some bafflement on the Prairies about Falcon's assertion that a memorandum of understanding is in the works.

The overall impression is that even if there were some room for a few paying visitors in B.C.'s high-functioning, high-capacity joint replacement program, it's unlikely these two governments could get their acts together to take advantage of it.