In a click-bait headline, the Globe and Mail pronounces, A hard diversity quota for medical-school admissions is a terrible, counterproductive idea (link to paywalled article). All other things being equal, access to essential social services such as higher education should reflect the demographics of the wider society, within a reasonable margin of error. This is…
Pierre Poilievre has said that if the Conservatives form the next federal government, it not would provide “a single taxpayer dollar” to supervised consumption sites (SCS) for addicts, calling them “drug dens.” Poilievre’s comments are a reflection of what you get when you address social problems with dogma rather than evidence. People don’t intend to…
Re: the McLeans article on health care in Canada titled Private Health Care is Here The more we have private health care in Canada, the more we create two types of victims: those who have to go into debt to afford the now-private service, and those who live with prolonged pain and suffering because they…
This is a response to a thread on Reddit: What’s something that Canadians should work on in order to make Canada a better country? – we need to address the creeping privatization of public health care. Governments are underfunding the current system and using this as an excuse to extend private services. – housing is…
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade abortion has become illegal in many places in the United States. This is a key point in a long-standing campaign by the Church and right-wing conservatives to return to a state of affairs that existed prior to the mid-20th century. Here…
I heard a pernicious argument from a Conservative commentator on Rosemary Barton’s morning show yesterday. In between condescending remarks (“now look, Rosie”) the argument ran as follows: We are in a time of inflation so we should not pass measures that increase consumer spending. So we should oppose pharmacare and dental care. By contrast, though,…
As I write there is a caravan of ‘truckers’ nearing Ottawa at the conclusion of a cross-country trek to protest vaccination laws. I put ‘truckers’ in quotations because they are not, for the most part, truckers, and those who are truckers represent a very small percentage of the people actually doing that work in Canada….
When the finance minister doesn’t follow the rules, he is showing a certain disregard for the people who die. And it leads us to suspect that this disregard applies to other aspects of his work and life as a finance minister.
In these early days of the Covid pandemic in Canada my estimation is that our government has been doing the right things, taken the right tone, and made the right response.
That’s why Conservatives cut health care funding. It’s not that they hate sick people. It’s that they think our health care system should be privatized, so it can make as much money for their business friends as the health care system does in the U.S.