There is a very simple explanation for why Canada turned into such a police state during COVID. Canada’s healthcare system is very bad. It’s barely coping in the best of times. Any strain on the system can’t be absorbed at all.
This is why Ontario today has worse lockdowns than we saw in the US in April of 2020. Nova Scotia locked down with less than a dozen people hospitalized for COVID. Nobody wants to recognize that this is all because the healthcare system isn’t coping even in the best of times.
And if Canada isn’t managing to get the healthcare system to work for 30 million people, how would the US do that with more than 10 times the population?
Importing the Canadian healthcare system here is a dumb idea.
Clarissa's Blog 
I work for a small business in the US that was bought out by a Canadian company a few years
ago. After a question to the new management about potential changes in benefits for the American employees, the CEO explained that there is a big difference between expectations in the US and Canada for employee benefits. He said other than the paid time off, the only extras they provide their Canadian employees is health insurance. I didn’t ask why it was necessary in Canada to offer the insurance, but I suppose you can draw a lot of conclusions about socialized health care from that.
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Absolutely! My sister in Canada bought health insurance for all her employees. When I asked why if they had free healthcare, she said she didn’t hate her employees and wanted them to be OK.
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How does it work? Is there private and state hospitals? Private and state clinics? Or it’s the same infrastructure and one can upgrade their level of services when they have insurance?
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Dentistry, optometry, specialized care, a doctor who will visit you at home (or see you earlier than six months from now) – that’s all private.
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I guess that’s quite similar as in Poland sans the private insurance. If one wants to see a specialist quickly and have a choice who they see, they go private and pay out of pocket.
I have to admit, one has to have a serious heath issue to understand the superiority of privatized medicine. My son had an ear condition that required multiple surgeries. We were able to see a few doctors until we settled on a surgeon that we felt comfortable with and who really turned out to be a miracle worker. Had we had to go through nationalized service, it would have been either ‘this doctor at this hospital in 6 months’ and if you aren’t happy, go back to end of the line.
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Definitely. I wouldn’t have a live child if I stayed in Canada. They simply have no resources to help carry such a high-risk pregnancy to term.
And yes, it’s my own fault for having a high-risk pregnancy. But then one can blame most illnesses on the people who suffer from them.
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“If one wants to see a specialist quickly and have a choice who they see, they go private and pay out of pocket.”
Where I am from, it used to be out of pocket to a pocket, if you know what I mean. No private insurance needed.
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” in Poland sans the private insurance. If one wants to see a specialist quickly and have a choice who they see, they go private and pay out of pocket”
On the other hand, prices are based on the local economy and what people can pay rather than insurance companies and healthcare providers bouncing kickbacks to each other to make simple blood tests cost thousands of dollars… or price insulin out of the bodies of those who need it…
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“There is a very simple explanation for why Canada turned into such a police state during COVID. Canada’s healthcare system is very bad.”
To support your point, it was recently estimated that it will take three and a half years in Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, to clear its COVID-postponed non-emergency surgery backload.
But healthcare capacity is a symptom rather than the singular cause of Canada’s “police state” lockdowns.
The real failures can be found in its (a) the inadequate, mind numbingly stupid leadership of its elites and (b) the historic deference of most Canadians to these elites – a deference first born of the aftermath of the American revolution. Compounding this toxic mix is the near-complete capture of most Canadian elites – political, bureaucratic, academic, mass media – by US-style wokesterism during the last decade or two.
A Westminister parliamentary democracy which centralizes power in the executive cannot properly function where everyone dutifully sings from the same wokester policy hymnbook and, accordingly, there is no “loyal opposition.”
Ontario’s Premier is the poster-boy of Canada’s mind-numbingly stupid leadership. When challenged, he recently justified his current province-wide stay-at-home-order closing schools, businesses and nearly everything else including all outdoor activities (save solitary walking) thusly: “I talk to my buddies, I know what happens. You know, they pick up another buddy, two or three, they go golfing, and there’s nothing wrong with golfing, the problem is the mobility. Then after the golf they go back, they have a few pops, that’s the problem. That’s the issue.”
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The deference was something I didn’t expect. I thought, you know, Canadians, the hard-beaten stock that defeated the terrible winters, that conquered the prairie, that survived in the wilderness, and ate squirrel stew. Silent but indomitable. And now I’m seeing eager metrosexual soy boys who are curtseying to the even more pathetic leadership.
No offense to my Canadian readership, but it hurts me to see this.
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“The deference was something I didn’t expect. ”
Deference to elite leadership has been a feature of Canadian political culture rather than a bug since the deep trauma of the American Revolution. Americans were held to be fractious and violent, their political system predictably collapsed into civil war, while we British North Americans were the “peaceable kingdom.”
As U.S. sociologist S.M. Lipset put it in his seminal Revolution and Counterrevolution (1968) “If there has been any consistent theme in Canadian traditions it is that the country has been spared significant social conflict and violence due to its unique political culture. The idea has been promoted that Canada has always been a tranquil and pacific society – through a process of compromise and peaceful debate. Contrary to the tumultuous republic to the south, Canada is a counter-revolutionary society and a ‘peaceable kingdom.'”
Democracy was ensured through principled elite competition in Parliament (and elsewhere in society) always assuming “a process of compromise and debate” symbolized in the concept of a Loyal Opposition that presented itself as an alternate government-in-waiting.
In current times, Canadian democracy has been vitiated through the near universality of wokester dogma within all of its elites and elite factions. This has resulted in the general population no longer having any effective means to check their governors through choosing between contesting elite groups. Put simply, wokester Canadian elites no longer meaningfully contest within themselves.
The means through which woke uniformity has been created and enforced within significant Canadian elite sectors are highlighted in this excellent case study recently published by Quillette.
https://quillette.com/2021/05/19/gender-activists-co-opted-british-columbias-courts-meet-the-woman-who-stood-up-to-them/
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As a lefty European I had never really questioned the idea of state-run healthcare before. Now I see everyone around me (including those who aren’t so lefty) having zero issues with the idea of regularly bringing the country to a halt to “save” the NHS. Some even seem to have resigned themselves to the idea of regular lockdowns in winter for years to come, which is downright absurd: even if you believe endemic Covid can overwhelm the healthcare system every year (hint: it will not; it didn’t even overwhelm it in 2020-21), wouldn’t it be more practical to expand the system’s capacity while allowing life to continue as normal? Saying that I’m not prepared to sacrifice anything for the NHS other than paying my taxes apparently makes me a neoliberal, right-wing Trumpian and white supremacist or something.
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