cannuck

And why would you deny me the choice of being forced to accept one model of care delivery over another????? What we have that IMHO we need to keep is a bit of a health care system, in which information and programmes are delivered to help us be, remain or become healthy. That is very much in the best interest of our government, as it also provides the insurance that must pay for our ignorance of health when we are sick or when tragedy results in injury. Government here and in many countries does a decent job of funding both health and sick care. Where government fails miserably is in service delivery. What we allow only on an extremely limited basis other countries allow far more private business to deliver sick care services. In most of Canada, you can only do that if the treatment falls outside of what has been determined to be "in scope" for our state funded and administered service delivery network. Raising this socialist "politics of envy" and very divisive attitude that if I have been fortunate or skilled enough to have some resources available that I should be denied the ability to provide for myself and my family to the best of my ability. That IN NO WAY denies anything to anyone else, but what you suggest would be denying ME and my family that which we SHOULD be entitled to pursue. In fact, letting private diagnostic and treatment service delivery stand side-by-side with publicly operated service REDUCES the load causing backlogs. In such an arrangement, ANY service provided should be paid to either the public or private delivery system at the same rate, and the private ones should be free to charge the consumer whatever premium they need to provide service as a competing business.

When we moved out of the North our target was prairies or the most suitable part of USA. We had been to Wisconsin quite often (Oshkosh - largest experimental airplane gathering in the world - 10,000 airplanes and over half million people). No two places could be much different from MOST of WI (i.e. outside of the strip of towns and cities along W shore of Lake Michigan - which are essentially an extension of Chicago). The East strip along the lake is mostly industrial, with a lot of dying heavy industry to the North and small more modern and solvent South towards Chicago. BUT: once you get into the rest of the state, it is a very Germanic, beautiful and friendly place. One particular high school in the South center has consistently the highest test scores in the country. USA and Canada are very much alike in one important way: big cities are essentially A-hole factories but rural areas and smaller centers are extremely welcoming places with a very different lifestyle. BIG difference between any place in USA and Canada is of course the sick care system. If you don't have a gold standard insurance plan (VERY expensive) it can be pretty shaky. The largest cause of personal bankruptcy in the USA is medical costs. Sick care insurance in Canada is all funded by government and service delivery is a mix of private clinics and government hospitals. While it may not be perfect, it gets far better results overall than the US at less than half the cost. If you are a big city person, then Toronto could suit you well. It is very diverse ethnically and has some of pretty much anything one could want. But a very expensive place to live (typical of any major city, but competing with Vancouver for highest costs in Canada). Our final choice for US living was Appleton WI, but since too small for a good University (we were going to raise kids and wanted them to be able to stay home when studying) we ended up near Saskatoon SK (small enough city to avoid much of the crime, drugs, etc. of really big cities). We have a business in WY and would be happy to live there, but not a place we would want to raise our kids (again, they would have to leave to finish education).

OK, we have heard from the city folk, now maybe consider what someone who has lived and worked with indigenous communities thinks when they hear this BS. Take a family with enough problems to force social services to take their child or children away for safety reasons then throw $40k, $80k or $120k or more at them and you will now likely have very well financed version of MORE of the same problems that caused the ruckus in the first place.

Morocco just signed onto the One Belt, One Road programme - the first in Africa to officially capitulate. To be fair, the battle for the resources of the Dark Continent began a very long time ago when the head of the KGB declared that: "the future of Mother Russia lies in the breadbasket of Southern Africa" or some translated words to that effect (Mikhail Gorbachev - who is actually a pretty good guy). All of the Angolan and such wars in the Maghreb with lots of Cuban participation, etc. were part of the Communist version of globalization. A VERY bright Deng Xiaoping (educated in France) knew enough of how the world works to free China from the horrible constraints of Maoism and use CCP authority to exploit the useful concepts of a Capitalist economy to unleash the massive productive capacity of the Chinese people. CCP simply went back to the old school Communist ambitions and used capitalism as the ultimate weapon against capitalism - while the capitalist world greedily shifted their focus from adding value and creating wealth to Casino Capitalism where the aim is to redistribute wealth and increase the money supply without the bother of having to create any value.

I keep a couple of AWD cars for daily drivers and switch one to studless snows and the other to some REALLY aggressive studs for winter, but have a 4x4 truck for farm and work - as do tens of thousands of Canadians thinking they are somehow "better" in snow. Truth is: the most dangerous thing on the road in the winter is a pickup truck with no load and in 2WD (really bad weight distribution leaving the drive axle to easily break traction). Sadly, since there is no center differential, switching them to 4WD can get you going in deep snow but is far worse for turning and stopping. Another problem with trucks as the weight goes up is that the tire compounds get hard and the tread blocks larger - making them far, far poorer performers on ice and compacted snow. Ideally, genuine AWD is king, but the low-buck "automatic" 4WD systems (GM in particular) that only engage the front axle when rear breaks loose do a fair job of addressing that problem. There is a lot more to winter tire selection and driving than you will ever learn from most "normal" sources. If you want to learn the real details, find someone who has raced in the "rubber-to-ice" classes in sports car clubs. Then see if you can get some instruction (some clubs offer that) to learn car control and your limits. The vast majority of "common knowledge" is really old wives' tales when it comes to winter driving.

Sadly, I must agree. The real question is when will Canadians stop being completely ignorant of the real issues and continue to elect virtue signaling morons who buy their votes with our grandchildren's money. Then there is the obvious follow-on question: when will the so-called Conservatives put together a slate of conservative candidates instead of trying to out liberal the Liberals???

Partisan BS all put aside: If getting government completely out of the sick care process worked, then the US would have costs similar to ours instead of double and their results would be better, not the dismally worse that they are. Trying to treat medicine (a social service) as a business simply doesn't work all that well - except for the minority that can afford good sick care. I think you will find the COVID experience in the US was little different for other patients from what it was here. AND, they had and continue to have far higher mortality results. Really sad that people on waiting lists died or deteriorated into untreatable status, but you could say the same thing about putting them in the place of someone who would have died without the ability of the available facilities to treat their Wuhan Virus.

My Father died on his 50th birthday from medical incompetence and we got to bury him on Christmas Eve, so I genuinely understand your feelings. However, bankrupting the country and tens of thousands of Canadians a year by introducing US style sick care is exactly the wrong thing to do, and will solve nothing. Maybe you should look into WHY medical professionals feel so disconnected as to become error prone and seemingly uncaring. I also agree with your efforts to point out the error rate and consequences. Punishment IMHO is not the solution, but making it a public issue should help. I have a number of very close friends who are MDs, DVMs or specialists in a number of countries, and I can tell the one thing they have in common is EXTREME efforts to be good at their job and they are literally the most compassionate individuals I have ever known. One actually builds and operates hospitals over a 10 year period and GIVES them to their host countries. Another (pediatric surgeon) even designs and builds his own surgical tools as the world doesn't exactly cater to the highly specialized small size equipment required. I also see another peds guy study and develop a procedure for WEEKS before putting together the team and equipment for difficult operations. These are not slap-happy "git-er done" cowboys, but I also listen to my daughter (veterinary emerg and trauma) about how quickly she has to make life-and-death decisions when presented with a case. I wish is was a simple as just get government (the den of total incompetence) to "change things" but the problem is far more complicated and needs the profession fully involved and committed to fixing the problems to make it work. Don't give up the fight, but please try to understand and seek a realistic and workable solution.

This is a wild oversimplification of the situation. First of all, why would you assume that some kind of privatization would make any difference to the frequency or severity of "medical mistakes"?? Secondly: people who do things make mistakes. All day, every day, every profession, trade and category of labour, people make mistakes. Finally: we don't have to wonder how privatized medicine works, we can just look straight South and see that such a system costs more that twice as much $$$$ as what we have and delivers outcomes far down the scale from what we get. You need to separate out what function is what function, who can best do those functions and finally what factors keep them from working as intended and remove those "problem" components. To begin with: medical doctors do NOT deliver much in the line of "health care", they mostly provide "sick care". to understand this: as with anything else, follow the gold. There is very little money in medicine until someone gets sick or injured. The drug business is a perfect example of how and why sick care is done the we it is - it is how the big bux flow into the picture. To my mind: the best way to make GPs switch from pill pushers for Big Pharma into health care providers is assign each one "X" patients and pay them for the ones who are healthy and alive. This was once done in China (so I was told when we worked out of a medical university campus in Guangzhou). What needs to be publicly funded is just that: HEALTH care. Moving some of the resources from sick care to health care would be critical to delivery. What needs to be 100% publicly funded is the insurance side (funding) as it more-or-less is now in Canada. What can be (and to some extent already is here) privately owned is service delivery. BUT: look at what happens in the US when you do that with Big Legal, Big Insurance and Big Pharma having carte blanche to exploit the system. Most of US sick care costs are based on the insurance component of the LLL (Legal Liability Lottery). One of the very few economic advantages we have in Canadian business over our Southern competing neighbours is our sick care system. It is far from perfect, but it allows business a free hand to be business instead of wasting billions (here) and TRILLIONS (in the US) on an army of blood sucking lawyers, insurers, administrators, risk managers, etc. We just need to tweek our delivery schemes to be more cost and medically effective. The idea that you can wave a magic wand and take the risk out of making split second decisions in care delivery of people in highly compromised and critical situations is ludicrous.

AGREED, you clearly don't get much outside of the loonie left talking papers.

If you actually gave a flying purple fuck about actual sustainability you and the rest of the mindless woke masses would not jump aboard the pure STUPIDITY of protesting pipelines. lt IS 100% about the method of transportation as the one you idiots protest is by far the safest that results in increased use of by far THE most dangerous and polluting way of meeting your endless needs to consume (your REAL needs, not your virtue signaling BS crap).. Pull your collective heads out of your asses and you will see that the problem is not immigration, it is population. The loonie left seldom if EVER points out the exceedingly obvious: people use things and damage the environment but at 7 going on 8 billion we are long past the level where this planet is sustainable. Devising more totally ridiculous ways of doing more of the same thing (Li ion battery electric vehicles - THE most polluting way of moving people and things around as a perfect example) not only delays but ACCERATES our trip to the end of sustainability. The first thing to do, but the last thing the so-called "environmentalist" movement seems to be barely capable of understanding is to do LESS. What really needs to be discussed is how to have SIGNIFICANTLY less population AND DO IT NOW. Your ilk have neither the brains nor the balls to deal with any real issues in an effective way.

And putting the oil and fuel you WILL use onto a rail or highway driven by an illegal, untrained, forced work driver - each with HORRIBLE safety records - is an improvement over pipelines (with overall reasonable safety records, HUGE level of oversight and resources to respond to safety needs)?????

As an engineering student with ice racing as a hobby at that time, this thread reminds me of going to a certain short link between Northbound Pembina Hwy East to Main St. in Winnipeg on first snow in the late '60s. Four lanes of traffic coming off of Pembina and turned gradually to the left, still 4 lanes then slowed to a sharp right with 2 traffic lanes and parking lanes on either side. Anyone careless enough to park on the outside of that corner was guaranteed to be crashed from behind on the first mornings of fresh snow this time of year. They long ago changed that route, but it was worth the wait to see how predictably incompetent drivers are. Decades later, in business with a guy who lived in a nice neighbourhood in North York who would bundle up in a parka and take his morning coffee and newspaper out onto the summer porch to watch the...uh...."Newly Arrived Canadians" back their new Mercedes down the steep driveways on his street and crash into each other at the bottom during their first snow day. I can also remember a trip to his place in the '90s on a fall snow day and was stunned to see some complete IDIOT driving a BMTrouble-you motorcycle down the 401 in slush 6" deep, both feet down, 60/70 kph and slithering between the usual bunch of semis. Yeah, we are pretty stupid when it comes to driving.

My Grammar was English and she corrected me often until her dying day.

Why would I put money in the hands of some else's company?????? ESPECIALLY one that is predatory in its business practice. What do I tell my shareholders? "I trust some scumbag bankster with my money, not our company in which you have placed YOUR money???" I NEVER gamble on something I can't control nor do anything to give credence to illegitimate and unethical business. I should add: I was trained by the Royal Bank and the knowledge of how they work and what they did gave me the skillset to stop illegal and highly unethical business practices regarding farm foreclosures in the '90s. We also once owned a risk management business that found extreme corruption at the highest levels of another major Canadian chartered bank. You have no idea how bad a corporate citizen banks are.

That is exactly how bank oligopolies work. You have no say in the costs or benefits for the services, and they are all nearly identical from bank to bank. You can walk out one door, but since bank accounts are pretty much a requirement now (ESPECIALLY for a business) you will have to walk into another "competing" door and get screwed over to exactly the same extent. Government, on the other hand, CAN be defeated. Unfortunately, we are so ignorant and greedy we just vote for the one who promises to plunder our grandchildren's bank accounts more than the next one.

You are spending all of your effort tilting at the windmill of the morons elected by the morons who vote them in and are totally ignorant of how a government, how and economy and how a country can and should work. Worse yet, the ultimate perpetrators of this gong show you are giving a complete pass!!!!! For every buck a politician puts in his pocket bankers are taking a thousand, or more like a million. The "essential services" that banks provide use money from the public who are either paid next to nothing or more likely charged through the nose for the privilege of providing banks billions to use for their own gain. Then, there is the whole game beyond the "essential services" in which banksters and their finance bretheren do the "money for nothing" thing by manipulating business and finance for their personal benefit - while creating very little value - just inflationary speculative gains.

Not sure if I am pouring water or gasoline on this fire, but let me relate some of my personal experiences with Wuhan Virus. First of all, I am NOT a medical professional, do not play one on television or youtube but I DID spend a couple weeks at a Holiday Inn Express in IA last month. I DO have a bunch of medical professionals as children and friends, though, so I tend to check my assumptions with them. For those who might want some idea how the Wuhan Virus actually works - here is a link: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2020.00317/full You can pretend I said all of these things to sound smart. On the vax vs. why side: one of my close friends is a pediatric surgeon in UK. He was and remains pro vax simply because as has been posted it can "flatten the curve". His hospital in Manchester has hit the 100% capacity many times. What the street doesn't see is that once they get that cleared, the backlog of surguries leaves him and staff working 18 hour days for weeks to months afterwards to clear up. ANYTHING that can prevent that kind of irregular flow is hugely beneficial. One of my business partners in the US is married to a rabid anti-vaxxer. He tends to follow a fair bit in that path, somewhat to keep peace but also since he is incessantly bombarded with vaccine "poison" stories. It is worth noting that NO vaccine is 100% effective nor 100% safe. As I believe has been pointed out several times by now, NOTHING is 100% safe, but we MUST do some things, such as drive a car or ride a bus that have far, far greater risk that that of vaccination with any approved compound. We also universally CHOOSE to use OTC drugs, illegal drugs, alcohol drugs and processed foods that present far, far greater risk. But in most cases, those choices mostly impact us as individuals and family, not those around us who have no other relationship. Well, my friend (a competitive trap shooter) went to an event in August and reported that he had caught a cold. Mildly syptomatic the next week or two, then on with life. In September, I almost fell over when he told me he had been vaccinated (so we had option of attending meetings on either side of border). No fuss, no muss, just out of the blue got a jab. Well, he is on oxygen now - only way he can get his blood O2 sats up enough to be able to sleep. NOW he admits he is pretty sure he had Wuhan VIrus. I no longer get an anti-vax lecture with every daily report. So, here's the deal: If you read the stuff I linked, you would know the entry point to infection for the SARS Cov2 virus is through ACE2. Any organ that its system is protecting becomes a source of infection for SARS. Problem is: nobody can predict how, or how much damage is going to occur if and when you become infected. Yes, the pulmonary sites are expected, but because of ACE2 involvement damage (as in minor to major, short term to permanent) can occur to vascular, myocardial, renal and even Neurological organs and systems. So, until something better comes along (bear in mind treatment not initiated until patient is symptomatic may be too late to prevent permanent damage) I will look at the numbers (have) and conclude the lowest risk to me and family is to go with the current vaccines. While they may not prevent infection they provide far more likely reduced permanent damage to organs.

What everyone around the masking question doesn't seem to understand is that anything short of a proper N95 (as in NIOSH approved) leaks like a sieve around the bridge of the nose. That dramatically increases the air velocity exhaling (note the frosted glasses on anyone in cold air) and aspirates the very fine droplets that for an infected person WILL contain virus. The ONLY thing a mask will do is to protect others from a massive lugie being horked up by the wearer (sneezing, for instance) but it makes micro particle aspiration into the surrounding space a LOT worse. The big drops a mask will catch would have settled quickly, but micro-droplets can stay airborne for hours. Not a big deal out-of-doors where sun's UV will kill bacteria quickly and it will disperse rapidly in even the lightest breeze, but a REAL problem indoors. Having a bit of experience with how surveys are done, my fear is by asking only the questions that will get the answers you want those mask camp peddling the idiotic notion that a piece of paper or cloth with HUGE leakage is somehow going to save you from infection promotes their agenda that results in people being in close contact indoors in a much higher risk scenario than actual science would or could ever approve.

What REALLY bothers me is that we from extremely diverse political points of view have no trouble conducting a reasonable discussion on this topic with reasonable understandings of the actual problems and reasonable suggestions as to the very obvious solutions. Yet NONE of this occurs at the sovereign nor diplomatic level - just truly idiotic and unsustainable efforts to do more of exactly the same things in slightly different ways. Take the US infrastructure bill right now: not a HINT of reducing the amount of use of infrastructure to transport the same load one way on one side and the other way on the other side and load the highways, trains and airlines up with non-essential travellers. Doesn't matter what side of the Canadian or American UNIPARTY is in power, they do the same things in slightly different ways, but always the same things.

This whole "carbon is the evil and stopping carbon fuels is the solution" is nothing but a ruse to avoid the REAL problems. Of course, at the very top of the list is population (over-population to be more precise). Problem is, developed nations do NOT contribute to that, so the UN gives a nod to developing nations to continue to doom the planet by reproducing like rabbits. Number 2 is globalization: we have displaced so much of our economy to third world and second world where environmental controls are non-existent and then stick the whole mess (that will need to be replaced ever few years due to the dismal QA/QC in place) on ships and move everything constantly around the globe for no other reason than to facilitate quick (and very dirty) profits. #3 (but maybe should be #1 right now) is poisoning the oceans to the extent it will no longer tolerate our filthy lifestyle. Somewhere around #4 is issues regarding carbon emissions. The amount of pollution from such idiocy as mining lithium to make batteries for EVs is far, far worse of a problem - and one that moronic governments promote and subsidize since they seem to be far too ignorant of the state of the ecosystems but more likely far too likely to benefit from playing with and profiting from the "solution" providers.

Only part of the story. We don't have so much of a CO2 emissions problem as a CO2 absorption one. The oceans are THE main sink and store of CO2, but since we have poisoned them so horribly and are killing off plankton at a phenomenal rate of 1% per year, they no longer can absorb the level of CO2 required to maintain a balanced carbon cycle. Most of the anti-CO2 campaign seems to be for the benefit of those who wish to profit from selling cars, etc. that use THE most polluting metal (mining of Lithium) that is insufficient in total know or predicted reserves to put even a small dent in our needs for transportation. Do you have any idea how much money it will cost and how much profit is to be made by replacing every vehicle on the planet???? The solution is not what the Euro-weenies and looney libs are proposing - to do MORE of the things that are destroying our sustainability but in different ways but to do LESS, MUCH< MUCH LESS of those things. Starting with less pollution of oceans. That, and stop reproducing like rabbits. This is a nice, little sustainable planet - for a couple billion or so people, not 7 and well on the way to 10.

Only part of the story. We don't have so much of a CO2 emissions problem as a CO2 absorption one. The oceans are THE main sink and store of CO2, but since we have poisoned them so horribly and are killing off plankton at a phenomenal rate of 1% per year, they no longer can absorb the level of CO2 required to maintain a balanced carbon cycle. Most of the anti-CO2 campaign seems to be for the benefit of those who wish to profit from selling cars, etc. that use THE most polluting metal (mining of Lithium) that is insufficient in total know or predicted reserves to put even a small dent in our needs for transportation. The solution is not what the Euro-weenies and looney libs are proposing - to do MORE of the things that are destroying our sustainability but in different ways but to do LESS, MUCH< MUCH LESS of those things. Starting with less pollution of oceans. That, and stop reproducing like rabbits. This is a nice, little sustainable planet - for a couple billion or so people, not 7 and well on the way to 10.