Machjo

It's time to explore our advantages. Raising carbon taxes will logically reduce motor-vehicle production. How could the government not have anticipated this? That being said, what are our advantages? If the carbon tax were revenue neutral, then we could argue that while the automotive industry might experience decline, other less fuel-dependent industries could benefit from the tax reduction to compensate. Unfortunately, the carbon tax was not revenue neutral, but an overall tax increase. In other words, we made it harder for the auto industry to grow without making it easier for other industries to take its place.

Individuals can be proactive too. For example, would it be that difficult to install security cameras at your home? Not only would if film criminals, but it would film police officers abusing their power too, no?

Chinese law requires all PRC officers to carry body cams. Hong Kong is presently considering the same. If a poorer country like China can afford body cams for each officer, how is it that a more developed country like Canada can't afford body cams for its? Sure some municipal police forces in Canada have body cams, but most still don't. Canada should take China's lead on this.

As I said in the OP: I'm not saying that I favour state funding of the press, I'm just exploring how the state should fund it if it does decide to fund it. As far as I can tell, if the state must fund it, it would be best to make it consumer-driven, and I think a media-voucher program would be the best model for that.

I actually question whether the government should be funding the media at all. But I'll play the devil's advocate here and presume a priori that the government does need to fund media. Based on that, how do we ensure the independence of the media? My personal solution might be for the government to hand out an electronic media-voucher to each resident of Canada over the age of fifteen for himself and for any dependent under the age of fifteen, that he could use to subscribe to participating media of his choice with participating media being bound by reasonable censorship such as censoring the promotion of addictive products and services ranging from alcohol to tobacco to porn to gambling, etc. If the government must fund media, how would you propose that the government fund it?

Instead of being against something, why not be for something?

The government to whom he'd paid the taxes?

I thought personal UNICEF donations were partially tax deductible.

The state in most cases.

Wouldn't a trucker pay the tax and so pass the cost on to the consumer?

That's why I support right-to-work laws. Heck, Sweden has right-to-work laws and even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) declares the right to work. The UDHR guarantees freedom of association too.

Interesting. Could you elaborate on that?

I agree that we share a common legal and official culture. I'm just saying that we lack any common culture outside of official contexts.

Bear in mind that life is more expensive here too, which is why some people return to their home country. For example, I used to work in Montreal and later Toronto. Though I earned less in Montreal than in Toronto, my pay after expenses was higher in Montreal just because of the lower overall cost of living. In other words, moving to Toronto was a mistake. At least that's how it was at the time. I imagine that at least some immigrants likewise soon discover that they need to consider not only how much they can earn in Canada compared to abroad, but also how much they'll spend here compared to there too. That said, I agree that genuine refugees aside, we need to cut all access to social services. We also need to make taxes more user-pay, such as a carbon tax to ensure everyone pays for the roads they use. permanent residency should be more difficult to obtain, but working in Canada visa-free should be easier, but they shouldn't get any GST, carbon, or any other credit from the government. In other words, they must support themselves and be self-sufficient. That's one thing I like about Hong Kong's and Singapore's immigration systems: it's easy to immigrate there but it's not easy to receive social assistance there. It's like saying let the market take care of it.

I don't think the problem is with immigration but rather with easy access to social assistance. If an immigrant had get his own private health care, had no access to social assistance (other than a one-way ticket home), etc., then I don't see how immigration would then be a problem.

I'm not too sure about that. The NDP was a champion of official bilingualism until one of its MPs, Romeo Saganash, decided to break rank and point out some of the problems associated with it. Now Jagmeet Singh still doesn't seem to know where to stand on the matter. Sometimes it's just a matter of pointing out some facts. A member of any party can do that. With his own party now divided on the matter, I'm curious to see how Jagmeet Singh will handle this come next election. In some respects, Bernier is to the Conservative Party what Saganash is to the NDP: a challenger from within of the party's established dogma.

Agreed. Perhaps it takes a politician who could galvanize voters by pointing out how Morocco's system surpasses Canada's, how Canada's sits thirtieth on the scale, and how all of the superior systems are more open mixed systems and how Canada's more closely resembles the US system than it does the others. Even in the rankings, with Canada's 30th and the US' 35th, we sit closer to the US than we do to France. Put it that way, and it might wake some voters up and put the anti-mixed-system politicians on the defensive. Right now they can stay on the offensive always comparing us to the US. Replace the US with France and the other 29 countries above us, and suddenly that would change the debate. If a politician insists on comparing Canada to the US, the other could challenge his US-centric views. Politically, this might wake the public up to realizing just how US-centric we really are in our health-care system in that it seems more like an irrational reaction to the US one than an actual attempt to create a better system.

But politically speaking, to propose allowing it on reserves could blend with the politically correct notion of indigenous sovereignty. In the age of reconciliation, should Canada really be telling indigenous peoples what kind of health care system they can get? Put it that way in an election campaign, and the NDP would blow a fuse. Just look at how Jagmeet Singh reacted to Romeo Saganash's opposition to compulsory official bilingualism for supreme court judges because it would discriminate against unofficially bilingual indigenous candidates. He ended up trying to play both sides of the fence and the NDP's policy on the matter has been divided and muddied ever since with no one still knowing where exactly the NDP stands on the issue. Present private health care in the same vein, and suddenly even the NDP would be stuck between defending mostly one-tiered public health care and indigenous sovereignty. To be honest, I loved how Saganash's position threw the NDP into chaos on that matter and the NDP still hasn't resolved it yet.

Or willing to travel abroad for it... but then that just adds to travel costs and pushes Canadians to fund private health care abroad too. Heck, it makes for a good business opportunity. I remember once considering, if Canadians really refuse to fully copy better systems, to at least exempt indigenous reserves from these rules. That way, a private business could set up a hospital on a reserve and Canadians who wanted private health care could go there. It would also provide tax revenue for the reserve rather than ship it abroad.

I agree, and that's harmful to Canada. Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which the US system was the worst in the world and the Canadian one the second worst. According to the present popular mind set in Canada, we'd tap each other on the back for a job well done while ignoring all of the other countries with a far superior system to ours.

I agree, but still the US system is comparatively speaking a more free market and government strives to try to make it so, just as the Canadian system, for all of the free-market components within it, strives to be as public and as non-private as possible. There is still an ideological attempt at making it a pure system in either direction, with both systems having to compromise since clearly a mixed system would work better as other states have shown and as Canada and the US strive to reject.

Ironically, Canadians' focus on the US system might actually undermine the Canadian system too. For example, Canadians notice how our system surpasses the US system and then smugly assume that ours is the best in the world (because of course Canada's world consists of Canada and the US) while overlooking the fact that around 24 other states around the world (including Morocco's) surpass Canada's. Another Canadian error is to assume that if one extreme doesn't work, the answer is to turn to the other extreme. In other words, since Canadian mostly public health care surpasses the US' mostly private care, then certainly the more public and the less private it becomes, the better it will be. Of course it's a fallacy, but I think some Canadian voters probably buy into such a simplistic argument while ignoring that perhaps a happy-medium system could surpass even the Canadian system by far.

And according to the World Health Organization, Germany's ranks 25th, Canada's 30th. so clearly we can learn from the more mixed systems that outperform ours rather than to just buckle down in the name of ideological purity.

Sorry, but I didn't mean in absolute terms. Both Canada's and the US' systems are mixed to varying degrees, but still, the US system is far more private than public just as the Canadian one is far more public than private, with the European, Hong Kong, Singaporean, and others finding a healthier balance between these two extremes and providing better health care systems overall. In many respects, the Canadian and US systems resemble one another more than either do other systems in that they both strive to conform to some notion of ideological purity (free-market capitalist in the US and equal access to health care for all in Canada) rather than to adopt a pragmatic approach to learn from the best systems even if they aren't so ideologically pure in either direction.

Here's the catch. When we legally prohibit the private sector from providing services that the public sector provides, we force all but the wealthiest (i.e. those who can afford to travel abroad for private healthcare) into the waiting queue. In the name of ensuring that the moderately-wealthy suffer as much as the poor, we force them into the queue even if it inflicts more punishment onto the poor. In other words, the goal is less about helping the poor and more about punishing the wealthy even if it hurts the poor even more. If we allowed private provision of the same services that the state provides, the moderately-rich might choose to bow out of the queue and pay their own way and so... get this... allow the poor to get services more quickly too. Now one argument is that private services would compete with public funding for the few qualified physicians. In the short term, that's true and so might not shorten the public queue at least initially (though it won't worsen it either). In the long term though, due to more money going to healthcare overall with the moderately rich spending more money money on it that they presently are not legally allowed to do in Canada, they would attract more physicians to Canada to fill the increased demand. As the market adjusts, the queue for public services would slowly start to shrink and so start to benefit the poor who can't afford private health care. The European, Hong Kong, Singaporean, and other experiences can vouch for this. Two-tiered actually helps the poor in the long run by allowing the moderately rich to bow out of the queue,, add more funding to the industry, and so attract more physicians. And let's not confuse two-tiered with the US one-tiered. I that respect, the US and Canadian systems share more in common with one another (the US mostly one-tiered private health-care and Canada mostly one-tiered public health care) than they do with some of the best systems on the world all of which are two-tiered). At the end of the day, to prohibit a truly two-tiered system (again, not to be confused with the US' mostly one-tiered system) has a a goal not so much to help the poor but to punish the moderately rich at the expense of the poor all for the sake of maintaining ideological purity rather than basing decisions on actual research.