Free Health Care
The wisdom of Brian Day
The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Monday, January 21, 2008Few people have done more to raise the issue of medical wait times than Dr. Brian Day. Dr. Day and the Canadian Medical Association he heads are at it again.
This time they have released a study showing that long waits for medical care cost the Canadian economy $14.8 billion in 2007.
As well, the report shows that the federal and provincial governments failed to collect $4.4 billion in taxes because Canadians were waiting for health care.
…”Forcing patients to endure pain and suffering in order to sustain a social program is wrong,” the CMA chief said.
Freedom of speech
What a strange place Canada is
Indeed.
EZRA LEVANT
Special to Globe and Mail Update
January 21, 2008 at 12:32 AM ESTA few days ago, I was interrogated for 90 minutes by Shirlene McGovern, an officer of the government of Alberta. I have been accused of hurting people’s feelings because, two years ago, I published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed in the Western Standard magazine.
Ms. McGovern’s business card said she was a “Human Rights Officer.” What a perfectly Orwellian title.
Early in her interrogation, she said “I always ask people … what was your intent and purpose of your article?”
It wasn’t even a question about what we had published in the magazine. It was a question about my private thoughts. I asked her why my private feelings were of interest to the government. She said, very calmly, that they would be a factor taken into account by the government in determining whether or not I was guilty.
Officer McGovern said it as calmly as if I had asked her what time it was.
When she’s doing government interrogations, she always asks people about their thoughts.
…What a strange place Canada is in 2008, where the police care more about human rights than the human rights commissions do, where fundamentalist Muslims use hate-speech laws drafted by secular Jews, and where a government bureaucrat can interrogate a publisher for 90 minutes, and be shocked when he won’t shake her hand in greeting.
Read the whole thing in both cases.