We’ve had a couple of posts on the dire state of Canadian health care. Why not pile on with one on the overall surrender of the Great White North to the reckless wokery of its leader?
Tag: canada
Subsidize demand. Restrict supply.
If you want something for “free,” make sure the government isn’t the payor. It’s a classic moral hazard.
In the case of any shortfall of the “free” good or service, the government will appeal to the people they saddled with the costs. AKA taxpayers. It’s the taxpayers fault for not paying enough. Or, it’s the taxpayers who are being hurt (by our policies) and must have relief!
Raising taxes is one solution. Reducing services is another. Doing both is optimal for your government. And when the drain on the Treasury can be reduced by eliminating customers… well health care isn’t where you want that to happen.
Those of you who think corporations are dispassionate have never considered the heights of dispassion available to the organization that controls the currency and monopolizes the ‘legal’ use of deadly force. Which may come from a gun or a syringe.
“Free” health care
Canada continues its long running demonstration that health care is not the same as health insurance. That ceding control of your health care based on promises from government health ‘insurers’ is a sucker’s move.
It’s been awhile since I mentioned Canada’s health ‘care’ system as a cautionary tale, but with the US Democrat hegemony piling more money into Obamacare with the Inflation Resurgence Reduction Act, you might be interested in what awaits us if the Dem’s universal health care dreams continue.
July 22nd, 2022
As Canada’s health system burns, Trudeau and the provinces debate the firehose
“A public health-care system that was already straining before the pandemic is now visibly coming apart.”
Aug 9, 2022
Healthcare costs for average Canadian family to hit $16,000 this year
A typical Canadian family of four will pay about $15,847 for public healthcare insurance this year, according to a study done by the Fraser Institute.
“Canadians pay a substantial amount of money for healthcare through a variety of taxes, even if we don’t pay directly for medical services,” said Fraser Institute director of health policy studies and study co-author Bacchus Barua in a Tuesday statement.
GOLDSTEIN: Canadian medicare — high costs, long waits, mediocre outcomes
Long before the pandemic hit, the myth of “free” Canadian health care gave us one of the most expensive health-care systems, with some of the longest medical wait times in the developed world, with mediocre outcomes judged by international standards.
Speaking of pandemic: Canada maintains the most draconian conglomeration of CCP virus mandates anywhere outside of China or North Korea. You can look it up. The government can do this because they can say your health insurance doesn’t apply to your health care if you don’t do what you are told.
Some looking it up examples: Make sure you find some info about Tamara Lich.
Artur Pawlowski is another example of free speech suppression. The Powlowski charges have been overturned.
Tamara Lich is still a political prisoner.
Erewhon
Forcible modification of basic human behavior is the Utopian’s dream and necessity. It’s what the attack on free speech is about. If you can’t say something without fear of punishment, self censorship will eventually disable your ability to even think about it.
In a debate with a Utopian, you might cite the failure of previous attempts to establish heaven on earth – in WWII Germany, China during Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” Cambodia under Pol Pot, Venezuela under Maduro, Cuba under Castro, Ukraine under Stalin, etc. etc..
It will avail you not. The fall back response is that the right people weren’t in charge. Utopia’s never really been tried.
The people currently volunteering to try their hand at being the right people run the World Economic Forum.
The WEF is an NGO apparently operating under the delusion that ‘the problem’ can be solved by instituting tyranny in multiple countries simultaneously:
World Economic Forum (WEF) head Klaus Schwab wrote back in June, “the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”
John Kerry’s on board, if you were wondering how stupidly bad this idea is.
If you weren’t wondering, maybe Milton Friedman can help you overcome Schwab and Kerry’s assumption that if things aren’t perfect, we can only fix them by forcibly changing human behavior to accord with the utopian visions of elite collectivists.
Take that as a 2 minute introduction to the longer conversation below. That conversation examines the results of WEF policy implementation.
Objections to the WEF agenda are often described as “conspiracy theories.” My understanding of conspiracy theories is that they describe secret plans of which only the theorists are aware.
The WEF makes no secret of its plans. Fortunately, discussions of these plans are not yet banned by YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Such a ban would also be an open conspiracy. And not a theory.
Jordan Peterson and Micheal Yon are still allowed to discuss Dutch farmer’s protests against WEF inspired ideas which would destroy farming in the Netherlands. This is an hour and 20+. It is not going to enhance your optimism. It is quite worth watching.
I leave you with one takeaway in case you do not spend the time on the video: Tiny Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of food. Dutch farmers arguably constitute the most efficient agricultural system in the world. Even as they are distracted by keeping their fingers in the dikes.
The WEF hegemony places them in its crosshairs. The WEF premise: Nitrogen in fertilizer is a catastrophic global warming threat. Dutch farmers use too much nitrogen. It must stop.
The Dutch government agrees. It intends to destroy its agricultural supremacy. In favor of what ecological improvement, exactly? Who will replace the world’s second largest food exporter with less environmental impact? Somalia? Bangladesh?
It won’t be Sri Lanka. Because Sri Lanka already tried implementing the same plan the Netherlands government is contemplating. It didn’t work out well. Sri Lankans are starving because food crops have been triple decimated. Fuel is not scarce, though. It is unavailable. Food exports were the major source of foreign currency to buy gasoline and diesel fuel.
This attack on farmers is not limited to the Netherlands. Canada is on the same track. Despite the horrific results in Sri Lanka.
And Canada’s plan to ruin farming is just one of their problems. If you’re up for more Peterson, this is a devastating look at Canada’s Sorry State. But, I digress.
The goal of The Great Reset is a drastic reduction in the human population through immiseration, starvation, and chaos. In Germany, for example, it’s manifesting as an energy shortage. The Germans closed down perfectly viable nuclear plants in favor of windmills, and solar panels, and Russian natural gas. They were burning more CO2 intensive coal to make up for energy shortfalls even before the Russians turned Nordstream off. Now Germans are gathering wood to burn for heat this winter.
“What did environmentalists use for lighting before candles? …Electricity.”
Warmth is marginally before food in the hierarchy of needs. You die more quickly from hypothermia than from starvation. Not a whole lot faster, but rioting warms you at least until you collapse from malnutrition.
It will get worse for the Germans when they can’t import food from the Netherlands and have lessened ability to grow their own because of fertilizer shortages. The major process for making fertilizer involves natural gas. Germany is already restricting hot water, and is very unlikely to have sufficient gas for home heating this winter, much less for fertilizer production going into next spring.
Dissent, a shared idea
“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air — that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.”
— H.L. Mencken
Ukrainians and Freedom Convoy truckers share this principle. You may disagree with their interpretation. If so: Use your words. And don’t try changing the definition of freedom.
The immediate risk of asserting that they are freemen is higher for Ukrainians than for truckers. The long term consequences of failure to resist tyranny are the same.
Trudeaupia’s false choice is that 1984 is not different from Brave New World. Though Justin did resort to the former when his estimation of the completeness of the latter turned out to be overly optimistic.
The Catastrophe of Canada | Rex Murphy and Jordan B Peterson
This is an important conversation.
What is happening in Canada is dreadful, not least because should Justin Trudeau remain in power it will show Canadians are not who they thought they were, do not have the institutions they thought they did, and are uninterested in recovering either their culture or representative democracy.
Is there some flaw in the British parliamentary system that has been exposed by the pandemic and changes wrought by social media? I wonder because, while serious authoritarian overreach can be alleged in most neoliberal democracies, Australia and New Zealand seem more up front about it than most. This most certainly includes the United States.
An hour. If you need an incentive to watch the whole thing, Here is a 5 minute summary. What goes before explores why it’s true.
Keep on Truckin’
It was not enough that GoFundMe, at the direction of Canadian apparatchiks, attempted to redistribute 9 million dollars given to Canada’s Freedom Convoy.
No, somebody had to perpetrate a DDOS attack against GiveSendGo‘s replacement campaign. The new Freedom Convoy donation site GiveSendGo is working this morning. I was able to donate an hour ago.
This degree of cooperation between the state and corporations is a matter of some concern. In this case, it appears GoFundMe volunteered to act as an arm of the State, as evidenced by extra punishment GoFundMe planned to visit on the truckers and anyone supporting them:
1) Requiring application for a refund, counter to GoFundMe’s SOP.
2) Setting a short window in which to apply for the refund.
3) Their differential treatment of the 2020’s Seattle insurrectionists. More below.
Dr. Julie Ponesse* has a worthwhile interview with Jordan Peterson about the political and social aspects of the protest. I’ve queued it up to JBP’s contention that the Canadian State coercion of GoFundMe as an inflection point more dangerous “to our collective health than the pandemic”. I would frame that as “the health of our polity”, but you get the point.
GoFundMe started out with a hypocrisy problem since they had promoted participants in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone occupation of Seattle, as Elon Musk pointed out.
The Seattle “summer of love,” to quote Seattle’s mayor, was, in fact, an insurrection. Police were besieged, government buildings were torched, looting was rampant, and murder was committed while GoFundMe promoted the occupation – in line with mayor Durkan’s gauzy ‘flowers in their hair’ puffery. The Antifa/BLM occupiers claimed sovereign control of part of Durkan’s city. It was an insurrection by any reasonable definition.
The Freedom Convoy has done none of that, but the Ottawa police and some faceless Morlocks in the Liberal government were able to convince GoFundMe to not only spike the Freedom Convoy donations, but also to force those who contributed to file forms to get their money back.
“We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity,” GoFundMe wrote in a statement.
Donors have until Feb. 19 to ask for a refund, and the rest of the money the group raised would be allocated to “credible and established charities” chosen by Freedom Convoy organizers, the site said.
Well, you certainly had the evidence of your own eyes in Seattle.
And, right. Define credible and established for me. Ottawa Police Benevolent Association?
GoFundMe would have ‘allowed’ (?!) the convoy organizers to send the money to support the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (Brian Peckford’s** lawsuit), the Fraser Institute, the Canadian Constitution Foundation, Canada Strong and Free Network? They are established. Will Justin Trudeau find them credible, or do they promote unacceptable ideas?
GoFundMe got shellacked for this attempted larceny, and are now following their standard practice: automatic refunds. But it’s far from over. You have to wonder how soon the name and address data GoFundMe collected will be forwarded to the Ottawa constabulary:
Ottawa Police have also warned that they will be collecting as much digital and financial information as they can from both the truckers and anybody who donates to support them. In a threatening statement, the police implied that supporters of the Freedom Convoy could face prosecution just for donating.
Enhanced intelligence operations and investigations: National, provincial and local intelligence agencies have increased efforts to identify and target protestors who are funding/supporting/enabling unlawful and harmful activity by protestors. /11
— Ottawa Police (@OttawaPolice) February 4, 2022Investigative evidence-gathering teams are collecting financial, digital, vehicle registration, driver identification, insurance status, and other related evidence that will be used in criminal prosecutions. /12
— Ottawa Police (@OttawaPolice) February 4, 2022
Peterson has a point.
Footnote:
There’s a lot of raw video out there from Ottawa, but a good place to go for news on the Freedom Convoy is Rebel News’: Convoy Reports. The legacy media is doing all it can to vilify the protesters.
*Dr. Julie Ponesse is a professor of ethics who has taught at Ontario’s Huron University College for 20 years. She was placed on leave and banned from accessing her campus due to the vaccine mandate…
**The only surviving drafter and signatory 40 years after the 1982 Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted.