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We want more health care, but we don’t want to pay for it
Friday, October 22nd, 2010
October 22, 2010
Maybe Canadians really want more and more money to be put into health care at the expense of everything else… Judging by the legislative committee’s report, Albertans are comfortable with more spending on health relative to everything else, perhaps because the committee didn’t situate health care in the context of other programs. The committee recommended an Alberta Health Act, an Alberta Health Charter, an Alberta Health Council and more “team-based” primary care. What it didn’t do was suggest how to pay for its recommendations.
Tags: budget, Health
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
In his quest for a majority, the PM has fallen off the best path
Sunday, August 15th, 2010
Auguat 14, 2010
His objection to the Progressive Conservatives of Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark was precisely that their “big tent” politics lacked ideological edge and sharp policy focus. That’s why, too, he left the early Reform Party, believing it was too populist and lacking the ideological clarity he thought a right-of-centre party needed. The party he assembled was essentially made up of three groups: the mushy Conservatives of Peter Mackay, the old Reformers, largely from Western Canada, and Mike Harris’s Ontario Conservatives.
Tags: ideology, participation
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
The long form will return. Voters won’t
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
Aug. 10, 2010
The census debate, so provocative and so needless but for the exigencies of ideology, roused civic society as few decisions have done in recent decades. The census will lodge itself in a corner of the electorate’s collective memory as a talisman for what the Harperites might do if given a freer rein and, as such, has ruined what little chance they had of achieving a majority. Canadian democracy, in this long-term sense, has triumphed by rejecting ideology over reason. Some day, the long-form census will return.
Tags: featured, ideology, participation, rights
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
Stats crash at the corner of ideology and reason
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
July 23, 2010
What Canadians are witnessing in the census saga is the temporary triumph of ideology over reason. Through the collective voices of their civic, religious and political institutions, Canadians apparently understand the threat – which is why they’ve rallied so strongly against the Harper government’s decision to scrap the mandatory long-form census. .. The Statistics Canada fight is not the usual clash of competing political visions, of left against right, of Conservatives against progressives. Rather, this is a fight about rational decision-making that requires the best fact-based evidence available against a reliance on ideological nostrums that scorn facts and reason when they stand in the way of those nostrums.
Tags: ideology, rights, standard of living
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
Battling aboriginal tradition
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
July 27, 2010
The ideology of contemporary aboriginal Canada is about self-government, self-determination and allowing people to remain on their traditional territories. Against this ambition are the facts… “people are running away.” Running away from reserves that are economically defunct or marginal, running toward cities, where they hope to find better education, better jobs… The overwhelming voice of aboriginal Canada, Mr. Podlasly argues, is owned by the chiefs and their councils, whose mantra of self-government is mocked by facts on the ground…
Tags: Indigenous, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Equality Debates | No Comments »
And the worst record on timely access to primary care goes to …
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
July 20, 2010
… after-inflation annual growth in Canadian health-care spending from 2000 to 2008 rose 3.4 per cent, while GDP growth in the same period increased 1.4 per cent. That 2-per-cent annual gap between health-care spending increase and GDP growth was higher than in any country except the U.S. and Britain. It also explains why health-care spending is pinching provincial budgets, even in provinces where the tax take has risen… A huge systemic problem is allocation of hospital beds. A chronic shortage of long-term-care beds exists…
Tags: Health, standard of living
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
PM’s census policy senseless but great for the party
Sunday, July 18th, 2010
Jul. 17, 2010
… here was an issue that could activate his party’s populist base – that could galvanize the core with bogus but potent arguments about the perils of the “nanny state,” the “elites,” the “bureaucrats,” the same sort of people who connive to take away your guns, raise your taxes and threaten your liberties, against whom only the Harper government stands resolute… When it comes to their core ideology, or policy positions they think will win political gain, no facts, no expert opinions, no learned arguments from inside or outside the government will deter them.
Tags: ideology, participation, rights
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
The true costs of ‘truth in sentencing’
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
June 29, 2010
There’s a difference between being “tough on crime,” as the federal Conservatives profess to be, and being stupid about crime, which is what they are. A case in point is their Truth in Sentencing Act, which will do next to nothing about bringing down crime, the rates of which are falling year after year. The act, however, will do a great deal to increase the costs of incarceration in Canada… More crowding would fit nicely with “tough on crime” or “let ’em rot in hell” rhetoric. It would do nothing, of course, in reducing recidivism rates, let alone rehabilitation.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, ideology
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Desperate measures don’t have to be stupid measures
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
Jun. 16, 2010
What Liberals cannot do, and would be crazy to contemplate, is a merger with the New Democratic Party. Merger is constitutionally impossible for both parties, politically unwise and, more important, intellectually bankrupt. A coalition after the next election? To paraphrase a great Liberal leader: a coalition if necessary but not necessarily a coalition.
Tags: ideology
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
The price we pay for a government of fear
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
June 8, 2010
Although centralized control of messaging has been a growing feature of federal governments – indeed, governments in many democracies – nothing in Canada has come close to the attention, time and effort the Harper government puts into managing and manipulating information and image-making. … there is widespread disgust at this centralized mania for message control, since it leaves public servants feeling neutered, their expertise unwanted. They are replaced instead for explanatory purposes about policy by young ministerial staffers who seldom know much about anything, except guarding their rear ends against the PMO.
Tags: featured, participation
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
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