Sunday 30 June 2019

Canada Day


Tomorrow Canada will be 152 years old. 152 years is relatively young for a country, especially when you consider our young neighbor to the south celebrated their bicentennial forty three years ago. After 152 years we have definitely got better at some things but, unfortunately, we have also dropped the ball a few times.

I met someone from Germany last night who has been living in Canada for the past thirteen years. He was definitely of the opinion that we could learn a lot about administering healthcare from Germany. The wait times we live with everyday are illegal in Germany. Being a guy who worked in the front lines of healthcare in Alberta for over thirty years, I have an opinion or two on why our system is in need of a major overhaul.

Patient outcome is not a consideration in Canadian healthcare. Everything is about budgets and business models. This should not be a big revelation for anyone in Alberta. We have had 40 years of governments who subsidize the oil industry while cutting back on healthcare and other essential services to pay for these subsidies.

Remember the days when your MP and MLA actually represented you first and their party second? Remember when the government was there to serve us - the people, rather than just govern to get re-elected? The answer is probably not. Most of us don’t even understand how a parliamentary democracy is supposed to work. Hence why we have a Premier who can get away with cheating to gain leadership of his party and then hand out ear plugs to his caucus so they do not have to hear what the opposition party has to say.

Lots has happened in the past few years of our country’s 152 years of existence. Let’s hope that the future of our country sees us return to the democracy our confederation fathers had in mind when they created Canada.

 “Many, many times I would shake my head in dismay at the goings-on in the House of Commons, but that never caused me to lose my fundamental faith in the values of our parliamentary institutions.” - Jason Kenney (b. 1968)

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