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Boy, is Obamacare getting hot or what? Have you seen footage of some of these Townhall meetings springing up across the country? The government is asserting this is all a conspiracy driven by the insurance companies who have too much of a vested interest in letting health care reform take place. Personally, I think the White House has lost its mind. When a government speaks openly about conspiracies and actively asks people to spy and snitch on one another well…

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Thomas Jefferson, 1788.

Obviously, Canada is in the middle of the debate. Yay! Attention! Despite some inaccuracies, I like this video because these guys actually secretly filmed their experiences within the system here. Be forewarned, it’s from Pjamas Media - a conservative media outlet. Ooooo, so scared, mommy!

Both sides are presenting their side of the story, and while each make valid points, I still feel the left paints waaayyyy to nice a picture and under estimates just how difficult it is to run such a massive operation while the right paints waaayyy to scary a picture.

All I know is, A) good luck in trying to control costs and B) the Canadian system IS under severe strain. These facts are well-documented and can be seen in plain view when you visit a hospital.

The video is valuable for one reason: It takes a secret camera inside clinics in Quebec. The picture is stark inside a semi-private clinic imagine public! See, I told you Mike we should have done this years ago when I suggested it.

Like most videos of this sort, it suffers from some factual errors. But still far less egregious and outrageous than anything Michael Moore puts out about the subject relating to Canada.

For example, they interview someone about his experiences with dermatology. Who cares? Like dentistry, dermatologists have private practices therefore they’re irrelevant to the discussion.

An important distinction is not made: As someone (Paul say hello) keenly point out to me, these are semi-private clinics. Not public hospitals. Public hospitals never close. Just as importantly, the Quebec system is not indicative of what goes on in other provinces since health care falls under provincial jurisdiction. For instance, Quebec allows private clinics to operate while Ontario doesn’t.This leads to different results.

These are just a couple I spotted. I feel the video was at its best while they were inside the clinics. Nonetheless, it still makes some valid points.

Generally speaking, despite provincial control, nationally we all experience, long wait times, rising expenditures, drops in overall quality of care, lack of accessibility to GPs and advanced equipment, experiencing doctor and nursing shortages and fiscal mismanagement. Canada’s performance in the OECD isn’t exactly something to write home about either.

None of this can and should be disputed. If we do, then all we do is defer to another time to make meaningful changes in enhancing and improving our frustrating Canadian public system.

What kind of changes? Man, that’s the million dollar question. So far, the best we’ve come up with is to expand private services to help alleviate strain on the public side.

Rather than sit back and take glee that the Americans want to have some type of universal care - has anyone read the bill? - maybe we should take this opportunity and assess our system properly and with conviction.

Which begs these questions: Is government responsible for providing care to all its citizens? Are there other ways to get care to the most vulnerable (children and elderly)? Is it feasible to run a universal system over time?

The Toronto garbage strike is really getting, erm, smelly. Public opinion is clearly against the union on this one. There are even calls for, gulp, privatizing the garbage collection sector.  Why not? I always say, “You’re not happy? Ok, let’s see how the market values and pays you!” Call my bluff. Ga’head.

This sad situation reminds me of when SAQ workers (Quebec’s monopolistic entity that runs the  alcohol racket, uh, business) went on strike during the Christmas holidays a couple of years back. I’ll never forget the t-shirts strikers wore. It read: “Boss, tu ris de nous autres!”

And then they turned around and mocked consumers as we had to wait in ridiculously long lines. What peeved me, while clinging to a bottle of Campari and Averna, was I had no choice but to fricken grin and accept it. I couldn’t voice my displeasure by taking my business elsewhere.  Why is the government involved in alcohol or casinos and lottery gambling for that matter anyway?

I digress.

At this point, the streets of Toronto are becoming a national embarrassment.

A few years ago I wrote an article on Intersportswire exploring two unlikely sports teams: the Montreal Canadiens of the NHL and soccer club Athletic Bilbao in Spain’s La Liga. The crux of the piece was about how sports and politics collide.

Sports and politics are often intertwined, sometimes unwittingly and sometimes by design. What makes Montreal and Bilbao unique is their conscious effort to maintain identity in a global sports environment. Can a team maintain a local cultural identity and still win on a global scale?

It must be said that Bilbao’s case is more rigid than Montreal’s. Bilbao rarely, if ever, employs anyone outside its Basque heritage. Pragmatically, Montreal doesn’t constrict itself at the player level this way, or else they simply wouldn’t compete – especially considering they don’t have the rights of French-Canadian players through the territorial draft anymore. However, at the coaching and management level it’s a different matter.

Recently, Montreal Canadiens president Pierre Boivin publicly proclaimed the next coach of the fable (but faltering) Canadiens would be a francophone - or at the very least a coach who spoke French. Boivin further stipulated it was the duty of the club to give Quebecers a chance to coach in the NHL.

To some this was an odd (if not discriminatory) assertion to make. The only duty of a sports franchise is to win and make profits.

To others, there was nothing obscure in what he said. In fact, it’s a question of being practical. He was merely stating the reality of the Canadiens being intricately woven into the French-Canadian fabric of Quebec society. They are one and the same, and not to be separated.

I think both arguments are valid. For the most part, the organization does seek a healthy balance but when push comes to making hard decisions that benefits the team will they lead with conviction?

However, there are consequences to both scenarios aforementioned. The first may mean tolerating no French-Canadian representation for a coaching stint, while the second can lead to mediocre results.

Employing a person to lead a great brand like the Canadiens is a serious thing and a question we can ask is, should it come at the expense of a better candidate? If it does, then are the Montreal Canadiens a meritocracy operating in a free market system or are they a provincial operation in a global competitive system?

A blunter question is, are Quebecers willing to accept mediocrity in the name of identity? We often hear about how we Montrealers don’t tolerate losing seasons.

As a prominent member in the community, Boivin should stay clear of cultural nationalist rhetoric and speak as a business leader. In this way, he could help change the public narrative concerning this issue and usher in a fresh way of looking at its hiring practices.

After all, as the greatest hockey franchise in history, isn’t it beholden to the Montreal Canadiens to give its fans nothing but the best?

La ministre de l’immigration et des communautés culturelles du Québec a accepté de revenir sur les mesures annoncées avant le déclenchement des élections.

D’ici 2009 , les nouveaux immigrants devront signer une déclaration , une sorte de contrat démontrant qu’ils respectent les valeurs québécoises. Cette annonce faite le 29 octobre dernier par Yolande James, ministre de l’immigration et des communautés culturelles du Québec, avait créé une réelle polémique sur l’intérêt d’une telle mesure. Le « plan stratégique 2008-2012 » prévoit aussi des cours de français au Québec et dans le pays d’origine pour encourager l’apprentissage de la langue officielle. Plusieurs immigrants ont qualifié cette mesure d’électoraliste. Yolande James s’en défend: « Nous avions commencé une série de mesures avec la commision Bouchard Taylord, la loi pour l’égalité entre les hommes et les femmes. Le plan contient aussi une aide à l’intégration, à l’obtention d’un emploi », rappelle-t-elle.

Respecter les valeurs québécoises en signant un contrat ? Beaucoup de personnes ont peur que cette démarche ne soit qu’un feu de paille. Les nouveaux immigrants ne pourront être renvoyés chez eux car la mesure ne sera pas coercitive. Pour Yolande James, « il existe des lois qui encadrent le respect des valeurs québécoises. Nous reconnaissons le potentiel qu’apportent les immigrants mais on demande que les gens soient informés avant leur arrivée. On veut être sûrs que les gens sont informés de qui nous sommes avant de choisir de venir ici. »

Le plan de Yolande James a été annoncé le 29 octobre 2008. La date du lancement des élections provinciales? le 5 novembre 2008, une semaine plus tard… Il faudra donc attendre les résultats des prochaines élections pour savoir si ces mesures seront bien en application dès 2009.

Taken by DanJackson_UK, Flickr Creative Commons

Fresh on the heels of the Bouchard-Taylor commission is a new pledge that the Quebec government will require immigrants to sign. The pledge asserts “Quebec values” including French as an official language, gender equality and the separation of church and state. Link to the cbc.ca story is here.

This pledge doesn’t seem to have any practical application. What do they expect to happen: someone travels all the way here, refuses to sign the pledge, and Quebec manages to keep out those who don’t want to assimilate? Or, conversely, an immigrant signs and we can expect no cultural tension from then on in? The only real effect this pledge appears to have is to offend many and create further divisiveness both in Quebec and throughout Canada.

The comments on the CBC story are, as usual, more disheartening than the story itself: while some criticize the idea of the pledge, many do so while making fun of Quebec; others applaud the move as a good one to “protect Canadian culture.” Are we this insecure about Canadian culture that we think a pledge is going to protect it?

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