Canadian election

[Skandranon]

'Fraid not.  It's a legitimate fear, particularly given the fact that he would render us all but dependent on private services with his tax cuts and massive military spending.

Now there's an unsupported statement. I admit that Harper's economics bother me, since he'll have to slash spending in a number of other areas, but he has committed to health care, and there frankly isn't any reason to believe the Liberals over any other party. Calling it a fact is way out of line.

The argument that we NEED to bend further to private enterprises in the interests of our economy is ridiculous.

I think you're talking to the wrong voter here. I don't like Harper's steep tax cuts either, part of the reason I'm probably voting Liberal. But we weren't talking about that, so stop conflating the issue. It's private delivery of public services, and we do this not because we can't afford it but because we can and there's a certain short-term efficiency factor to private delivery.

Scaring off a few corporations thanks to slightly higher corporate income tax rates that would earn government coffers billions would be more in the interest of the public good than is readjusting our socioeconomic infrastructure in order to accomodate global corporations who have little to no interest in the equitable distribution of public services.

I call foul on your attempt to redirect the subject.

Because our major media outlets are all owned by massive corporate interest, the bad press to arise from the flight of a few corporations would be sure to result in the voting out of power of the incumbent government thanks to the loss of our "competitive edge" vis a vis the Americans; however, the results of opening ourselves to the whims of global capital are only beneficial to the Canadian citizenry up until a point, at which time those socio-economic values that differentiate and identify us as a social collectivity are erased and the slippery-slope is engaged.

Exactly what is this, Maude Barlow?

No one's talking about opening anything up to "massive corporate interest". And the meaning of slippery-slope is an argument that says this will happen, and then this, and then this, without justifying the "and then" steps, which is what you continue to do. Nor are the "whims of global capital" involved in this discussion at all. The problem is that we cannot provide timely health-care services. The solution is providing more health care services with equal accessibility to all. The choices to reach this solution are to either build new facilities with new equipment and hire new people, or hiring a private company that already has people and equipment and facilities to do it for us. In the long term this costs us, but in the short term we get more health care much earlier and as long as it's funded out of the public purse everyone will get equal access. I'm not saying that it's a superior method, but it's not clearly inferior and certainly not the beginning of a chain-reaction that will destroy Canadian values. It's an alternate option worth exploring.

Sorry.  I don't agree with you.

I don't think you even know what I'm arguing about, so I can't see how you can make that statement. The number one issue regarding partial privatization is accessibility; a clear second issue is the idea that private clinics drain qualified medical professionals away from the public system by offering better wages. Both of these things are issues well worth taking with partially privatized medicine. Instead, you've offered a rant I could take out of the WTO Protester's Handbook or a Council of Canadians publication having only peripheral relevance to the issue. I've read the CoC's stuff and we are not talking about letting the American HMOs into Canada, we are not talking about allowing richer people to pay for better health care. We're talking about an alternate method to deliver public services to make sure that all Canadians get better health care.