Canadian election

[Chaerophon]

Nope. No misdirection here. My point is simple: these "alternatives" aren't necessary, and importing American businesses to do the job is quite clearly not what the Canadian people would prefer.

We aren't operating in an environment "necessitated" by the economy. Instead, we are operating in an environment that our government and the influence of the neoliberal media has created for us: one of fiscal inevitability, one in which the public sector is "inefficient" and one in which any alteration in the tax structure, it is argued, would be to the ruin of the Canadian economy. I would take issue with any one of those statements. P3 is not about a desire to go private, but a fiscal "necessity" on the basis of "efficiency".

The federal government CAN afford to pay for health costs and infrastructure adjustments, particularly given our increased dependence on pharmaceuticals and alternative medicines that remain uncovered by the CHA. The Liberal claim that "we simply don't have the money" and the Conservative argument for augmentation by private services are not necessary "pragmatic" realities, but determinist rhetoric that refuses to acknowledge the obvious: the Canadian state does not "have" to retrench its self. It chooses to do so. We CAN pay for public health care that is efficient and effective. Shrouding themselves in the mantle of necessity allows the Conservative turn to private services to appear pragmatic when in reality it reflects the rhetoric of "inevitability" that has robbed us of our effective public health care system in the first place. I realize that our health care WILL be reformed and that that reformation will be in the direction of increased fee-for-services and privatization. Neoliberal ideology has come to necessitate itself, but that doesn't mean that I have to like it, and it doesn't mean that I can't hold politicians, rather than "global forces" or "economics" responsible.

Note to you: we've been on the slope ever since NAFTA. If you can't see that, then you're blind. If we polled Canadians, asking them whether we would rather cut corporate income tax or health care, I think that the answer would be obvious. Canadians always side with health care. Unfortunately, the citizenry was never given such a choice, and now the rhetoric flies so thick that no party in power HAS a choice. THAT'S the point. You can mock me and this point to death, but it remains a fact. Canadians DID NOT WANT a retrenchment nor a privatization of their health care system, but they have consistently been told that they don't have a choice, when, in fact, this has not been the case, at all.