There’s an old joke: The definition of a Canadian is an unarmed American with health care.
(CALGARY, Alberta) - Over the past few months I have been asked about Canada—about atheism, health care and gun control in particular. None of these issues can be addressed in isolation, so a comparison benchmark is required.
Americans, as the primary readers, understand America best, so America becomes the benchmark.
As we can see from Table 6, the Canada/US ratio is approximately ten-to-one for both population and GDP. The GDP per capita is approximately the same.
What this means is that, in general, anything that occurs in the U.S. should occur at about one tenth that rate in Canada or, occurring Canada, at about ten times the rate in the U.S. As a rule of thumb, this holds in many cases. It does not come close to holding in some areas, as we will see below.
Health Care
There’s an old joke: The definition of a Canadian is an unarmed American with health care.
Everyone in Canada has health care coverage. No one in Canada has ever died because they lacked healthcare coverage. No Canadian has ever filed for bankruptcy or lost their home because of medical bills.
The Canadian health care system is imperfect. No one denies that. But no one would say that it is better than nothing. It is far more than nothing. The only people who want to take it apart are those who think they can make money from the system or, as supporters of the private market, believe that if it is a public good, someone should be making money from it.
The illogic of such privatizers makes me shake my head. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that the system costs $1 billion of taxpayer money. Then, let us privatize the system. The status quo still costs $1 billion, but for the private interests to make a profit one of two things (or both) must happen. Service must be reduced so that the savings can be diverted into private pockets. Or the fees for the service must be increased so there is additional money to be diverted into private pockets. Privatization is against the public interest and Canadians will not allow it.
Supreme Court of Canada Justice Emmett Hall was the key architect in designing Canada’s medicare system in the 1960s. Asked to review it in the late 1970s, he said in his 1980 report:
“Canadians…as a society, are aware that the trauma of illness, the pain of surgery, the slow decline to death, are burdens enough for the human being to bear without the added burden of medical or hospital bills penalizing the patient at the moment of vulnerability. The Canadian people determined that they should band together to pay medical bills and hospital bills when they were well and income earning. Health services were no longer items to be bought off the shelf and paid for at the checkout stand. Nor was their price to be bargained for at the time they are sought. They were a fundamental need, like education, which Canadians could meet collectively and pay for through taxes.”
Canadians are, overall, a caring society. If you are an American, what in Hall’s statement do you find objectionable?
Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede studied problem solving among IBM employees around the world. The result was “Hofstede’s Dimensions,” one dimension of which is an individualism/collectivism scale measuring how much a society expects individuals to look after themselves. The United States, not surprisingly, was at the top of the scale.
Of 53 countries across 5 continents he found the United States to be the most individualist country in the world along a continuum of individualism versus collectivism. No coincidence, the U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world that does not give its citizens access to universal health care. Even now, as the Obama administration is trying to pass a health care bill, there are millions of Americans against it.
I find this passing strange and when you think about it, it’s because money trumps health and welfare which goes against the Constitutional pursuit of “life”.
My challenge to the American individualist thesis is always the same. When a child is born, it should immediately be placed, naked (no blanket to weaken it), out of doors, summer or winter. Any child who lives to be a year old is obviously a rugged American individualist.
The lack of universal health care does two things. It prematurely kills people and, of those who live past childhood, it shortens their lives.
Compared to Canada, as we see in Table 3, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. is almost one quarter greater.
From Table 4 we see that the under five mortality rate is almost a third greater.
And from Table 5, we see that life expectancy for both males, females and overall is significantly greater in Canada. For those Americans who would argue that it is better to be “free”, they have, as a society, less life-time to be free than Canadians who are, American propaganda notwithstanding, equally free. We just don’t make a big deal of it.
Recently, there has been increasing interest from epidemiologists on the subject of economic inequality and its relation to the health of populations. There is a high correlation between socioeconomic status and health. This correlation suggests that it is not only the poor who tend to be sick when everyone else is healthy, but that there is a sliding scale, from the top to the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, relating status to health. This phenomenon is often called the "SES Gradient". Lower socioeconomic status has been linked to chronic stress, heart disease, ulcers, type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, certain types of cancer, and premature aging.
Guns
Someone who called himself Kelly, said this in a comment: “I have noticed that some good headway is being made in Canada in the area of re-evaluating gun ownership. I will keep my fingers crossed that Canada comes up to speed with us and learns to legislate more logically. Maybe that would be a noteworthy exception for your country?”
I find this statement to be offensive and a good example of American arrogance and ignorance. There are billboards on the Texas Panhandle that proclaim: “GOD, GUNS AND GUTS MADE AMERICA FREE.”
Indeed.
In 1972 sociologist Alphonso Pinkney of New York’s Hunter College wrote in his book The American Way of Violence
“There are so many contradictions and inconsistencies in American life that frustration is a constant state of affairs for large segments of the population. Such cultural ideals as monetary success, freedom and democracy are mere myths which lose meaning in the face of widespread poverty and oppression. Violence frequently results from the frustration which individuals feel when they fail to satisfy legitimate aspirations. The society is generally an inhumane one.” (emphasis added)
In the 37 years since, the situation has certainly been exacerbated.
Catherine Ford was, until her recent retirement, a columnist for the Calgary Herald, as well as member of the Editorial Board. She is a third generation Albertan so can speak authoritatively about the province. On gun control she wrote:
“Particularly in Alberta, particularly to urban Albertans, the angry voices of protest ring hollow: those doing the most public protesting about their treatment by various governments don’t seem to be those with the most to complain about. The loudest voices don’t come from the needy or disadvantaged, but from the opportunists who see in the politics of anger and discontent a chance to remake Canada. Small-town Alberta may support any protest against, for example, gun registration as yet another attempt by loafer-wearing city slickers to make life difficult for them, but the architects of their rebellion aren’t out on the back forty shooting coyotes that are preying on livestock. No, the protest is led by well-educated opportunists who believe might, right and money will buy anything. Despite bumper stickers to the contrary, what is being protested is not just gun-control legislation, the Kyoto Accord, same-sex marriage, and all the other right-wing bogeys, but Canadian values themselves. Of course, supporters of neo-conservatives don’t say that they are protesting values the majority of Canadians hold important, but insist they are fighting for ‘freedom’.”
Compared to the U.S. Canada is, overall, a non-violent society. Two main forms of violence are against the self and against others. As we see from Table 2, the suicide rates in both countries are virtually the same.
But, it’s when we look at societal violence we see the difference. The homicide rate in Table 1, shows homicides more than three times greater in the U.S.
Canada had 611 homicides in 2008; less than a third of which (200) were committed with firearms. Calgary, a city of a million, where I live, had 34 murders; 138 were gang-related, up from 118 in 2007. Topix.com reports that there were 16,272 homicides in America in 2008.
Incarceration
Concurrent with the homicide rate, the United States has the highest documented incarceration rate, and total documented prison population in the world. As of year-end 2007, a record 7.2 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole. Of the total, 2.3 million were incarcerated. More than 1 in 100 American adults were incarcerated at the start of 2008. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million, while having four times the population, thus having only about 18% of the US incarceration rate.
About 10.4% of all black males in the United States between the ages of 25 and 29 were sentenced and in prison, compared to 2.4% of Hispanic males and 1.3% of white males. Seventy percent of prisoners in the United States are non-whites.
In 2008, the most recent data available to Statistics Canada, there was an average of 38,348 inmates—36,330 adults and 2,018 youth. The figure translates to 117 people in prison out of 100,000 population—an increase of two per cent from 2007. The U.S. rate is 1,000 out of 100,000—8.5 times the Canadian rate.
A few years ago the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) released a report titled, “Incarceration in Canada”. One member, Kim Pate, released a dissenting report. He wrote:
“I cannot endorse this NCPC paper. To do so would be to participate in a fraudulent depiction of the problems of our current use of imprisonment. As one Australian prison administrator has stated:
"they are misused by society as an inappropriate means of social control... they are, in the main, inhuman and unnatural places; ... each year they take large numbers of hopeless people and turn them into bitter people;…they are part, among other things, of the systematic destruction of (Aboriginal peoples);...they institutionalize and make captive the people who work there...for hundreds of years the people who work in the system, the influential people in the criminal justice system as a whole—politicians and community leaders—have used prison to perpetuate the longest running biggest social fraud in the history of the modern world...that prisons serve a useful purpose in social control and crime prevention."
“Prisons do not work. To participate in pretending otherwise is our crime.”
Unionization
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics In 2008, 12.4 percent of employed wage and salary workers were union members. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent—a decline of nearly two thirds in a quarter century.
In Canada in 2007, the union membership rate, according to Statistics Canada was estimated at 29.3%, 2.3 times greater than that of the U.S.
The interesting aspect of this is that union members make about 30% more than non-union members, yet Americans prefer to be poorer but free. Sounds like a cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face strategy.
Religion
Canada has the same range of religions as the U.S., but not the same issues of religious dysfunction. We, too, have our religious fundamentalists, but we have never allowed them to hijack the public discourse.
Abortion, as well, is an issue for some, but the man in Canada, Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who has worked for the last forty years to make abortion safe for Canadian women, was on July 1, 2008, was awarded the Order of Canada for “for his commitment to increased health care options for women, his determined efforts to influence Canadian public policy and his leadership in humanist and civil liberties organizations”.
He was twice acquitted by juries for performing illegal abortions, but on appeal the acquittals were overturned. He was finally acquitted by the Supreme Court of Canada which declared the law he was convicted under to be in violation of the Charter and thus unconstitutional. This ruling by Justice Brian Dickson essentially ended all statutory restrictions on abortion in Canada.
To further make my point, the last four or five Prime Ministers were Roman Catholic and I, as a political junkie, never knew this because the issue of religiosity was never raised. I know this now only because someone covered the issue a couple of years ago. The current Prime Minister is, I think, RC, but I’m not positive. That’s how little Canadians care about religion as a political litmus test.
We have also had a female prime minister who was defeated, not because she was a woman, but because her predecessor in office, Brian Mulroney, brought the Conservative Party so low that in the 1993 election, the Conservatives were reduced to only two seats (from 169) out of 308.
Only the current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, as a follower of the American Republican party, has taken to ending his speeches with “God bless Canada”. No other prime minister has ever done this.
Conclusion
On the basis of homicides, infant mortality, life expectancy, religious tolerance and security of the person, Canada is the safer, more tolerant and more civilized society—for all the many flaws this nation has. Many of the flaws, particularly here in Alberta, exist because of a distorting American influence.
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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves—writing and trying to make the world a better place
The Canadian Comparison: Part 1Salem-News.com