Election Health Care

Polls have troubling updates to disturb the equanimity of the Liberal Party of Canada. Their choice of leader was not quite the resounding success they planned it would be. Michael Ignatieff seemed as though he might be useful, capable of sweeping the hustings with the magic of his personal style. He seems to have miscalculated on behalf of the Liberals.

The electorate has been instructed by Mr. Ignatieff to view the Conservatives and Stephen Harper as a viperous slithering menace whose underbelly covers nefarious Canada-harming plans, should majority governing status be achieved, to undo all of Canada's social welfare programs. In the process, dragging the country into worse fiscal damnation that they've already managed to incur.

All the forward-looking, progressive fundamentals that make Canada the great country that it is, will be undone if we are foolish enough to grant Mr. Harper the majority he so wishfully urges upon the country. We have the option of voting 'blue', or 'red', either door is open to us; will we then grasp the obvious wisdom of bringing back the natural governing party?

Doesn't appear so. Not if those damn polls are anything to judge by. Even Jack Layton's New Democratic Party is on the upswing, prepared to demolish the hoped-for prospects for the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec. And the Liberals? So far back of the pack we're groping for our binoculars to get them within our line of vision.

Looks as though the latest ploy has fallen flat. And one wonders why. The vaunted intellectualism of the former academic appears to have failed him, in hauling out health care and the dastardly Conservative plan to privatize the country's universality of medicare-hospital care. True, the electorate has a famously forgetful attitude toward the past.

On the other hand, it hasn't been all that long ago that Jean Chretien and Paul Martin between them, with a majority government repeated, ruthlessly slashed social programs. That would include "our cherished health care system", as Michael Ignatieff so lovingly describes it. That very system that he is prepared to defend against the Conservatives' destructive tendencies.

Did no one in the party remind Mr. Ignatieff, who was absent from the country in those days, that it was Mr. Chretien and Mr. Martin who looked the other way when private clinics erupted here and there, in Quebec and British Columbia, throwing the sanctity of the Canada Health Act into disarray?

My goodness, Mr. Martin's personal physician ran a string of private clinics. And it was Paul Martin who allowed the provinces to allocate additional health-care funding transfers wherever they saw fit, not necessarily toward health care spending, without penalty.

So it does make Mr. Ignatieff sound rather hollow and hypocritical as he waxes indignant over Mr. Harper's purported diabolical plan to transfer federal tax points to the provinces to enable them to raise their own revenues, each funding their own health system.

And then there's the interference of the Supreme Court of Canada, striking down on June 9, 2005 a law in Quebec prohibiting people from buying private health insurance to cover medical procedures already offered by the public system. "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care," two of the justices wrote in their decision.

Things are not always what they seem, are they?