Ulli Diemer — Radical Digressions

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Radical Digressions
Ulli Diemer’s Notebook #3

Casanova’s sad fate

June 9, 2001 - #

From an article about Casanova in the Globe and Mail: “Eventually, he lost his looks, charm and potency and was forced to spend his final years as a librarian.”

Keywords: Career Change – Librarians

A crisis manufactured by the Harris government

August 22, 2002 - #

Given that the financial crisis affecting the Toronto, Ottawa, and Hamilton schools boards is the result of the unworkable funding formula imposed by the Progressive Conservative government, there is a certain logic to the government taking direct control of the boards.

Why should the elected trustees take the blame for implementing the government’s destructive and dictatorial policies? Let the government do its own dirty work, so it is clear to all who is responsible for the mess the education system is in.

This is a government which openly stated that it intended to create a crisis in education. It has pursued that aim in a manner which can accurately be described as Stalinist: ignoring public input as well as expert advice, moving at breakneck speed to ram through ill-conceived ideologically driven schemes with mindless arrogance.

Along the way, it has plundered the funds raised by the city boards from their own taxpayers, gutted local democracy, and created chaos.

The funding formula is a straightjacket which makes no distinction between the needs of an inner-city classroom where more than 90% of the students don’t speak English, and a classroom in a small town where 100% of the students are Canadian-born and English-speaking. The formula doesn’t even admit that the costs of heating a building built in 1920 are different from the costs of heating a building built in 1995. It is unworkable, and wilfully ignorant.

Rather than admit that its policies are disastrous, the government is instead choosing to impose direct dictatorships over the boards so that it can continue to ignore the parents, teachers, students, and democratically elected trustees who want to protect our schools.

This a government which is not fit to govern.

Ulli Diemer

Keywords: Crisis – Educational Restructuring – Neoconservativism

The law-breaking legislator

31 December 2002 - #

According to Doug Griffiths, the Alberta MLA who plans to break the law by refusing to register his guns, “a firearm is a tool. It’s like a vehicle is a tool, it’s just something you use to get a particular job done.”

So then, is Mr. Griffiths being consistent by refusing to carry a driver’s license or to put a license plate on his car? If not, why not?

Keywords: Firearms – Gun Laws/Rights

The Iraq crisis in context

12 March, 2003 - #

A rogue state, heavily armed with weapons of mass destruction, openly contemptuous of international law and the United Nations, and with a lengthy record of threatening and invading other countries, has plunged the world into crisis.

How should the world respond to this threat? What can we do about the United States and its undisguised imperial ambitions?

While governments, and tens of millions of ordinary citizens around the world, work hard to avert war, the war has in fact already started. U.S. and British planes are bombing Iraqi defences in the no-fly zones on a daily basis to pave the way for their planned invasion. American special forces are already on the ground inside Iraq, poised to take over the oil fields as soon as the invasion begins. U.S. troops are active in the demilitarized zone between Kuwait and Iraq – in violation of the UN ceasefire agreement – ripping open the fence along the border to clear the way for U.S. tanks.

To be accurate, though, what is being prepared is not a war, but a slaughter. Despite all the rhetoric about Iraq’s weapons, the fact is that Iraq is essentially defenceless against the American juggernaut. According to the U.S., 80% of Iraq’s military capacity was destroyed in the 1991 war. Twelve years of disarmament and sanctions have further reduced that capacity. It is worth remembering that in the 1991 war, when Iraq’s military was far more powerful and better equipped that it is now, Iraq’s entire armed forces were able to kill fewer than 100 American soldiers in combat. The U.S. and its allies, meanwhile, killed some 100,000 Iraqi soldiers, including large numbers who were fleeing or trying to surrender, and including many who were deliberately buried alive by U.S. tanks with ploughs mounted on the front. Gleeful U.S. soldiers referred to their spree of killing defenceless Iraqis as a “turkey shoot”. No wonder that the U.S. insists that its personnel be exempt from the jurisdiction of any international court established to prosecute war crimes.

U.S. plans for this war – that is, for its attack on a country that can’t fight back – call for massive bombing on a scale never seen before.

Read the rest of the story here.

Keywords: Iraq – U.S. Imperialism – War – Weapons of Mass Destruction

Saddam’s Alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction

18 March, 2003 - #

Why doesn’t Saddam use his weapons now [March 2003] if he really has them?

The United States justifies its unilateral decision to go to war with the claim that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction which could it use to attack the US.

The US claims that the threat from these weapons is so great, and so imminent, that the inspections process backed by most United Nations members has to be abruptly terminated so the US can launch an immediate attack on Iraq.

Under these circumstances, Saddam Hussein, and the Iraqi leadership, can have no possible illusions about the fact that an American attack is about to begin and that they have little or no chance of surviving it.

If Saddam Hussein really possesses these alleged weapons of mass destruction, would it not be logical, from his point of view, to launch them against the United States right away, today, while he is still alive and still able to use them? Knowing he is about to be annihilated, why would he possibly hold back from using them now?

There is only one logical explanation: that he does not in fact possess the weapons capability that the US claims he does. And if this is so, then many thousands of Iraqi will die because of an utterly unnecessary war, a war launched on a pretext that is clearly false. Such a war would be a crime against humanity.

Ulli Diemer

See also: The Iraq crisis in context

Keywords: Iraq – Weapons of Mass Destruction

Island Airport Insanity

May 21, 2003 - #

It is hard to believe that serious consideration is actually being given to the latest ill-conceived scheme to expand the Toronto Island airport.

The Toronto waterfront, and the neighbourhoods that lie close to it, are densely populated communities. The last thing we need in these neighbourhoods, or in the Island parks, is the noise and pollution produced by a busy airport. Airports don’t belong in the middle of downtown.

What Toronto taxpayers also don’t need is to keep pouring subsidies into this perennially money-losing boondoggle. There have been countless schemes promising to turn the Island Airport into a profitable enterprise. Every one has failed, and in each case the losses have been absorbed by the taxpayers.

This latest scheme, consisting of empty promises swallowed uncritically by irresponsible bureaucrats, would saddle Toronto with noise, pollution, and debt.

We don’t need it, and we don’t want it.

Ulli Diemer

Keywords: Toronto Islands – Airports – Airport Noise

The reliable tyrant

April 8, 2004 - #

The Bush administration is starting to look a bit desperate as it seeks a way out of the mess it created with its invasion and occupation of Iraq. The weapons of mass destruction that were supposedly the reason for the war are nowhere to be found, and the Iraqis are acting anything but grateful for their ‘liberation’.

Fortunately the solution to the whole debacle is within the Americans’ grasp.

All they need do is release Saddam Hussein from custody and put him back in power. Given a second chance, he’ll soon crush the opposition and restore order. He’s got the credentials and the track record for the job, if anybody does. It's true that he’s a truly nasty piece of work, but his methods, including mass murder and torture, didn’t stop the U.S. from supporting him enthusiastically throughout the 1980s, the period of his greatest crimes. It was only when he made the mistake of disobeying the U.S. that he became an enemy.

No doubt a deal could be worked out. Saddam would be happy to return to power in exchange for an undertaking to follow orders. And the U.S. could withdraw its troops, secure in the knowledge that a reliable tyrant will maintain order and keep the oil flowing.

Ulli Diemer

See also: The Iraq crisis in context

Keywords: Iraq – Dictatorship – U.S. Imperialism

Monogamous Voles

June 17, 2004 - #

Re: Could Voles Help Create The Perfect Husband? (article in the Globe and Mail, June 17, 2004):

If only a tiny minority of mammals are monogamous, then presumably non-monogamous behaviour offers an evolutionary advantage.

In that case, instead of searching for a genetic fix to make promiscuous humans monogamous, wouldn’t it be more useful if the researchers at Emory University tried to find a way to cure the minority who suffer from monogamous tendencies?

Ulli Diemer

Keywords: Mammals – Monogamy – Non-monogamy

Taking the helicopter to the cottage

April 2005 - #

Hydro One CEO Tom Parkinson repeatedly commandeers a corporate helicopter, paid for by the public, to have himself flown to and from his cottage, and all Ontario Energy Minister Dwight Duncan can say is that "these things are always difficult to explain to eople."

Not so difficult, really. Mr. Parkinson is guilty of misappropriating corporate resources for personal use. Lower-ranking employees guilty of misappropriation on a comparable scale would undoubtedly be fired.

If Hydro One’s board of directors approved these misappropriations, they have failed to properly carry out their responsibility to protect the interests of their shareholders: the public. Instead of expressing his confidence in these board members, the minister should be moving expeditiously to replace them.

Ulli Diemer

Keywords: Corporate Ethics

Flatly outrageous

April 15, 2005 - #

P. L. Reid’s outrageous claim, in his April 15 letter to the Globe and Mail, that the Fraser Institute is the 21st-century equivalent of the Flat Earth Society cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged.

To be sure, there is a superficial similarity, in that both organizations cling to obsolete world-views in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

But the Flat Earth Society has never tried to destroy medicare, undermine public education, wreck social programs, nor sell Canada out to the United States. There is no call to sully its reputation by comparing its harmless notions to the far less benign ideology of the Fraser Institute.

Ulli Diemer

Keywords: Fundamentalism – Ideology – Neoconservatism

A moment on Church Street

- #

Church Street at Maitland in downtown Toronto. I’m on my bicycle, headed west on Maitland, waiting to cross Church Street. Beside me, a man and a small dog are also waiting, and while they wait, they are working out their relationship.

“Sit,” the man commands.
The dog ignores him.

“Sit.”
The dog looks at him.

More forcefully: “Sit!!”
No response.

Louder still: “Sit!!”
The dog continues to ignore him.

“OK, fine!” the man says. “Don’t sit!”

The light changes, and we all cross.

Photos from Gros Morne & Northern Peninsula, Newfoundland Summer 2005

July 2005 - #

Overlooking Bonne Bay. Photo by Miriam Garfinkle.

Click here to visit the photos index page.

Neocon con game: First deprive public institutions of their ability to act, then blame them for not acting

September 11, 2005 - #

The classic definition of chutzpah cites the man who kills both his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. An updated example of chutzpah is provided by ideologues like Margaret Wente (Bureaucracy Kills, Globe and Mail, September 10) who, day after day, year after year, devote their energies to badmouthing public institutions and demanding they be stripped of resources and denied the ability to act, and who then have the gall to point to the deliberately engineered impotence of these agencies as proof that public institutions don’t work.

The New Orleans post-hurricane Katrina catastrophe, like the poisoning of Walkerton's water, were events whose likelihood was repeatedly predicted by experts working for public agencies. In each instance, these experts’ well-substantiated warnings were ignored by administrations pursuing an ideologically driven agenda of starving and crippling the public sector.

The Bush administration, like Mike Harris’s in Ontario before it, followed a deliberate policy of slashing funding to agencies responsible for public safety, silencing or driving out the dedicated professionals who are the heart and soul of those agencies, and appointing incompetent political hacks to run them.

And now the very people, like Margaret Wente, who advocated and cheered for those policies, have the nerve to claim that the debacles caused by these policies are proof that we need more of the same. Chutzpah indeed!

Ulli Diemer

Keywords: Fundamentalism – Ideology – Hurricanes – Media Bias – Neoconservatism

Special Diet Clinic

October 3, 2005 - #

In the wake of massive cutbacks to social assistance rates implemented by the Harris government in the 1990s, cutbacks which were not reversed by the Liberal government that replaced it in 2003, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) informed social assistance recipients on Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) that they might be eligible for the little known Special Diet Allowance – an additional payment of up to $250 per month.

Over 100 healthcare professionals and experts signed a letter saying that all OW and ODSP recipients should be entitled to the full $250 per month supplement on a permanent and ongoing basis due to the inadequate welfare rates which make it impossible for them to maintain a healthy diet for themselves and their children.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) announced a Special Diet signup clinic – one of a series in different locations in the province – on the front lawn at Queen’s Park (the grounds of the Ontario legislature) to be held on October 3, 2005. Over 1,000 people signed up for the clinic. My partner Miriam Garfinkle was one of the health providers from Regent Park who participated in the signup clinic. I hung out and took photos.

Mr. Bush and the truth

November 16, 2005 - #

Apparently Globe columnist Marcus Gee’s delicate sensibilities are offended by the fact that more than half the public believes that George W. Bush is dishonest and untrustworthy (Mr. Bush is not a liar – Globe and Mail, November 16). Would Mr. Gee feel better if instead of characterizing Mr. Bush as a ‘liar’, we were to say that Mr. Bush ‘frequently and habitually makes statements which are the exact opposite of the truth?’

Beyond his concern over the proper label to apply to Mr. Bush’s truth-deficient claims that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Gee’s defense of President Bush is peculiar indeed. He says, well of course there wasn’t a shred of truth in what Mr. Bush said, but we shouldn’t single him out for blame because other members of his administration also misled the public, and the Democrats also misled the public, and the compliant media also misled the public.

That’s one way to look at it, perhaps. Another way of looking at it would be to say: they’re all dishonest and untrustworthy. Whether Mr. Gee likes it or not, more than half the American public seems to have come to that conclusion.

Ulli Diemer

See also: The Iraq crisis in context

Keywords: Iraq – Lying

The “cost” of software piracy

November 16, 2005 - #

It may be the job of the software industry’s PR people to pump out figures designed to make software piracy seem like a huge drain on the economy. But why do the media have to uncritically parrot their highly suspect statistics without scrutinizing them to ask how valid they are?

The enormous dollar amounts the industry throws around in its PR campaigns are purely imaginary. These numbers – $1.1 billion a year is what their latest press release claims – are nothing but guesses, guesses based on absurd – and demonstrably false – assumptions.

In their fantasy world, everyone who ever tries out a piece of software they haven’t bought is depriving the industry of the full retail price of that software. In the real world, people often try out software to see if it’s worth buying. Since the industry has decided, in its greed, to make it impossible to ‘test drive‘ a program without first buying it, and since users know that software is often buggy and doesn’t function as advertised, people understandably circumvent the rules in order to check out the true merits of a particular program. Often what happens is that they try it out, find it doesn’t meet their needs, and delete it. How different is that from test driving a car? Does the automobile industry spend its time whining about how much money they lose to ‘car pirates‘ who test drive a car and then decide not to buy it?

Even more ridiculous than the industry’s grossly inflated numbers is their claim that the value of pirated software, whatever the true amount is, is money that is “lost” to “the economy”. The plain fact is that not one cent of it is “lost”. Instead of being spent on software, that money is simply spent on something else. That something else might be a competing product, or it might be rent, or books, or beer. But certainly it is spent on something, and it ends up circulating in the economy in just the same way as money spent on software does. It may be a loss to Bill Gates and his cohorts, but a loss to the economy it isn’t.

Ulli Diemer

Keywords: Software Industry – Software Piracy

The Amelia Street cottages

November 18, 2005 - #

Someone recently gave me a copy of Old Toronto Houses, a coffee-table book featuring colour photos by John de Visser, with accompanying text by Tom Cruickshank. It was a cold and grey day, and I was enjoying leafing through it contemplating the photos, most of them taken in summer, which allowed one to imagine that one day trees will again be green and the sun will shine once more.

Then I arrived at page 90, which is devoted to the Amelia Street cottages. To my surprise, the text proclaims that “the three cottages are among the oldest buildings in the neighbourhood.” Given that the original cottages were built in 1873, this would certainly be the case – if it weren’t for the indisputable fact that they were demolished long ago, in the late 1980s. I know, because I lived in one of them (see photo, circa 1980) from 1975 to 1987, when they were cleared for demolition. I even took some photos of the empty lot where they once stood.

So what’s with this claim that these houses are “among the oldest buildings in the neighbourhood?” Well, when they built seven brand-new houses on the lot where the three cottages once stood, the developers agreed to put a facade on the front three houses to make the new streetscape appear similar to the previous look. This, according to Cruickshank and de Visser, makes those new houses “old.”

Now, there’s surely something to be said for making new buildings fit into the existing streetscape. But really, calling a brand-new building “old” because the facade mimics the facade of the houses that used to stand there? (Not even an exact imitation, since the originals certainly weren’t stucco.) It no more makes these new houses “old” than any of the new Victorian-style townhouses built in the area in the 1990s are “old” because they imitate the style of older buildings.

Ulli Diemer

The Buzz Hargrove election controversy

December 2005 - #

Straight Goods denounced Buzz Hargrove for saying, during the federal election campaign, that he thought NDP supporters should vote for the NDP in ridings where the NDP has a chance, and Liberal in ridings where the NDP doesn't have a chance, to defeat the Conservatives. Straight Goods asked readers for their opinion; Ulli Diemer submitted this one:

Buzz Hargrove has simply stated the obvious. If you live in a riding where the NDP has a chance of winning, vote NDP. If you live in a riding where the NDP doesn’t have a chance – i.e. most of them – it’s better to hold your nose and vote Liberal to keep out the Conservatives than to waste your ballot on the NDP candidate and watch the Tory get elected.

If the NDP doesn’t like this logic, too bad – they’re the ones who, in their wisdom, decided to team up with the Conservatives and the Bloc to force this unnecessary election.

What was the point of forcing this election now? The most likely outcome is another Liberal minority: in other words, we end up back where we were, except with the Bloc stronger in Quebec. The second-most likely outcome is a Conservative minority, probably supported by the Bloc as it goes about dismantling as many federal programs and institutions as it can. The most likely outcomes after that are either a Liberal majority or a Conservative majority – either way, something much worse than we have now. An NDP government certainly isn’t a possibility.

I don’t get this outrage over what Hargrove said. Is there some sacred duty to always vote NDP, no matter what the circumstances? Is the NDP so wonderful that we’ll lose our souls if we don’t support everything the NDP does, no matter how ill-advised it may be?

Personally, I remember the NDP in government in Ontario, and it wasn’t so great. I remember them breaking promises left and right – or more accurately, right and right. I remember them breaking union contracts, imposing wage rollbacks, and ramming through the so-called ‘social contract’. I remember them making plans to bring in workfare. I remember them jumping on the privatization bandwagon. I remember their lack of vision and principles, and their breathtaking incompetence as a government. The best you can say for them is that the Harris Tories were much much worse.

Personally, I’m going to vote NDP because in my riding, it’s a race between the NDP’s Olivia Chow and the Liberal incumbent, Tony Ianno, with the Tories nowhere in sight. But as a socialist, I have no illusions that the NDP are anything more than the lesser evil.

Ulli Diemer

See also: Let’s Stop Kidding Ourselves about the NDP

Keywords: Elections – New Democratic Party (NDP) – Strategic Voting – Voting System

Food fanatics

February 28, 2006 - #

It’s so tiresome to see food fanatics like Sarah Keating (NOW Magazine, Feb. 23 - Mar 1, 2006) spouting their ill-informed nonsense. Keating claims milk "has no place in a healthy diet". So how does she explain all those millions of milk-drinkers walking around in good health?

Moreover, the "facts" she cites in support of her prejudice only demonstrate she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Keating would have us believe all milk is "full of sugar, fat, and cholesterol". In reality, skim milk, which most nutrition guides recommend, contains no fat or cholesterol. And while it contains some sugar, so do fruits and vegetables, which she says are an essential part of a healthy diet.

The fact is that a healthy diet requires balance and moderation in what you eat, not rigid rules. You can be healthy on a diet that includes milk, and on a diet that doesn’t include milk.

What has no place in a healthy lifestyle is ill-informed dogmatism.

Keywords: Diet – Food – Food Issues – Milk – Milk/Health Concerns – Nutrition

Israel’s attack on the UN post in Lebanon

July 28, 2006 - #

The Globe and Mail's editorial (July 27) categorically dismisses the suggestion that Israel deliberately bombed the United Nations outpost in Lebanon. “Why would they do such a thing?”, the editorial asks, “knowing the deaths would provoke outrage around the world?”

Why?

Because Israel doesn’t want impartial witnesses to its invasion of Lebanon. Because the Israeli military is angry with UNIFIL for providing independent verification of indiscriminate Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians. Because Israel is furious that UN officials, including Louise Arbour, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights and Jan Egeland, the UN’s top humanitarian official, have warned that Israel is violating international law.

This is by no means the first time Israel has attacked UN positions or the staff of humanitarian agencies. Two days before the attack on the UN observers, Israeli forces attacked a clearly marked Red Cross ambulance, injuring nine ambulance workers. In 1996, during a previous invasion of Lebanon, Israel attacked a UN post in Qana, killing 106 civilians who had sought safety there.

As for world outrage, Israel’s leaders could care less. Israel’s superpower patron, the United States, supports everything Israel does and keeps supplying money and arms, while the U.S. and Canadian media provide uncritical support.

Why would Israel do such a thing? Because they know they’ll get away with it.

See also: The Middle East: Resources for peace, justice and human rights

Ulli Diemer

Keywords: Israel – Lebanon – Media Bias – War Crimes

The Globe’s pro-Israel pronouncements reek of double standards and historical amnesia

August 7, 2006 - #

Israel is praised (Globe and Mail Editorial, August 7) for having “pulled out of Gaza”. Pulled out? Israel has sealed off Gaza’s borders. It is blocking food, medicine and other needed supplies. It has destroyed a large proportion of the infrastructure, including the sole power station, as well as much of the arable land. It bombs, terrorizes and kills as it pleases, on a daily basis. It has killed at least 167 residents of Gaza in the last six weeks, many of them children. The conditions in Gaza resemble nothing so much as the Warsaw ghetto after the German conquest of Poland.

Despite these facts, the Globe claims that Hezbollah’s attack on Israel’s military was unprovoked and that “Israel did nothing to deserve that attack”. Nothing? Committing war crimes in Gaza is “nothing”?

Far from being inexplicable and unprovoked, Hezbollah’s attack on an Israeli military patrol directly followed Israel’s ongoing rampage in Gaza.

Is it wrong to come to the aid of your friends when they are being attacked? Were England, France, and Canada guilty of ‘unprovoked aggression’ when they declared war on Germany in 1939, after Germany attacked Poland? Was Canada guilty of ‘unprovoked aggression’ when it declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor even though Canada had not been attacked? Were we wrong to come to the aid of our allies? If not, then why is it wrong for Hezbollah to come to the aid of its allies when they are being attacked by Israel?

See also: The Middle East Conflict: Resources for peace, justice, and human rights

Keywords: Israel – Lebanon – Media Bias – War Crimes

Manifestos, Political Statements, Programs, and Visions:
A Compilation

November 29, 2006 - #

Connexions now features a page of selected radical and left political manifestos, statements, programs, and visions, compiled by Ulli Diemer.

Included are manifestos from 1649 to the present.

The oldest is the Levellers’ manifesto of 1649 “An Agreement of the Free People of England.” Composed by John Lilburne in the Tower of London, where he and other radicals were being held prisoner, the manifesto demands, extremely radical for the time, called for an end to arbitrary rule, the right to vote, freedom of religion and freedom of the press, equality before the law, the right to trail by jury, taxation proportionate to wealth, and end to imprisonment for debt.

It is followed by Common Sense, Thomas Paine’s passionate call for revolution, published in 1776. Writing in a time of ferment in the American colonies, when most people are undecided about whether to seek independence from Britain and fearful of revolutionary means, Paine makes an unequivocal case for independence, and argues that revolution is justified when people are oppressed by an unjust government. Because its contents are treasonous, the first edition is published anonymously. Common Sense is enormously popular: 120,000 copies are sold in the first three months; 500,000 in the first year. It goes through 25 editions in the first year alone, and, in proportion to population at the time, it has the largest sales and circulation of any book in American history. Passages from the pamphlet are read aloud at public meetings, bringing its message of revolution even to people who are illiterate. Paine makes no money on Common Sense: he donates all the royalties to the revolutionary army.

Altogether more than 50 manifestos and statements are included in this compilation, among them:

Communist Manifesto of 1848,
Manifesto of the Paris Commune,
Manifesto and Platform of the Communist International, both from 1919,
Regina Manifesto of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (1933),
Freedom Charter of the African National Congress,
Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society,
Waffle Manifesto: For an Independent Socialist Canada of 1969,
Ken Knabb’s Joy of Revolution , and
LEAP Manifesto of 2015.

Explore the Manifestos page here.

National Post columnist traumatized by having to wait his turn

December 26, 2006 - #

For those who know the National Post only by its right-wing reputation — be assured that reputation is well-earned. Some of the straight news coverage is reasonably unbiased, and occasionally an interesting feature appears, but for the most part the Post resembles a propaganda broadsheet more than it does than a newspaper. The Post’s columnists are uniformly smug and negative: day in and day out, they whine and complain that Canada is socialistic and inferior — inferior to that utopia to our south, of course.

Picture a Dr. Frankenstein who spawns an automaton with Ronald Reagan’s brain and Attila the Hun’s heart, clone the result a dozen times, and then teaches his creations a few simple phrases from a script written by the Fraser Institute, and you’ll have a pretty accurate picture of the Post’s parade of columnists. What makes them so tiresome is not merely their opinions, but their utter predictability. You know in advance not only what they will say about a given topic, but the very words and phrases they will use to say it. George Orwell might well have been talking about the Post when he wrote, in ‘Politics and the English Language’, that “no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.”

One of the few Post columnists who gives the impression of actually thinking before he writes – sometimes anyway – is Jonathan Kay. On occasion, he has been known to stray from the script – he wrote a column saying he now thought he had been wrong to support the invasion of Iraq, and an article he wrote about censorship actually led me to send him an E-mail complimenting him on the piece.

Mostly though, Kay can be counted on to stick to the party line. In fact, a recent piece [Dec 5, 2006] on the horrors of socialized medicine could well earn him an award as right-wing propagandist of the month.

This particular horror story — Kay calls it his “run-in with the system” — begins when he shows up at his local hospital’s emergency room with an infected knee. The trouble is with his left knee, he tells us – reinforcing his belief, no doubt, that anything on the left is unreliable and troublesome. The inefficient socialistic health care system sends him off for treatment within ten minutes – not too shabby, most of us might say – but it takes a lot more than efficiency and high-quality appropriate care to please a National Post columnist. Soon he is lying in a public hospital bed, intravenous clindamycin trickling through his veins, and thoughts about how much nicer a private hospital bed would be flooding through his brain.

Mr. Kay returns to the hospital the next day for a follow-up treatment, and this time – the horror! – he has to sit and wait before he’s seen. In fact, he tells us, “all but the most acute cases” have to sit and wait their turn. There is – hard to believe, but it’s true – no special queue for the affluent and the privileged, not even if they are National Post columnists. So Mr. Kay sits and seethes. Yet he is not totally without sympathy for others: he feels sorry for the triage nurse, whose skills, he proclaims, are being squandered having to deal with “surly immigrants and delirious seniors”.

If only we had private health care, he moans, “middle-class people like me could pay for prompt treatment and then spend the rest of the day at work or with their family, instead of reading a Stephen King novel and breathing in other people's germs in a hospital waiting room”. If only – if only! – we had private emergency-room service, then “people with some money to spare would plunk down their Visa cards and get fast, dignified service”.

Let the people who don’t require prompt dignified service — the people who aren’t middle-class and don’t have “money to spare”, the “surly immigrants and delirious seniors” — let them spend their time breathing in other people’s germs. People like that don’t have families they’d rather be with, or other things they’d rather be doing with their time

As it happens, the same week that Mr. Kay paid his visit to the emergency room, I found myself in another emergency department in the same city with my mother, who had been admitted for an infection. My mother is one of those people – an immigrant and a senior – whom Mr. Kay would like to shove aside so that he can plunk down his Visa card and get fast, dignified service.

But here’s a shocking piece of news for Mr. Kay: most Canadians feel that immigrants like my mother and me, and seniors, and the poor, are just as deserving of prompt dignified health care as are those who, like him, are more well-off. We’re appalled at the idea that access to care should be prioritized not on the basis of need, but on the basis of who walks into the hospital with the biggest wad of cash.

Most Canadians understand that the pretense that private facilities would take the pressure off the public system is just a con job to hide the fact that a two-tier system means better care for the affluent, and worse or no care for the rest. The obvious fact is that private clinics don’t add a single doctor, nurse, or technician to the health care system. They just hire them away from the public system by offering them more money. It’s a zero-sum game in which the affluent win and the poor lose.

If Mr. Kay can buy himself quicker care by waving his credit card or a wad of $20-bills, my mother will have to wait longer for her care.

No thanks, Mr. Kay.

Ulli Diemer

This article is also available in French.

See also: Medicare Myths and Realities

Recommended Web sites/links:
Canadian Health Coalition
Profit is Not the Cure/Council of Canadians
Canadian Doctors for Medicare
Connexions

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