The New World we live in.

 

 The New World we live in.

My long-time friend Mario is dead. He worked hard for close to fifty years, never cheating on taxes. Taxes pay for our health care, he used to say. Last year he had a toe infection, couldn’t get in to see his doctor, and ended up in Emergency. The doctor there prescribed a medication that Mario was allergic to and sent him home. My friend called an ambulance that didn’t arrive for hours and when they did, he was gone. Shortly after, his dependent wife died as well. May they rest in peace. I can’t wish peace to the people who broke our health care system. There is blood on their hands.

Both Mario and I were in graduate studies when Calgary opened a school for doctors and nurses. Calgary and southern Alberta were going to have enough doctors. Governments paid for the buildings, both at the university and the Foothills Hospital and we were sure that when we get old, we will have the best medical care. Not so. The province kept slashing the budget, and we ended up training doctors for other countries. The international students paid more. Our rural communities began recruiting outside of Canada, while our doctors moved wherever they could get higher pay. That lasted until our government decided to reduce the benefits and the few doctors we had left en masse a few years ago. They weren’t going to stay and fight for their pay with a Premier who could see no farther than his nose.

The province saved money to reduce corporate taxes and attract business. It didn’t occur to them that businesses consider lower taxes but also need workers. They set up head offices in places with educated people, good services, and infrastructure. It is hard to set up a big operation where there is substandard quality of life. Even if we cover it up by providing private services for some, we still must live with the rest of the local population. Who wants to live in a place where you can’t leave the office without walking over homeless people sleeping on the streets? The hospitals are dilapidated, and schools look as if gangs infested them, to name a few. The Alberta that drew big business was the brainchild of Peter Lougheed, not the Danielle Smith and Jason Kenny version. Today our hospitals and schools are broken. There are not enough trained firefighters and EMS no longer can respond to emergencies in seven minutes as they used to. Hilariously, the people believe it is the Federal government’s fault. A friend came yesterday and told me that Trudeau wasted our healthcare money going on a multi-million dollar vacation. I think he really believes it.

It is easy for me to cry out about all our problems, some of which are killing us. We made mistakes and we are paying a heavy price. The reality now demands that we do something right and start climbing up after the fall. Unfortunately, to do that we must say some unpopular things, which politicians can’t do, and stay in power. At the same time, we all know the truth. If we do the wrong things again and again, nothing will change.

We, Canadians, need many more people here for us to move forward. Our country and economy are built around it. We can forget about northern Europeans with perfect Canadian English coming here. They have it better in their countries of origin. For over fifty years we have been playing the game of “bait and switch” emigration system. We enticed educated people from abroad to come here just to find out that we don’t recognize their foreign credentials and expect them to work driving taxis and cleaning senior’s care homes. Most of us whose parents spoke with accents pull rank over newcomers, saying that we can’t understand them. Often, we can’t understand people with darker skin colors the most. If we keep it up, we will soon have no people to do all that needs to be done and collect much less tax revenue. People from majority non-white countries do not have inferior intellect as right-wing Liberal politicians like to believe.

Canada’s future has a secret sauce for success called immigration, and it can go sour quickly if not treated carefully. Things have changed since the middle of the last century. China, Japan, and India are successfully competing with the West in many respects. They don’t respect the fact that we have a king with a purple crown wearing a white ermine fur cape and they have more and better weapons than we do.

Not long ago, we were on top of the world and developed an elitist attitude. Those days are over and the future belongs to those who compromise, share, and negotiate. If we always compete to get more than the rest for ourselves, we will lose our advantage as we clearly see happening right now. If we choose not to believe it, we are risking a rude awakening. Superheroes are toy action figures only. In the real world of humans, we either care about all of our kind, or at best, manage to destroy all that we achieved and, if we are lucky, try to start again. There are no guarantees that we will be able to.

For the time being, let’s put the fires out and elect smart people to govern us.