I liked the paper from a couple years ago that suggested that every EIS must quantify the number of people that will die as a result of it, so that anyone who signs on the bottom line can be tried by future generations as they were clearly aware of the number of people they murdered by approving the project.
All the Canadians I know, including myself, do care about it. There’s just a bunch of greedy shitheads who see it as an opportunity to line their own pockets while they carve it up.
Similarly, we’ve engaged in approximately zero self-reflection over the COVD-19 pandemic. A great example of this is the inexplicable mismanagement of Canada’s personal protective equipment stockpile. It cuts across Liberal/Conservative lines: our governments pinky swore to maintain the stockpile after SARS. The Public Health Agency of Canada’s internal audits noticed that in 2010, and again in 2013, but chose to do nothing. Then we spent the first part of the next pandemic scrambling to get healthcare workers PPE. If Canadians gave a collective shit, this and all of the similar disappointments at PHAC (the bureaucratization of the organization; the AWOL pandemic preparedness plan; the inexplicable shutdown of the pandemic early warning observatory - but it was restarted, so I’ll give this one a pass), then we’d talk about it at the very least. But we don’t.
And then there’s the collapsing provincial healthcare systems. We don’t have enough specialists, doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, or personal care attendants. But we allow our political parties to make mealy mouthed promises and do virtually nothing about it.
Oh absolutely. I probably responded to your overly reductive take with my own equally overly reductive take. ^^; I’ve got a few extended family members who’ve fallen into the contrarian to alt-right pipeline, so I totally get the sentiment. I just wanted to point out that a lot do still care. But you’re right, it’s quickly becoming a dire situation.
It’s been my anecdotal observation that part of the problem is that the overall quality of healthcare has been on the decline, so more and more people are looking to less scientifically accepted treatments. Of course the rise of social media has played a big part as well, where whatever convenient and truthy sounding content is rewarded, and often above the actual scientifically backed information.
So yeah, things are bad, but we’re also not alone. There are still a lot of us that do care about our public healthcare system and see it as one of the things we’d like to be proud of as a country.
I suspect where we differ is on the meaning of the word “care”.
I don’t see much in the way of public advocacy for healthcare. In environmental and political movements you see Canadians giving up evenings and weekends, and donating money. People show they care by doing something.
Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, but the Canadian healthcare advocacy organizations I see (e.g. Canada Health Coalition, HealthCareCAN) seem to be mostly made up of healthcare professionals. Other orgs that seem more representative of the general population (like the Council of Canadians) mention healthcare, but it’s part of a larger portfolio of concerns.
It’s like healthcare professionals get what’s going on, but the rest of us don’t. Or if we do get it, we rarely bother to show up.
And, as the links above show, there’s a growing minority of Canadians who are actively opposing public health by avoiding vaccination.
Framing it as an environmental problem always implicitly assumed that people understood we need a good environment to be healthy…
People complain about bonfire restrictions in my city, but when I show my air quality sensor data and the effect it has on breathing and sports performance, they tend to be more open minded.
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