Tuesday, September 28th, 2004
The Charter of Rights and Free Medicare
I like to read Colby Cosh's articles. They are honest, straight-forward assessments of our political system. I found this reference to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms quite interesting:
It's a funny thing: We Canadians have a Constitution that was patriated and radically updated within living memory, but it seems sometimes not to be a living thing. Not in the way, I mean, that the U.S. Constitution is. The American republic's founding debates and basic law never fade from view for long in the bustle of current affairs; the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments endlessly dissected and cited there, and the Fourteenth shows up, throwing wild haymakers, in every debate from affirmative action to the 2000 presidential election.
We certainly talk about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms a lot, or our politicians do. But we don't have a political culture in which new laws are instinctively tested against the ambitions and intentions of our constitutional framers -- either the ones of 1982, who are rarely consulted or even considered in the capacity of founders, or the ones of 1867, whose ruling passions and federalist specifications are largely forgotten.
It's the latter group that is most relevant to a consideration of contemporary health policy. The problem is that none of them, for a second, would have considered the possibility that the state would one day be responsible for providing comprehensive, universal health care to the citizenry. If you could shake John A. Macdonald awake and explain medicare to him, he would wonder how and when the damned filthy Prussians had managed to take over the Dominion. And the same is true, I would warrant, of everyone else who had a hand in the events of 1867. They were Victorian gentlemen; they had no idea that the political "centre" would one day be located far to the left of their era's jelly-spined European socialists. [emphasis mine]
It's interesting, isn't it? The U.S. seems so concerned with protecting the founding father's original intent for the country, while we seem to blythly ignore our founder's wishes.
Speaking of medicare, the 'brain-drain' we often refer to is all the more interesting in light of this tidbit of history:
When [medicare] was broadened, the Douglas government had to fight the doctors, who were foursquare against the socialization of their labour and went out on a hair-raising strike. Douglas won.
~Jason
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