Public Options and Profiteering

America is addicted to capitalism, and it's about to strangle their efforts at health care reform.  For a while it looked like the ultimate goal was a universal, free system like we have north of the border, but so far that has proved too socialist for even the most liberal of politicians.  The best they have been able to do is to propose "public options" to "compete" with the current system.  As much as they end goal is to provide coverage for everyone, it still leaves motivations in the wrong place.

Using competition as the means still leaves profit as the end goal and avoids the whole point: getting quality, healthcare for everyone, all the time.  Offering a "public option" simply gives a fall back for people unable to pay premiums or dropped by their other programs.  It's business as usual (with less guilt) for healthcare corporations except that just as Republicans have feared, costs go up, quality goes down, and in the end nobody wins.

The idea that seems to be left out of the debate is this: some things work better as a collective effort (ie socialism).  If you need proof, just take a look what happened before the Fire Department came into play.  It used to be that people would pay private fire companies to protect their house in the event of a fire.  In exchange for payment, they would receive a badge to display outside their house.  Sounds like a pretty good deal, except if your house caught on fire and you had the wrong badge, you were out of luck.  People realized this was a ridiculous system and a public Fire Department was created.  It remains to be seen why almost nobody identifies privatized healthcare as the exact same problem.

Why does this matter to me as a Canadian? Perhaps because I care that everyone has access to proper healthcare, or maybe because it SHOULD matter to Canadians.  We have long been worried about the "brain drain", losing quality doctors to the Americans, and because more than a few Canadians have had health related accidents south of the border, returning home with thousands in hospital debts.  Mostly though, this matters to Canadians because it makes us appreciate how lucky we are to live in the country we do.

As Bill Maher recently wrote in the Huffington Post, "Not everything in America has to make a profit".

The War on Warm

They're here.  They're loud.  They're climate change deniers, and they aren't going away.

Alex Higgins has written in the Huffington Post that even some media sources are getting in on the act, despite all evidence to the contrary.  Higgins hilariously describes the process:

"1. Global Warming Denier makes claim

2. Claim is comprehensively, indisputably debunked

3. Claim is withdrawn, while Denier publicly continues to assert they are the new Galileo and their critics are religious fanatics with no regard for facts 

4. New Global Warming Denier makes exactly the same claim as if previous debate never happened"

Although I wholeheartedly agree with Higgins' assessment, I believe that even he misses the point.  You will never be able to quash claims that deny history or science, so long as someone stands to profit from it.  Evolution is still disputed in certain circles, and even the Holocaust has its deniers.  Those who deny global warming provide themselves an easy excuse not to take action on our quickly fading environment.  However, what nobody seems willing to admit is that in the grander scheme of things, the legitimacy of human-caused global warming as a theory is irrelevant.  We are facing multiple issues that are as serious (if not more so) than global warming which are not only indisputable but have not been seriously dealt with.

Let's take a look at some of the issues that have been put on the backburner while argiuing about global warming:

1. Species extinction- not new, indisputable, and a serious threat to the survival of millions of species, including ourselves.  Keep an eye in particular on sharks and bees, on whom entire ecosystems depend.

2. Resource depletion- according to the world's leading geologists, peak oil will likely happen in the next 10 years, if it has not occurred already.  Results include prices hitting the roof on oil and everything that requires it for transportation, manufacturing, or as an ingredient.  Global economic collapse that will dwarf the current recession, and little that we will be able to do about it once it has started.

3. Population control- arguably the greatest threat to the environment.  Humans have by far exceeded their carrying capacity on Earth and have created unsustainable strain on their surroundings.  Other scary results include the potential for worldwide viral pandemics.

4. Global Water Shortages- the next big issue.  Over a billion people currently depend on the Himalayas for water, and like other glaciers, the mountains are losing their permanent ice.

Enough with the partisan bickering.  Let's deal with this thing while we still can.

The Long Road to Local

It seems we have reached a tipping point with local food in mainstream media.  Enough Canadians have demanded to know the source of their food such that many companies have started to claim "local" ingredients in their products.  This is very encouraging for the local food movement in that it means people are starting to care about where their food comes from.  Furthermore, it shows that the market has been willing to respond to these consumer demands.  However, even a passive viewing of some of these "local" claims suggests many are not all they are hyped up to be.

One of the most popular claims to "local" ingredients is simply to call them Canadian (Lays potatoes), which if you know your geography doesn't mean much.  Certainly, this gives some quality assurance, but removes any guarantee of environmental benefits.  Hellman's boasts their canola oil from the prairies, which run into the same problem (if you are from Toronto, your food might as well be sourced from Texas)

I am not one to be picky.  I think it's great that Canadian citizens and commerce are hopping on the local bandwagon.  I just think we need to be able to discern between a real change in operations and just a change in what we are being told.