Token Canadian Blogging

A co-blogger asked what I thought of the CBC’s “Greatest Canadian” poll, so as this blog’s Canadian representative I suppose I should say something now that my grant application is finished. I generally like these kinds of pointless lists–I’m all for rationally indefensible Top 10 movie lists, for example–but I don’t have any idea who I would have voted for, although it seems obvious to me the Gretzky is too low, and it strikes me that any list that can find room for David Suzuki and Don Cherry makes Neil Young’s exclusion an even greater outrage, but to debate such things is to miss the point.

Douglas’s win, though, can tell us something about the recent debate on framing. Undoubtedly, this will be framed by the right-wing blogs as a triumph of Canadian “socialism,” which has the inconvenient disadvantage of being false; the NDP is even further from being a viable contender for national office than usual, and while the Trudeau-era Liberal party did co-opt its ideas to some extent the current Liberal party is an extremely potent electoral and patronage machine wrapped around an ideological void; it’s no more a party of the left than Tammany Hall Democrats were.

What it is, of course, is a symbol of the triumph of single-payer health care, which has come to be central to Canadian nationalism and Canadian identity. From a strictly rational perspective, this doesn’t make a lot of sense–I don’t believe Canadians had no national identity prior to socialized medicine. But it must be admitted that it’s been a smashing success as a political trope; I grew up in the most conservative major city in Canada and a politician running against socialized medicine couldn’t be elected as a junior high school treasurer. Since single-payer is unquestionably superior to the American system on the merits, then, I really can’t object. Remember this survey the next time a conservative blowhard appears on TV and claims that Canadians hate their health care system; if Douglas hadn’t initiated the process, nobody outside of Saskatchewan would remember his name.

This story reminds me of something else: contrary to what you might think, business interests in Canada are generally supportive of single-payer, for the obvious reason that it relieves them of the burden of providing basic health care for their employees (and, since it costs less in state money, let alone total money, than the American system, it doesn’t in itself lead to higher taxes either.) I suspect a non-trivial number of American businesses with the potential to outsource white-collar jobs may figure out that you can pay Canadian workers the same wage and save shitloads of money–a sort of reverse race-to-the-bottom.

UPDATE: Lindsay Beyerstein offers a companion bottom-10 list. Excellent choices, although 1)I’d put Todd Bertuzzi on the list instead of Cherry, 2)Jacques “Money and the ethnic vote” Parizeau would make a nice companion to Lionel Groulx, and 3)I’m only going to include Johnson when Carl Lewis gives up his gold medal too, and 4)while I shouldn’t bring more attention to my home province’s greatest shame, I have to say that the guy from Nickleback is even worse than Alanis.