Harper's To Lose

And so we are off.

At this moment I have to confess it is hard for me to imagine how Dion would win this election. From the Star:

Harper will run on his record, outlining the tax-cutting promises kept since the 2006 campaign, and slammed the Liberal "green shift" plan to tax carbon fuels and offset the impact with other income tax cuts and subsidies for hard-hit sectors and individuals as a risky gamble.

I believe Dion hadn't had time to fully sell his Green Shift to the general population.

At work, hardly many people know the details of the Green Shift. More people know about the tax increase on pollutants than the income tax relief that Dion has proposed. With the Green Party also doing well, Dion could leak support to them as well.

All in all, it will come down to the English debates where Dion has to invoke a "gotcha" moment vs Harper - and I am not a big optimist that his English will improve sufficiently in time.

Sicko and the American Healthcare

I remember once I was in southern Georgia, US, on my way to Orlando, Florida. We stopped at this little town where a buddy of mine worked, to rest for the night. He took us for dinner at this small family restaurant, along with a few co-workers of his. During dinner, the conversation shifted to voting.

"So you guys are all voting this year?" I casually asked his colleagues.

"Oh yes," one tall woman replied, "but we haven't gotten our vote card yet."

"Vote card?" I asked.

"Oh yes," she replied, "our company gives us cards with the candidates positions and who they recommended to vote for, and we do accordingly."

My jaw was like an :-0 in shock. And it is because of people like her (and she was not an aberration I found - many in the south of USA are truly politically ignorant hicks who never step out of their own towns and have no knowledge - nor interest - in what is going on at home and abroad), people who never think, yet they vote, that I despair of films like Sicko ever having any impact in the US.

Sicko was not a bad movie (though I maintain Moore's Bowling for Columbine was his best). It did paint a rosier picture of Canadian health care than what is the truth, but despite all the purported problems of our health care, I would not change it at all for an American-style user-pay-as-you-go health care. It is baffling that the richest, most powerful nation in the world cannot afford to provide adequate health care for more than half of its citizens.

It's also surprising how environment is suddenly the top issue amongst all the supposedly educated elite and the secular thinkers of the American political establishment. Yes, Gore my man, kudos to you for raising the profile of an issue you did nothing major about for eight years as the vice-president, but this Live Earth thing wasted more energy than the Canadian army in a single day in Afghanistan! Yes, I know the intent was to raise awareness, but everyone already knows about the environment! It is easy to latch on to the environment as something to do, because other than petitioning the government to sign the faulty Kyoto agreement you don't really have to do much.

While watching Sicko, there are many times I was glad that man, I am Canadian. However, one nagging thought did keep interrupting me - wait times. There are times when I had been down with something, or had a broken bone wherever, and had to wait a week or two before seeing a specialist. In those one or two weeks, pain killers would have to do. At those times, I sometimes wish I could have the option of paying and seeing the specialist early.

However, problems with our system are limited (and caused by) how we run our system, not with the system itself. For no other reason do many Buffalo citizens still try and somehow manage to obtain an Ontario Health card.

The Greens Are Stupid

'Coz if you are a new party, looking to break into the political mainstream, you want to make your pitch by telling voters, "Vote for us, pay even MORE for gas!"

They would have had a better reception had they, oh I don't know, suggested we build a better transit system in the cities. Most people wouldn't abandon cars if the gas prices rose by 12 cents. Hell, it rose by more than 30 cents since last year (from 75c/l) and I am still driving to work (albeit painfully). You know what would stop me, and I suspect most people, from taking their car to work?

A much better, and connected, transit system. Where a 10 minute drive by car does not take an hour to go by transit. If they connect Scarborough in Toronto to the subway by, for example constructing a north-south line through Markham Road, suddenly much of the cars that now clog-up the 401 from Kennedy to Morningside would disappear. And I suspect it's much the same in most of the major cities in Canada.

Miller had a good idea by making the Metropass transferable and affordable so more people take the transit to work. It's time to take the next step and expand the subway.

Not having stupid ideas by trying to punish people for just living their daily lives.