World War Two
Published 9 Feb 2023Does Adolf Hitler like Duke Ellington? No, and nor do many National Socialists. But the story of the music in the Third Reich is more complicated than you might think. What if we told you that Joseph Goebbels has tried to create a Nazi-approved swing band tasked with bringing the Jazz War to the Allies?
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February 10, 2023
Hitler’s Jazz Band – WW2 Documentary Special
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“What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling”
In The Free Press, Jamie Reed explains why she gave up her job as as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and is now speaking out against the early and aggressive therapeutic treatment of gender-confused children and teens:
Reed in her office. (Theo R. Welling).
Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.
At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as — who wanted to be — a girl.
Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.
I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.
This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.
The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.
Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).
The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.
To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist — usually one we recommended — who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.
That’s all it took.
When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.
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Water-Cooled .50s: The US Navy Mk22 Pedestal Mount
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Oct 2022In 1942, the US Navy adopted the Mk22 Pedestal mount, which fitted a pair of water-cooled Browning M2 machine guns (one left-hand feed and one right-hand). It was used for antiaircraft use primarily, and was also adopted by the Army as the M46 in 1943. The mount was an update to the previous single-gun MK21.
The gunner was protected by a 3/8″ (9.5mm) hardened steel shield, and the mount could rotate a full 360 degrees, with elevation from -10 degrees to 80 degrees. They were produced by the Heintz Manufacturing company (no relation to the Heinz company that makes ketchup) of Pittsburgh from 1942 until 1945.
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February 9, 2023
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” … but sometimes it’s almost prophetic
Once again, Ted Gioia’s Honest Broker Substack has something interesting I’d like to share with you (I wouldn’t blame you at all for cutting out the middleman and just subscribing for yourself):
Today I want to focus on a single paragraph published in 1960.
You’re asking yourself: How much can a single paragraph matter — especially if it was written 63 years ago? But read it first and judge for yourself.
It’s a chilling paragraph.
[…]
By any measure, [Paul Goodman] was one of the most eccentric thinkers of the era. Yet he anticipated our current situation with more insight than any of his peers.
Let’s look at this one paragraph from the Preface to Growing Up Absurd. It’s a long paragraph — it takes up most of two pages. So we will break it down into pieces.
Goodman begins with a puzzle he needs to solve — society is stagnating everywhere, and we all can see it. But there’s no action plan to fix it. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing and finger-pointing everywhere, but nobody has even started on developing a practical agenda.
According to Goodman, this is because people “have ceased to be able to imagine alternatives”. Everybody accepts that the current system “is the only possibility of society, for nothing else is thinkable”.
Now comes his analysis, and — to my surprise — Goodman begins by talking about music. This was the last thing I expected in a social critique, but for Goodman the manufacturing of hit songs is a metaphor for everything else that’s wrong in a stagnant society.
He writes:
Let me give a couple of examples of how this [inability to imagine healthy alternatives] works. Suppose (as is the case) that a group of radio and TV broadcasters, competing in the Pickwickian fashion of semi-monopolies, control all the stations and channels in an area, amassing the capital and variously bribing Communications Commissioners in order to get them; and the broadcasters tailor their programs to meet the requirements of their advertisers of the censorship, of their own slick and clique tastes, and of a broad common denominator of the audience, none of whom may be offended: they will then claim not only that the public wants the drivel that they give them, but indeed that nothing else is being created. Of course it is not! Not for these media; why should a serious artist bother?
When I first read this, I was dumbstruck. Goodman wrote this during the winter of 1959 and 1960, when radio stations were independent and freewheeling. Back in my teen years, a single business was only allowed to control one AM station and one FM station. In 1985 this was increased to 12 stations on each band. And in 1994 this was raised again, this time to 20 AM stations and 20 FM stations.
But then all hell broke lose when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed in the Senate by a 91 to 5 margin and was signed into law. Now the sky was the limit — and all the airwaves it contained.
Soon Clear Channel Communications owned more than 1,200 radio stations in some 300 cities. The company began the process of standardizing and homogenizing our musical culture. We still suffer from that today.
Even after radio started losing influence in the Internet Age, huge streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) ensured that access to the ears of America would be controlled by a tiny number of huge corporations. A musical culture that was once local, indie, and flexible has become centralized, corporatized, and stagnant.
How could Paul Goodman even dream of such a scenario back in 1960? That future was decades away at the time.
But we are only at the start of this visionary paragraph. Goodman now explains that the same thing will happen in universities.
Colleges and schools were small and non-bureaucratic back in 1960. Yet Goodman sees a crisis looming. On the next page Goodman warns against “the topsy-turvy situation that a teacher must devote himself to satisfying the administrator and financier rather than to doing his job, and a universally admired teacher is fired for disobeying an administrative order that would hinder teaching”.
Administration at US colleges has grown exponentially in the last two decades and has turned almost every academic institution into a plodding bureaucracy — but how in the world did Goodman anticipate this in 1960?
Now let’s return to our chilling paragraph. Immediately after discussing radio stations, Goodman adds a gargantuan sentence. It jumps all over the place but hits the target at every twist and turn:
Or suppose again (as is not quite the case) that in a group of universities only faculties are chosen that are “safe” to the businessmen trustees or the politically appointed regents, and these faculties give out all the degrees and licenses and union cards to the new generation of students, and only such universities can get Foundation or government money for research, and research is incestuously staffed by the same sponsors and according to the same policy, and they allow no one but those they choose, to have access to either the classroom or expensive apparatus: it will then be claimed that there is no other learning or professional competence; that an inspired teacher is not “solid”; that the official projects are the direction of science; that progressive education is a failure; and finally, indeed — as in Dr. James Conant’s report on the high schools — that only 15 per cent of the youth are “academically talented” enough to be taught hard subjects.
Here in a nutshell is the credentialing crisis of our times. Learning is replaced by exclusionary certification programs that limit career opportunities — unless you take out loans and “purchase” the necessary credential from these academic gatekeepers.
This has become so destructive in our own time that many are crushed by student loans, and others seek ingenious ways of bypassing college entirely. There’s no way that Goodman could have grasped this in 1960 — when only 7.7 percent of Americans had college degrees.
Nor could he have known about the replicability crisis in science or the destructive games now played in awarding of scientific grants. Those are the problems of our times — not his.
But somehow Paul Goodman saw it coming.
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February 7, 2023
Disney – An Empire In Collapse
The Critical Drinker
Published 6 Feb 2023Disney isn’t looking too healthy these days, with massive financial losses, collapsing stock prices and internal power struggles threatening to tear the House of Mouse apart at the seams. How did this happen? Let’s find out.
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Big Sky fascism, according to the New York Times
In The Free Press, Walter Kirn expresses dismay to discover that he’s been living in a “quasi-fascist” state for 30 years and didn’t even notice until the Grey Lady informed him about it recently:
Just a few weeks back, I sat down with my morning coffee, opened up the paper and learned that I now live in a quasi-fascist state. It said so in the paper.
The paper wasn’t a local publication but one from a couple thousand miles away, the New York Times, whose glossy Sunday magazine included a lengthy, illustrated feature with the five-alarm headline How Montana Took a Hard Right Turn Toward Christian Nationalism. To illustrate the state’s alleged swerve toward neo-fascist theocratic rule — a dire development I’d somehow missed — the story included a scary gothic photo, heavily filtered to bring out its dark tones, of a ghostly white cross on a bare hillside reflected in a passing rearview mirror. It also included, of course, a Yellowstone reference and Kevin Costner’s name — right up top, where the search engines would see them.
Since moving to small-town Montana from New York City over 30 years ago, I’d lived through at least a couple of cycles of ominous national coverage of my state. Without going into the details, let me assure you that this article was bunk, as exaggerated as the photo.
But fiction is fact where Montana is concerned, particularly on the country’s coasts, where tales are told about the country’s interior that the country’s interior lacks the clout to counter, much as our guns lack the range to bring down aircraft. Despite our legendary swagger, Montanans are largely helpless against the country’s more powerful forces. The missiles on our prairies aren’t missiles we asked for, just missiles that formidable others wished to plant here. They make us a target, but we don’t control them.
Do I sound defensive? Perhaps I am.
I live in a state with zero big-league sports teams, not a single Fortune 500 corporation, and no national media influence to speak of — unless you count made-up shows about fake ranchers slugging it out in scripted brawls. I’m one of about a million residents, all of whom, no matter their circumstances, are up against the myth-making machines of cities and states of imperial wealth and numbers. And imperial attitudes, dare I say, which emerge in their basic, perennial story about us: those folks from the steppes and mountains are growing restless, including the ones who’ve just moved there to go skiing, who appear to be worse than the ones already living there, who we’ve always found unsettling enough.
When the spy balloon floated across America, the rest of the country got a taste, perhaps, of Montana’s stoic colonial impotence. For days, we could point, but we weren’t allowed to shoot — great-power diplomacy prevented it. Americans may think we’re tough, as Montanans may think they’re tough, but it seems that we’re tough in the way that actors in westerns are: only with the permission of the director, only symbolically. Down went the balloon on Saturday to much applause, but the spectacle was pure cinema by then, like a fistfight on Yellowstone that draws fake blood.
But at least we proud Montanans kept our honor. We spied the lurking villain, we called the sheriff, we warned our neighbors, we did what we could do. I suspect we’ll continue in this role, watchful vigilantes of the skies. There’s trouble afoot – you can feel it everywhere, particularly if you dwell near nuclear missiles, particularly if you live where there’s no cover — and someone has to stand lookout on the hill.
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February 6, 2023
Food prices going up? Destroying “excess” production? That’s Canada’s Supply Management system working at peak efficiency!
Jon Miltimore reports on recent comments about some of the weird requirements for quota-holding dairy farmers under the Canadian Supply Management system:
Canadian dairy farmer is speaking out after being forced to dump thousands of liters of milk after exceeding the government’s production quota.
In a video shared on TikTok by Travis Huigen, Ontario dairy farmer Jerry Huigen says he’s heartbroken to dump 30,000 liters of milk amid surging dairy prices.
“Right now we are over our quotum, um, it’s regulated by the government and by the DFO (Dairy Farmers of Ontario)”, says Huigen, as he stands beside a machine spewing fresh milk into a drain. “Look at this milk running away. Cause it’s the end of the month. I dump thirty thousand liters of milk, and it breaks my heart.”
Huigen says people ask him why milk prices are so high.
“This here Canadian milk is seven dollars a liter. When I go for my haircut people say, ‘Wow, seven dollars Jerry, for a little bit of milk'”, he says, as he fills a glass of the milk being dumped and drinks. “I say well, you have to go higher up. Cause we have no say anymore, as a dairy farmer on our own farm. They make us dump it.”
[…]
In the United States, the primary regulations are high-level price-fixing, bans on selling unpasteurized milk (which means farmers have to dump their product if dairy processors don’t buy it), and “price gouging” laws that prevent retailers from increasing prices when demand is low, which incentivizes hoarding.
In Canada, the regulations are even worse.
While the price-fixing scheme for milk in the US is incredibly complicated and leaves much to be desired — there’s an old industry adage that says “only five people in the world know how milk is priced in the US and four of them are dead” — in Canada the price is determined by a single bureaucracy: the Canadian Dairy Commission.
The Ottawa-based commission (technically a “Government of Canada Crown Corporation”), which oversees Canada’s entire dairy system (known as Supply Management), raised prices three times in 2022, citing “the rising cost of production”.
Food price inflation remains a serious issue in Canada, but the problem is particularly acute in regards to dairy products, which has seen their annual inflation rate triple over the past year, to almost 12 percent.
If the farmers were doing this sort of price-fixing themselves, it would be illegal. Instead, because it’s the government doing it, it’s mandatory. You aren’t allowed to produce any of the supply-managed products outside the system, and the government helpfully protects Canadians from being “victimized” by cheaper imports by high tariffs on anything competing with supply managed output.
As with any rigged market, the costs of “protecting” the market are diffused among all Canadian consumers, but the benefits are concentrated in the hands of the quota-holders (and the bureaucrats who oversee the system). My issues with the supply management system are one of the “hobby horses” I’ve ridden many times over my nearly 20 years of blogging.
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QotD: US railroad land grants
In 1871, Kentucky Congressman J. Proctor Knott gave a humorous speech on the floor of the House of Representatives ridiculing the idea of giving land grants to western railroads. He focused on Duluth, which at the time had about 3,000 residents, and his basic argument was that U.S. taxpayers in general should not be required to subsidize projects that benefitted only a few.
The speech was widely reprinted by those skeptical of government pork barrel (a term that first became popular about the time Knott gave his speech). Sixteen years later, Northern Pacific, which received what was probably the largest land grant to a private company in American history, reprinted the speech in this brochure.
This might seem strange except that NP annotated the speech with recent facts in bright red letters, such as that Duluth had grown to house 26,000 people by 1886, that more wheat was delivered to Duluth each year than to any other American city, and that it also saw deliveries of millions of board feet of lumber and hundreds of thousands of tons of iron ore each year.
NP didn’t say so in so many words, but its point was clearly that the land grants, contrary to Knott’s predictions, were a good thing for most if not all Americans. However, the brochure also didn’t mention that James J. Hill was proving that a railroad that didn’t receive any land grants or subsidies could provide just as many benefits without going bankrupt, which would leave both investors and taxpayers in the lurch. (The St. Paul & Pacific did receive a small land grant, but Hill paid fair market value for that railroad and land after it went bankrupt, thus Hill didn’t particularly benefit from the subsidy.)
Train Lover (Randal O’Toole), “Debate Over Railroad Land Grants”, Streamliner Memories, 2022-11-01.
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February 5, 2023
“[E]very story now assumes ‘white supremacy’ as the core truth of the world”
Andrew Sullivan on the state of the American legacy media in an age of young, woke reporters driving the narrative forward at the expense of any hint of objectivity:
Memphis police officers charged in the beating death of Tyre Nichols.
There are times when I actually feel some pity for the editors in mainstream media. In the last few years, pressured relentlessly by young, super-leftist staffers, they have slowly and then precipitously dropped the goal of objectivity and news in favor of subjectivity and narratives. The struggle against white supremacy has become too urgent for news that may not advance “social justice”. Here’s a glimpse of what the old guard is dealing with, in a leaked transcript of a NYT staff meeting in 2019. An early question from a NYT reporter was:
I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.
And, as you can see every day, this is what the NYT subsequently did. Distilled that year with The 1619 Project (now airing on Hulu!), everything was and is parsed through the lens of critical race/gender/queer theory — from birdwatching to knitting to “literally abolishing the police”. It’s their foundation.
The same ideological fervor swept over the WaPo, of course — right down to the racist birds! And this week, the former executive editor, Len Downie, a near-icon of the old school, published a report on journalism and found a broad consensus among his colleagues that, in the words of one editor-in-chief, “Objectivity has got to go!” So every story now assumes “white supremacy” as the core truth of the world.
So what happens when stories arrive which, on the face of it, seem to refute that entirely? Take three recent events: two mass killings of Asian-Americans within two days in California by an Asian-American (in Monterey Park) and a Chinese national (in Half Moon Bay); five black police officers in a majority-black police force with a black police chief all but lynched and murdered an innocent black man; and a trans woman was convicted of the rape of two other women with the use of her penis.
How on earth do these fit into the pre-arranged “white supremacy” template?
They can’t of course. They reflect a reality far more complex than the crude racial hierarchies beloved of actual white supremacists and woke activists alike. They show individual actors, with a range of possible motives, in unique moments that will always escape predictable narratives. Maybe racial prejudice is present; maybe not; or maybe mixed into a range of other possible factors. You work empirically from the ground up.
But if the facts don’t fit the narrative, you move on quickly to a story that will. So with the Asian-American massacres, after some initial excitement, the MSM lost interest as soon as a white man could not be blamed. (Contrast that with the days-long feeding frenzy over the Atlanta spa massacre, despite zero evidence of any anti-Asian motive from the white killer.) Or they try to force it into their narrative anyway.
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Leningrad: NO STEP BACK! – Week 232 – February 4, 1944
World War Two
Published 4 Feb 2023The Allies begin a new operation in the Pacific this week: assaulting the Marshall Islands. They also make big attacks from their beachhead in Italy at Anzio, but these are called off after only a few days in the face of heavy enemy resistance. However, in the USSR there are several successes against the Axis, as they are pushed back both in the far north and the far south of the front, and still surrounded near Korsun.
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“We need to find a couple of big-fish donors who want to see a bunch of vets going out and collecting digital Nazi scalps”
Chris Bray examines the cutting edge of anti-Nazi crusading:
So here’s the most important political story to appear in Rolling Stone since Sabrina Rubin Erdely earned early retirement:
There’s a growing movement of American Nazis, you see, so military veterans are pulling on their boots to fight for their country again, hunting those Nazis and taking them out. But actually reading the story is, pardon me for a moment, a little like hammering a fucking spike into your brain. Every claim self-refutes; paragraph by paragraph, the story tells you X and Not X, side-by-side, with equal authority.
Start with the foundation of the claim. Goldsmith’s work, Rolling Stone explains, “centers on exposing the inner workings and public wrongdoing of neo-fascist groups through deep-dive intelligence reports that can give prosecutors the evidence they need go after the hatemongers in court.” Try to find a definition of “neo-fascist” in the story, though, and you fail. Fascism, it turns out, is being mean. It’s politics for the TikTok era: fascism is haters! Actual fascists thought they believed in the sacredness and centrality of the state, government as the highest form of human expression; the LARPers tracking fascists in 2023 think it means you didn’t contribute to WinBlue last month.
And so Goldsmith says he’s tracking “these people who would literally kill their fellow Americans to install a fascist dictator”, which would be a pretty dire confrontation. Then, making the claim concrete, Goldsmith gets to this description of the Patriot Front, his primary Nazi nemesis:
I have come to understand them as a unique threat against the people of the United States. While they’re a small group — they may have 200, 220 members at any given time — the thing that makes them so dangerous is the cult like atmosphere.
So the headline is a life-and-death struggle between the rising tide of American fascists who are preparing to kill us all and install their Hitler; the story is 200 people — maybe 220! — “at any given time”. Here, by the way, is a leaked Patriot Front training video, so you can see just how terrifyingly dangerous they are:
The only thing the Patriot Front threatens is the retail availability of your favorite product at Dunkin’ Donuts, but let’s go on.
Standing across the battlefield from this terrifying group, the story reveals, Goldsmith & Co. now total a force of “two dozen volunteers”. Then comes this exchange, deep into the Q&A:
Rolling Stone has turned a cosplayers-on-cosplayers circle jerk into the Battle of the Bulge. Compare THE NAZI HUNTER NEXT DOOR to a living room’s worth of unpaid hobbyists who could really turn into something if someone would just, like, give us some money.
Now, the punchline: The NAZI HUNTER is very much having his big media moment, scoring a series of profiles since the start of the year. Here he is being interviewed by the New York Times (where his wife is an editor) in January, for example, under an intro that says he’s hunting “antigovernment” extremists who are fascist. We all remember how the original fascists were passionately anti-government, of course. Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini — big libertarians, all. Hardly wanted to have any government, so people could just hang loose and roll however they chose.
The tediousness of pumping all this sad-sackery into a big national story is exhausting, as is the news media in general. But we need the distraction of Nazis and insurrections, or we’d risk talking about things that are real.
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February 4, 2023
Poland’s Descent into Civil War – War Against Humanity 097
World War Two
Published 2 Feb 2023Poland, occupied, abandoned or even threatened by her allies is left to fight her own war. A war that under the influence of internal and external forces looks more and more like a full blown civil war inside the world war.
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“Ghost Riders In The Sky”
Audio Saurus
Published 30 Oct 2015Neil LeVang in 1961 on The Lawrence Welk Show.
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QotD: Leftists against humanity
Here’s the list as to why:
NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST:
1) Pushing to maximize abortion
2) Pushing to maximize homosexuality
3) Multiple different initiatives to make child rearing more difficult and expensive including
a) Ramping up the intensity of social services scrutiny, effectively necessitating high intensity “helicopter parenting”
b) Turning schools into indoctrination factories that don’t prepare children to function independently but do prepare them to have constant fights with their parents over their indoctrination
c) Making healthcare more expensive through constantly ramping regulation, making the actual having of children more difficult and prohibitively expensive
d) Pushing to nationalize healthcare, granting them further power over who lives or dies – allowing limitation of IVF, and also
e) legitimizing legal euthanasia while also pushing to make healthcare decisions for the public (see Canada right now)4) Pushing from other regulatory angles to make the de facto standard a two-income family, ensuring children are raised in daycares and further pushing family budgets to the brink
5) Using the student loan system to turn the bulk of reproductive age, upwardly mobile people into collateral in a deal that passes billions of dollars directly from the US government to the same system that then indoctrinates those kids to the point of full societal dysfunction; encouraging, as much as possible, the use of sex as entertainment ONLY
6) Turning sterilizing yourself into the hot new fad for kids
7) Turning the simple identification of gender into a minefield so that even sex between people who aren’t mutilating themselves is suddenly difficult to even consider
8) Willfully manipulating nursing homes into putting elderly people in a position where they are MOST LIKELY to die during COVID
9) Adopting COVID policies which foreseeably shut down cancer diagnostics and treatment for almost two years, which is the most likely cause of the 10 fold increase in the rate of cancers since the COVID lockdowns (although I can’t entirely discount that the vaccines themselves are partially responsible because, sing it with me now, you can’t ensure the long term safety of something that hasn’t been around long enough to have long term safety data, which is why we do clinical trials and not mass experiments on the general public. I note in passing that the drug companies are so trustworthy they demanded legal indemnity as a condition of participating, while swearing blind that the product was safe and effective even though it was physically fucking impossible for them to have data to back that up due to minor problems like the requisite quantity of time not passing.)
Sarah Hoyt, “I Don’t Believe in Aliens”, According to Hoyt, 2022-10-31.
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February 3, 2023
A spectre is haunting Ontario politics: the spectre of [Shock! Horror!] American-style healthcare!
Everyone in Canada has heard alarming stories of people in the United States being presented with five- or six-figure bills for hospital care, and any hint that one of our provincial healthcare systems might move in that direction scares the pants off almost everyone. Politicians know this well, and salivate at the chance of deploying charges that their opponents favour “American-style” changes to our system because it’s a guaranteed vote-winner. None of it has to be true — very few Canadians know much about US systems aside from the horror stories — but it’s always effective.
In The Line, Harrison Ruess makes the sensible point that there are more healthcare systems in the western world than those of Canadian provinces and our closest neighbour:
Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
First, to be emphatic on this point, we need to be realistic about where our system ranks globally.
It is truly bewildering to me the lengths that otherwise smart and empathetic Canadians will go to to defend the status-quo approach to health care in Canada. The results we get, versus the money we spend, is simply not brag-worthy. The argument that our system works great, if only we threw more money at it, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Is our health care okay? Sure. Decent? Probably. Is it great? Hardly. Could we do better? Yes, much. Do we need to spend more? Maybe a tad, but not likely much, if any. To wit:
According to OECD data, on life expectancy Canada ranks 16th. On mortality rates from avoidable causes, we’re 23rd. On cancer survival rates we range from 13th down to 18th, depending on the cancer type. On the number of one-year-olds vaccinated for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, we rank an abysmal 37th (even the U.S. is higher here at 27th. Gulp.). One area where we do rank closer to the top is spending as a proportion of GDP, where we sit seventh.
World Health Organization (WHO) data wasn’t any more flattering, where Canada’s health care ranked 30th in overall performance despite being 10th in spending. The Commonwealth Fund ranks Canada 10th out of 11 in performance and 6th out of 11 in spending. In report after report Canadians aren’t getting the outcomes we need or want based on the money we’re spending on our current system.
Besides for reasons of nostalgia, why would anyone spend their energy defending these sorts of results? “We’re 16th! We’re 16th!” is hardly a chant you’d hear at a rally. It’s time to do better. And I get the feeling most people recognize this – certainly when you get onto Main Street.
Ipsos polling from December 2021 reported that 55 per cent of Canadians are “somewhat satisfied” with their health care, alongside 22 per cent that are “somewhat dissatisfied.” I.e. three quarters of Canadians find themselves in the middle of the road on the quality of our health care. This seems about right — mediocre support for mediocre health care. (The strongly satisfied and strongly dissatisfied were about even, at 12 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.)
But today Canadians are also, rightly, very worried. Leger polling in January 2023 showed that 86 per cent of Canadians are worried about the state of our health care.
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