{"id":15751,"date":"2012-07-01T10:25:43","date_gmt":"2012-07-01T15:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=15751"},"modified":"2012-07-01T10:25:43","modified_gmt":"2012-07-01T15:25:43","slug":"except-in-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/07\/01\/except-in-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"“… except in Canada”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The National Post<\/em> editorial board celebrates Canada Day by making a case for Canadian exceptionalism<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The acronym \u201cEIC\u201d can refer to a newspaper\u2019s editor-in-chief, the various forms of the storied East India Company, the Engineering Institute of Canada, and, in scientific circles, Electromagnetically-induced chirality. But in these odd times, they might also be deployed, for verbal economy, to denote \u201cexcept in Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n

As in: Banks all over the Western world have suffered a series of shocks since the 2008 financial crisis \u2013 EIC. Economies have slowed \u2014 EIC. Real estate bubbles have popped \u2014 EIC. Deficits have ballooned to crisis proportions \u2014 EIC.<\/p>\n

OK: Perhaps national pride leads us to exaggeration. A more truthful acronym might be EICAG \u2014 to include Canada \u201cand Germany.\u201d Various smaller European nations, as well as countries in Asia and Latin America, also have fared well. Yet it is hard to remember a time (if ever there was one) when Canada\u2019s fortunes, taken as a whole, were so rosy compared to those of all other Western nations. This good fortune is something worth celebrating as we prepare to celebrate Canada\u2019s 145th birthday this weekend.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They even have some praise to lavish on two former prime ministers who don’t normally get a kind word from the right:<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s relative lack of red ink also is no accident. Two decades ago, Canada was what Greece was today: a bloated welfare state running up massive bills that it couldn\u2019t pay. The unpopular job of fixing the balance sheet feel primarily to Jean Chr\u00e9tien and Paul Martin \u2014 and they accomplished the task without any of the political chaos that has been gripping Athens and other southern European capitals in the last year. The prosperity and stability we enjoy today is in large part due to what those two men did with the fiscal mess bequeathed to them by Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, not everything is going wonderfully well in the Dominion: we still have not emulated one of the notable successes of our European friends:<\/p>\n

One of the few institutional factors holding Canada back is its healthcare system. As Shaun Francis writes elsewhere on these pages, our refusal to explicitly permit full-blown private alternatives to the current government-payer health monopoly is bad policy that is out of keeping with that of leading European jurisdictions.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, this is a shortfall that can be cured easily. As the furor over Obamacare in the United States shows, building a universal public health system is difficult. But Canada has already done this heavy lifting over the last 50 years: All we lack now is a parallel private track \u2014 and that is something that will spring into being without any governmental action at all, save the legislative stroke of a pen needed to modify the Canada Health Act accordingly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The National Post editorial board celebrates Canada Day by making a case for Canadian exceptionalism: The acronym \u201cEIC\u201d can refer to a newspaper\u2019s editor-in-chief, the various forms of the storied East India Company, the Engineering Institute of Canada, and, in scientific circles, Electromagnetically-induced chirality. But in these odd times, they might also be deployed, for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,84],"tags":[829,769,770,511,394,162],"class_list":["post-15751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","category-government","tag-brianmulroney","tag-jeanchretien","tag-paulmartin","tag-pierretrudeau","tag-privatization","tag-socializedmedicine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-463","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15751"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15752,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15751\/revisions\/15752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}