March 21, 2005
"Give us your affluent, your overeducated, your Unitarian masses yearning for socialized medicine": Matt Labash investigates our neighbor to the north. He meets American ex-pats, visits a Supervised Injection Site, learns that Victoria dumps untreated waste into the Pacific, and hears about Duke's Canada Studies program ("We're the most important university to make a serious effort to study Canada. That's like being the best hockey team in Zimbabwe.").
He concludes, "In a sense, Canada is the perfect place for American quitters, as it evidences self-loathing masquerading as self-congratulation."
For two sentences that tell you most of what you need to know about Canada's health-care system, see this AP story: "A letter from the Moncton Hospital to a New Brunswick heart patient in need of an electrocardiogram said the appointment would be in three months. It added: 'If the person named on this computer-generated letter is deceased, please accept our sincere apologies.'" (Link via Fark.)