Well, first of all, Canada is not socialist, in its health care, nor in any other way that the US already has. Fire, police, EMTs, highways, etc. are paid for by government, just as in the US.
With that out of the way, healthcare in Canada is provided by self-employed physicians in private practice; and often through hospitals that are non-profits or run by religious orders (which, by necessity, are non-profits), and none are government-run (except perhaps the National Defense Medical Centre in Ottawa). In other words, no government involvement. Private-practice physicians bill the provincial insurance system for services provided, and they always get paid, no questions asked.
Really, all Canadian healthcare is, is an insurance system, administered by the provinces. Except it isn’t really insurance; because unlike insurance, there is no rating of risks, no claims adjusters, no claim deniers nor “death panels,” and most importantly, no denial of claims, ever. That’s not “socialism” by the true definition of the word, where “the workers own the means of production,.” as Marx stated. Rather, it’s a sensible approach to making sure that all Canadians get what they need when they need it.
Americans who claim that Canada has socialist healthcare and live under socialism, have no idea what socialism is all about.
A thing you might find different, at least from a federal view, is that the government governs. There is no split between the executive and the legislative as with the US’ Congress/President. So when a party says it will do something, and it has won a majority, it is fully capable of doing it. If it fails to do it there are very few ways to deflect blame for failing to implement policy on the opposition parties.
You’re the government; you get the laurels or the brickbats. Justin Trudeau promised electoral reforms when he first won a majority. His government slow walked it and finally killed it. He/the party still carry that failure.
Furthermore, the provincial legislatures are all unicameral, the federal parliament has a second chamber that is very weak in practice, and supermajorities aren’t (AFAIK) ever required. And I don’t think municipal governments have entrenched “home rule” rights in any province, either, so if a provincial government wants to change how things work…it just can. Canada isn’t nearly as much of what Francis Fukuyama calls a “vetocracy.”
I don’t mean this argumentatively but I will say that I don’t know how accurate this is (literally, I don’t ). Halifax and Ottawa (and I’ve lived in both for a number of years), for example, don’t have municipal political parties, but Montreal does. I don’t know about Toronto or other Canadian cities, however.
Many Conservatives are social conservatives, and many are socially conservative because they are religious. We’ve had Conservative premier candidates say they are pro-life, they make no bones about it, and if they win the election there will be no abortions in Ontario. (They lost.) Sam Oosterhoff is Ontario’s youngest MPP (Member of Provincial Parliament; he was first elected at age 19!) and he won on a religious platform. He was homeschooled (for religious reasons). His only qualification was being intensely religious. Objections to a new (now cancelled) sex ed curriculum were centered on religion (not just Christianity) and homophobia. The 2007 Ontario election was essentially fought on a religious basis; while public funding of religious schools were only one half page of the fourteen page Conservative platform, it drew non-stop negative attention until the premier candidate cut it from the platform and he still lost the election.
I think religion in Canada is a weak enough force that you cannot win a national or even provincial election on the topic, but you could win some ridings (depending on the local population). Social conservatism is often seen as a form of/excuse for homophobia. Today we saw conversion therapy banned by federal Parliament with pretty much everyone voting for this ban; while I’m sure some MPs wanted to vote against the ban, they are well aware that doing so makes their party look really bad.
I think this is largely because of the parliamentary system, rather than anything about Canadians, per se. Largely because of this point:
By it’s very nature, Parliament generally produces Prime Ministers and Governments that actually have the power to do things, particularly the every day things like passing budgets. How much drama has there been in the US over their budgets, military spending, the debt ceiling, and all that, because even with a majority in Congress, it’s not a given that the President will get any of that passed?
The only time this is really an issue in Canada is if we have a minority government. But even then, the PM usually has at least enough support from a second party to pass normal legislation. We’ve had several minority governments in the last 15 years, but there was never really any worry that the budget wouldn’t pass.
Not having that huge argument literally every year, which always drags on for months, makes a big difference.
And another factor is that, once the SC has ruled on an issue, most of our politicians, and so far all our elected governments, accept those rulings, and don’t keep pushing the envelope in hopes that this time the SC will decide differently.
The abortion debate is the best example - take a look at what Texas has done this year, which is nothing more than a blatant attempt at doing an end-run around the US SC decisions about abortion. This hasn’t happened in Canada, so we have much less reason to spend a lot of time worrying about it.
And part of the reason we spend time talking about US politics on sites like this one is that, yeah, we may not have a vote, but we absolutely need to have a voice. Largely because of the 800 pound gorilla effect of being right next to the US. And the Trump Era proved that we are right to be worried. Trump went out of his way to demonize Canada (and Mexico, while we’re at it), and started a pointless trade war. And that matters, because if the US really wanted to, they could trash our entire economy with very little effort.
And there are lots of other such issues in which the US could screw us completely if they wanted to. The only defense we have for that is to make sure regular Americans don’t want a government that is inclined to screw Canada.
That just isn’t literally true. Government has a tremendous amount of say on how hospitals are run. Here in Ontario, all hospitals must be run in accordance with very detailed laws and regulations laid out by the province - either the Public or Private Hospitals Acts, which dictate a great many things about how a hospital may be operated, including whether or not the hospital may exist at all, and of course the province holds most of the purse strings. The province may not OWN the hospital or directly employ the doctors and nurses, but saying there’s no government involvement is really far from reality.
Furthermore, in the specific case of psychiatric hospitals, the government of Ontario actually does own them.
I’d like to pursue the discussion of municipal elections, since in Quebec they are held every four years on the same date in all municipalities at once, and it so happens that they took place just last month so I’ve heard a lot about them in the last few weeks. The last time I’d voted in a municipal election was in 2006 at the latest, since it was before I started moving all over Quebec, Canada and even the world for studies and work, but now that I’m in some place where I might stay in for a while (we’ll see), I wanted to take part in the process.
Many of Quebec’s larger cities have municipal political parties, and often the form that this takes is that, for example, the city of Nicetown will have mayoral candidates Adam Allen, Brenda Bush, Charles Collins, and so on, and then city councillors will run as members of the Nicetownian Movement (Team Adam Allen), the Citizens’ Party of Nicetown (Team Brenda Bush), Development Nicetown (Team Charles Collins), etc. So the municipal parties are often vehicles for the mayoral candidate’s vision as party leader. Some cities even have a kind of party-list system, where defeated mayoral candidates can take the place of one of their elected councillors on the city council to act as opposition leaders. In Montreal this year, Denis Coderre declined to do this after his defeat and decided to retire from politics instead. Note that “opposition” in this context doesn’t quite work the same way it does in a parliamentary system: in Quebec City, the protégée of outgoing mayor Régis Labeaume, who led for most of the campaign and was even declared the winner by the media on the night of the election, ended up narrowly losing to the challenger after all votes were counted. But her party still managed to get a plurality on the city council, even though it will be the opposition.
Even though municipal parties aren’t affiliated with the national parties, sometimes the candidates are known for their ideological or political “colour”. In Montreal, it was relatively clear what Valérie Plante, Denis Coderre and Balarama Holness stood for ideologically, and Coderre was also known as a former federal Liberal minister (even though his team included people affiliated with other political parties), and as the previous mayor of Montreal. While I don’t believe Valérie Plante has formal ties with any national party, she seems to be informally linked with Québec solidaire. In smaller municipalities, though, municipal politicians aren’t necessarily linked to a given ideology. In fact, many small towns in Quebec don’t have competitive elections, and have elected their mayor and councillors without opposition for a generation or more. The (medium-sized) city where I live now is an intermediate case: it’s essentially the regional capital of Abitibi-Témiscamingue if such a thing exists, so quite a few candidates will run for office because it is a “big” city in the relative sense, but the system is entirely nonpartisan: no municipal parties, and the candidates didn’t seem to have any ideological colour that I was aware of.
There were four candidates for mayor, which is quite a lot, and also two candidates for councillor in my district. I’d missed the two mayoral debates, the first one because I wasn’t aware of it, and the second one because I was out of town; I tried to see if it’d been recorded and put on YouTube or something but to no avail. So I checked online to find the candidates’ platforms. Three of the candidates have a website: the outgoing mayor running for reelection, her main challenger who’s a former journalist with no previous political experience, and the third candidate who’s a former councillor. The latter seems to be, of all mayoral candidates, the one with the clearest ideological colour: his website talks about his activism during the 1980s, so he’s probably a green, solidarity/classical leftist type that would be at home in Québec solidaire. But I didn’t really see any obvious difference between the two main candidates (the media treated them as the two main candidates, and indeed the outgoing mayor ended up winning again but in a fairly close race with the journalist, with the leftist far behind). And there was also the fourth candidate, essentially a perennial candidate, who has no website (though I think he has a Linkedin page), and no platform to speak of. I call him the Runner, since most information about him online are about his being an enthusiastic runner, and I’ve actually seen him run (or bike) around the city. So that’s the whole of the information that I had to base my vote on.
For the councillor election in my district, things were even worse: there’s the outgoing councillor who seemed to have no online presence, except her name on the city’s webpage. Maybe she’s on Facebook or something, I guess I should have tried this (I don’t use Facebook). And the challenger, who according to my Googling his name was either a fireman who received a Governor General’s award, a guy who died three years ago, or someone who complained about people urinating in the alleyways in the city centre. I think it’s actually Pee Guy, since I remember reading that on the news and it might actually be a somewhat important issue. Anyway, the outgoing councillor won handily. But I’m thinking that if I’d decided to run, and taken the minimal effort of setting a webpage and doing a minimal amount of door-to-door canvassing, I might actually have won.
So what’s the moral? I don’t know, I just thought it was an interesting story. But I’ve heard that turnout in municipal elections is low and not improving. Part of this might be that people are mobile and do not necessarily feel attachment to the place where they are living, part of it might be that the nationalisation of politics means people aren’t necessarily interested in local issues with little ideological salience, and part of it is that people just don’t know the issues. But in this case the media and the candidates didn’t really manage to explain to me what the issues were, even though I tried to get involved. (I know that one of the major issues here is heavy metal and metalloid pollution from the foundry, but I didn’t hear much about this from the candidates, possibly because the foundry is also a major employer.)
Isn’t Erin O’Toole also catholic? I know Andrew Scheer was, for one.
But you make an interesting comment here that ties with the difference between the perception of religion in Canada and in Quebec. You infer that Justin Trudeau is catholic, and yes, I believe that’s probably how he identifies. Except for white evangelical Christians, Canada perceives religion as an ethnic marker. Jagmeet Singh is Sikh, not because he chose this faith, but because he just is. And it doesn’t imply anything about his opinions on any issue; it’s just telling us who his ancestors were. Similarly, Justin Trudeau is catholic because he’s French Canadian and French Canadians are catholic. It doesn’t mean he’s opposed to abortion or same-sex marriage, and it doesn’t mean he “chose” this faith, it’s just telling us who his ancestors were. Trudeau, who grew up in large part in Ottawa in a bilingual family with an anglophone mother and a francophone father, naturally adopted this Canadian take on religious identity.
But this isn’t true in Quebec. In Quebec, religion is a faith that is adopted by the individual. An ideology, in other words. You couldn’t infer, for example, that Yves-François Blanchet is catholic (he probably isn’t). You cannot infer that I am (I’m not), even though Canada would probably take it as an obvious matter that I am. If a Quebec politician tells us they’re catholic, it’s likely that they’re rather conservative, or at least that they do practice this faith, which puts them among a minority of Quebecers.
Well, if you limit examples to Quebecois de souche, of course the term “Catholic” takes on a conservative/religious significance.
For example, would referring to Amir Khadir, or Leonard Cohen as Muslim and Jewish (respectively) be an ethnic label or religious one? It’d be an ethnic label.
Side note: Jagmeet Singh must be a religious man seeing as he is a turban wearing Sikh. If he wasn’t religious he wouldn’t bother with this (my assumptions).
True in BC as well. The Health Authorities (that run the hospitals) are themselves run by a board of directors who are entirely selected by the provincial government. The funding for the health authorities (and hospitals) comes from the provincial government. (There are also transfer payments from the federal government, but these go to the province, so the feds are at arms length, and don’t say how the money is spent.
What I can say is that these boards are pretty much non-political.
I would refer to this as a “slate”, as they are not an actual political party.
Some folks in my municipality tried this last election (bunch of developer friendly folks, with a lot of money backing them from… somewhere. They got squashed like a bug on a windshield)
This is not a universal Canadian position, and is at odds with rather a lot of evidence. My ancestors were Catholic but I am not Catholic. I can’t even begin to count the people I know who aren’t the faith of their ancestors. Speak for yourself; I as a Canadian do NOT see religion as an ethnic marker. Those are two different concepts.
Jagmeet Singh isn’t Sikh because his parents are Sikh, he’s Sikh because he is actually a practicing Sikh. If he didn’t wear a turban or practice Sikhism, he would not be Sikh. He’d be a Canadian of Indian descent, which is true of many people who aren’t Sikh. A lot of people with Sikh ancestry choose not to be Sikh, which is, of course, true of all religions.
I’d also point out that you deliberately chose two people for whom reliion and ethnicity are more likely to be tied together - but of course many, many Canadians don’t have a religious identity that clearly tied to their particular ethnicity.
Well it makes sense that (in Quebec) the term “Catholic” refers to a particularly more observant/conservative person, and that this connotation would simply not exist in the ROC where the label “Catholic” easily includes those who are non-practicing (but tied to Catholicism somehow).
It is important to reflect on the reason why this difference exists. The term “Catholic” is more useful/distinguishing/informative outside of Quebec because less people (percentage-wise) are Catholic. Thus non-practicing / non conservative people can be referred to as “Catholic” in a more ethnic/general sense.
If Quebec was a majority Jewish, referring to someone as “Jewish” would mean that they are particularly observant. But Quebec isn’t majority Jewish, so referring to someone as Jewish includes both observant and non-observant Jews too (just like in the ROC).
What really annoys me is how people call Quebec as “Quebec” (normal) but call the ROC as “Canada”
I don’t know if Amir Khadir practices a religion or not. He’s of Persian ethnic origin. Leonard Cohen was an Ashkenazi Jew, which is in fact an ethnic group. (Jews are about the only case where I feel that ethnic and religious labels get blurry, but then again “Ashkenazi” is the actual ethnic identifier in this case.)
Sometimes they are actual parties, and outlast their founder, choose new leaders, field candidates over several elections, and so on. But in many cases municipal political parties are fairly recent and may still look like a vehicle for their founder. We’ll see over time if they’re stable.
Well then your position is similar to mine. If most Canadians agree with us, then great. But I’ve heard often enough from anglophone Canadians that “all French Canadians are catholic”, as if we had literally no choice in the matter, that I think the opposite position is more common than you think.
I’m from Quebec. I’m familiar with Quebec society. I look at people from elsewhere in Canada, and hey, they’re a bit different. So I try to understand it. Canadians look at francophones in Quebec and think we’re pretty weird, it’s the same idea.
During the election I read an opinion piece on Singh’s religious beliefs. While the Sikh religious books don’t go into homosexuality or abortion, generally high ranking Sikh religious figures are opposed to both. The very left-leaning Jagmeet Singh is pro-LGBTQ+ and pro-choice. Clearly he’s observant in some ways (such as wearing a turban) but it could have become a cultural rather than a religious thing for him.
(Per the article, there is now a generational divide on this issue among Sikhs. Singh is middle aged.)
Well they are not ACTUAL ethnic labels (except Jewish as you pointed out). People just use ethnic and religious labels like Jewish and Muslim to include those who are non-observant too.
Calling someone a Jew/Muslim in Quebec would not necessarily mean they religious or conservative (just like in the ROC). However, calling someone a Catholic in Quebec would mean that they are particularly religious (this is not true/same in the ROC).
“Catholic” (and only Catholic) holds a different weight in Quebec versus the ROC
I’d say most of the stuff in this thread is useful and true, but when talking about generalizations there are sometimes exceptions.
Religion in politics is not anything like the force it is in the US, with concomitant expectations, but as a group politicians tend to be more religious than the populace. Presumably this informs their personal beliefs but is not generally emphasized in policy. School funding includes two systems and the Catholic system might be seen as a historical legacy. Certainly the issue was a factor for John Tory.
Nepotism is also less of a factor in Canada, but rewarding party loyalists is certainly common in the Canadian system. So is lobbying. Politicians often move into industry positions of influence in the hope of using their connections. I am unsure how strong corporate governance laws are in comparison to the US.
Many mayors have previous involvement with provincial or national political parties, and naturally there is often some coordination between these. Health care has further complications than the above simplification, but has been somewhat clarified and is not worth doting on.
). Halifax and Ottawa (and I’ve lived in both for a number of years), for example, don’t have municipal political parties, but Montreal does. I don’t know about Toronto or other Canadian cities, however.