A while back Canadians voted for the best Canadian of all time.
Who won??
Tommy Douglas. 
Despite spending 25% of the healthcare budget on administration the outcomes for US citizens are only marginal,
In a recent international comparison of 10 peer nations, the U.S. healthcare system ranked last, despite spending significantly more on healthcare than other countries, with poor performance in health equity, access to care, and outcom
When inventor Frederick Banting discovered insulin in 1923, he refused to put his name on the patent. He felt it was unethical for a doctor to profit from a discovery that would save lives. Banting’s co-inventors, James Collip and Charles Best, sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for a mere $1. They wanted everyone who needed their medication to be able to afford it.
Insulin is a Canadian invention and was done without royalties yet the US sees fit to put a high price on it …fuckers… 
Random thought while catching up on the thread:
This whole argument/perspective that Canadians and Americans are wholly indistinguishable culturally, and that Canadians should welcome an American takeover, sounds disturbingly similar to Putin’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine. I know it’s not a 1:1 comparison, Ukraine was actually part of Russia at one point of course whereas the United States and Canada have never been despite historically close ties. This of course misses the point that a state’s sovereignty and and national identity is about more than just shared values. Most Western countries have a recognized set of shared values, and the arguments that can be made about Canada and America could equally be made about the UK or France or Germany. I think that’s kind of been the undercurrent of all the talk about other countries joining the Commonwealth? Certainly these five countries have far more in common with each other than with say Japan or Ethiopia. That doesn’t mean any of them would want to be taken over by any of the others. That’s not how international politics nor how balance of power works.
Does anyone else remember the BS claim from Putin at the beginning of the invasion that Ukraine was actually being ran by Nazis? Peter Navarro’s been out here taking that claim, dusting it off, and substituting Mexican Cartels for the Nazis. It’s the same thing and it feels like it’s coming from the same place.
Anyway please carry on.
So, I’m supposed to take it when people say they will ‘let’ us leave and then disparage us with a bunch of crap about how we don’t care about the environment or that our economy is a mess (when in fact the best in Canada) due to our own mismanagement rather than the result of continued meddling like the NEP, onerous ESG reviews, carbon taxes, and cancelled pipelines? Insinuating that we’d be living in some dystopian wasteland if it wasn’t for their oversight.
And to call me far right is completely wrong. If you think that someone who believes in public healthcare, free education, support for when people are down and need help, is far right, I don’t know what to say. But for those things it needs a good economy to pay for it. Crushing industry and making it almost impossible for projects to get built is stupid. So, if you think I’m far right it is only because you have gone so far left that when you see the center, you think it is the edge.
Jihi has a good post above. What is the point of the EU if not to minimize borders allowing free movement of goods and people. To avoid the issues of the past that caused the wars that devastated Europe in the past. Getting rid of borders is a good thing, imho.
Being crushed, slaughtered and enslaved by fascists is not a good thing, however. Comparing a voluntary association with a threatened war of conquest is absurd.
Also, comparing North America to Europe is absurd. Europe has a whole lot of countries, some big, some small, but no one nation utterly dominated all the others. Smaller countries could join the EU and expect to have at least some impact on the direction it would go.
Not so much the US and Canada. Any such union would be dominated from the very beginning by the vastly larger population and economy of the US. Canadian laws and custom would be largely replaced by US laws and customs.
We might have a shot in a North American Union if Mexico was part of it, but no one in the US is seriously talking about annexing Mexico, are they?
Here’s the thing - there IS lower price insulin available, an older version, but it’s not that commonly available, you have to seek it out. It is also in some ways more difficult to use and patients are commonly instructed in its use because, objectively, the newer stuff with long and short acting variations and so on does control blood sugar better, comes neatly packaged, etc. But if you can’t get it then the older, less fancy stuff will keep you alive and healthy.
Banting discovered insulin and how to refine it from animal pancreases, but “humalin” (not the real name, just what I’ve heard it referred to), the genetically engineered human insulin version was invented in the US by Genetech and that has a patent separate from the U of T one, and that is what enables the profiteering at the expense of people’s sight, limbs, and lives.
Yes, yes it does. Which makes me wonder just how closely Trump intends to follow Putin’s playbook.
I feel like we’re approaching a time in the US when a person has to declare they are with Trump (100% with Trump) or be declared an enemy of the state. I dread that for a number of reasons, not the least being that I have no desire to be part of a war.
If you want those things then being part of the US, especially right now, is absolutely not the way to get them because all of the above are being systematically dismantled, including the good economy.
I don’t know if you’re politically left, right, or sideways and I really don’t care about that. You do, however, seem sadly misinformed about what the US is currently like and what is happening there.
The US already sort of annexed half of Mexico, that’s how we got California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona… That should be an example of how an annexation of Canada would go.
Thanks for clarity on insulin. 
I was just watching a YouTube on the possibility of Canada joining the EU. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but interesting.
I would agree with you here, by that standard you would probably be a right leaning Democrat or a lefty Republican. The criticism of your opinions is based on you not seeing the very sharp divide between the average Canadian and average American. I think this is more of a blind spot for Albertans who have more in common with the Midwest in some ways.
The EU has a backlog of EUROPEAN nations that want in. Get in line!
It’s a neat idea… but entirely Canadian. The EU will never admit Canada, not in this generation, anyway. They have always maintained the position that the European Union should be, understandably, European.
Fine, EU. Dump your emigrants in North America and claim you have no connection. I guess “de Nile” is in Europe now, not Africa.
(Those grape were sour, anyway.)
I’ve had it. This shit is too damn depressing.
[quote=“FinsToTheLeft, post:991, topic:1013734”] The criticism of your opinions is based on you not seeing the very sharp divide between the average Canadian and average American. I think this is more of a blind spot for Albertans who have more in common with the Midwest in some ways.
[/quote]
Nevermind the giant WTF from the French Canadian population, both in Quebec and outside of it. Canada offers French Canadians constitutional protections that you know Trump wouldn’t keep. French Canadians are worried about losing their culture now…it wouldn’t be any better as part of the USA and almost certainly much, much worse.
In that scenario, vive le Québec libre!
Moderating:
This is pretty damn racist. Do not use it in such joking/mocking context again. Next time will bring a warning.
Okay, now this is going to hurt:
Canada places 200% tariff on little Canadian flags Americans wear while travelling
There was an interview on CBC Radio a few days ago with someone from The Beaverton – I think it was their editor. He was a cheerful, funny guy who expressed surprise that people sometimes didn’t realize it was a satirical paper, kinda like Canada’s version of The Onion.
Once again, completely wrong, continuing your now-established unbroken trend of being completely wrong in everything you say about Canada.
No, if Canada merged with the US, universal health care absolutely would not be possible any more – for so many reasons that I can hardly even begin to list them. And saying that provinces “provide” health care is misleading. Health care is provided by independent practitioners and hospitals; what provinces do is administer and partially fund the health insurance system, but they do not and can not do so independently. They get substantial financial assistance from the federal government, must administer the system under federal guidelines, and are assisted by laws that severely limit the role of private insurance.
These are just some of a great many reasons that UHC as we know it could never exist under an Americanized system, where the federal government is traditionally hostile to “socialized medicine”. Lack of federal financial support is one of many reasons Vermont couldn’t make it work.
But it’s much worse than that. Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA now come into play, hugely complicating any attempt to introduce a simple streamlined single-payer system like we have in Canada.
There would also be huge, virtually unstoppable opposition from the private health insurance lobby, arguably the most powerful industry lobby in Washington. These bloodsucking parasites have essentially been banned in Canada when it comes to medically necessary procedures, but under an American regime they’d be back in full force.
There are many, many other problems. For example, with the elimination of an international border, if Canada somehow tried to maintain a UHC system it would encourage medical tourism and migration from other parts of the US to get “free” health care, which would completely overwhelm the system.
The whole idea that we’d be free to maintain our current universal health care system is just laughably preposterous.
There’s no way Canadians would be allowed any decisionmaking authority over their own former territory at all. They’d be voiceless non-citizens in occupied territory.