There are few things that upset me more than any Government, particularly in my country, wanting to grow in size and bit by bit wanting to control our lives. I am going to take the liberty of quoting from a talk given by Mark Steyn to Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan.

In the province of Quebec, it’s taken more or less for granted by all political parties that collective rights outweigh individual rights. For example, if you own a store in Montreal, the French language signs inside the store are required by law to be at least twice the size of the English signs. And the Government has a fairly large bureaucratic agency whose job it is to go around measuring signs and prosecuting offenders. There was even a famous case a few years ago of a pet store owner who was targeted by the Office De La Langue Francais for selling English speaking parrots. The language commissar had gone into the store and heard a bird saying "Who’s a pretty boy, then?" and decided to take action. I keep trying to find out what happened to the parrot. Perhaps it was sent to a re-education camp and emerged years later with a glassy stare saying in a monotone voice, "Qui est un joli garcon, bein?"

He goes on later to touch on a topic that is very topical in the Bahamas:

A couple of years ago it emerged that a few Quebec hospitals in the eastern townships along the Vermont border were, as a courtesy to their English speaking patients, putting up handwritten pieces of paper in the corridor saying "Emergency Room This Way" or Obstetrics Department Second on the Left." But in Quebec, you’re only permitted to offer health care services in English if the English population in your town reaches a certain percentage. So these signs were deemed illegal and had to be taken down. I got a lot of mail from Canadians who were upset about this and I responded that if you accept that the Government can make itself the monopoly provider of health care, it surely has the right to decide the language in which it’s prepared to provide that care. So my point isn’t just about Quebec separatism. It’s about a fundamentally different way of looking at the role of the state."  (the bold print is mine.)

Canadian dependence on the United States is particularly true in health care. That is, public health care in Canada depends on private health care in the U.S. A small news story from last month illustrates this:

A Canadian woman has given birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets. The four girls were born at a U.S hospital because there was no space available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units. Autumn, Brooke, Calissa and Dahlia are in good condition at Benefice Hospital in Great Falls, Montana. Health officials said they checked every other neonatal intensive care unit in Canada, but none had space. The Jepps, a nurse and a respiratory technician were flown 500 kilometers to the Montana hospital, the closest in the U.S. where the quadruplets were born on Sunday.

There you have Canadian health care in a nutshell. After all, you can’t expect a G-7 economy of only 30 million people to be able to offer the same level of neonatal intensive care coverage as a town of 50,000 in remote, rural Montana. And let’s face it, there’s nothing an expectant mom likes more on the day of delivery than 300 miles in a bumpy twin prop over the Rockies. Everyone knows that socialized health care means you wait and wait and wait – six months for an MRI, a year for hip replacement and so on. But here is the absolute logical reductio of a government monopoly in health care: the ten month waiting list for the maternity ward."

Again, the bold print is mine for the benefit of any Bahamian who still thinks that a government monopoly in health care is something to desire.

Click here… for printable pdf of Mr. Steyn entire presentation from Imprimis.