The Truth About Canada Read Online Free PDF

over the past decade. 27
    ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION IN LITRES PER CAPITA
    The OECD 2003 average for individual alcohol consumption was 9.6 litres. Eight OECD countries had a lower average consumption in 2003 than did Canada (at 7.8 litres). Turkey was the lowest, at only 1.5 litres, followed by Mexico at 4.6 litres, Norway at 6.0, Iceland at 6.5, Sweden at 7.0, the Slovak Republic and Japan at 7.6. The level in the United States was 8.3 litres. The highest alcohol consumption was in Luxembourg, at 15.5 litres. France’s average consumption was 14.8 litres, Ireland’s was 13.5 litres, and Hungary’s was 13.4 litres. Eleven other countries were above the OECD average.
    In most OECD countries, there has been a reduction in alcohol consumption and in deaths from liver cirrhosis. According to the OECD, wine consumption has been increasing in many traditionally beer drinking countries. Alcohol consumption in Italy and France has dropped substantially, but it has increased substantially in Iceland and Ireland. 28
    Finally, with all of our system’s problems, a report confirms the advantages of Canada’s healthcare system over the American system. In April 2007, a report in Open Medicine , a new online Canadian medical journal, said,
Canada’s much-maligned health system produces as good or better outcomes as the vaunted U.S. system, and it does so at less than half the cost.
A team of 17 Canadian and U.S. healthcare researcherscrunched data from 38 existing studies from both countries published between 1955 and 2003.
Canadian patients had at least as good an outcome as their American counterparts, if not better.
The authors said that “the fundamental message of this study is that the solutions to Canada’s healthcare problems lie not in resorting to U.S. style private funding or for-profit delivery, but rather in strengthening publicly funded health care delivered by not-for-profit providers.” 29
    Regarding the ongoing pressure for a two-tier healthcare system in Canada, here are the words of Dr. Arnold S. Relman, Harvard emeritus professor of medicine, and emeritus editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine , who favours the elimination of all for-profit facilities: “The facts are that no one has ever shown, in fair, accurate comparisons, that for-profit makes for greater efficiency or better quality, and certainly have never shown that it serves the public interest any better. Never.” 30
    Despite some recent improvements, there are still major problems in Canada’s healthcare system. There remain shortages of medical beds and nurses. Only one in five family physicians are accepting new patients. The number of physicians in Canada is still far below OECD average levels and surveys indicate that more than 4,000 Canadian doctors plan to stop practising within the next two years. 31
    All of this said, a January 2008 report by a British researcher in Health Affairs says that “Canadians are getting excellent value for the money” compared to the citizens of 18 other countries studied, and the outcomes are substantially better than those for their southern neighbour.
    For readers who want more detailed healthcare information, the excellent Canadian Institute for Health Information ( www.cihi.ca ) has a long list of valuable reports that can be downloaded free of charge in both English and French.

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    POVERTY IN CANADA
“We’re not the lovely people we think we are.”
“Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.”
— NELSON MANDELA, BBC, FEBRUARY 5, 2005
    Y ear after year in Canada, the public opinion polls are clear. After health care, and more recently after the environment, but well ahead of lower income taxes or reducing government debt or increasing military/defence spending, Canadians place a constant and a very high priority on reducing child poverty. But of course you don’t reduce child poverty without