CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES SUPERFICIALLY THE SAME
Canada and the United States are both composed of immigrants, but the similarity ends there. They are two diffeent countries and their foreign policies reflect their size and importance to the world. The U.S. is a world power with interests everywhere, whereas Canada is a middle power with very limited military ability and similarly limited interests. The differences between the two populations irrespective of their size and standing in the world are fundamental.
The U.S. is a litigious country where people are not hesitant to sue each other for litterally any real or perceived injustice. I recently returned from a vacation in Arizona. I was astounded at the number of continuous advertisements on television by legal firms encouraging people to sue for real or imagined shortcomings in medical procedures or in drugs. Operations that did not work to the patient’s satisfaction….
i.e. Johnson and Johnson mesh for urine incontinence, drugs such as Yaz, Yazin and Zoloft, that did not act according to expectations brought on legal suits. The American legal firms take on the case “pro bono” or in plain english “get their fee only if they win the case”. They usually sue large firms that will pay out a huge amount to get the law suits off the books. It is better to settle than to have weeks in a courtroom with high -priced lawyers. I do not want to leave the impression that all of the law suits are frivolous. Far from it! But in my mind it is not professional for these legal firms to generate business in this way.
The Sandy Hook primary school massacre were twenty young children and six adults where gunned down by a mentally deranged individual emphasizes the difference in attitudes between Canada and the U.S. to gun ownership. There was a similar type of crime at the University of Montreal in Canada a few years back. This immediately led to tougher controls by the government of Canada on hand guns. This has not happened in the U.S., where after the shock of the killings wore off, it appears that the type of automatic weapon used at Sandy Hook will not be banned. What may happen, and it is not certain, is there will be more stringent controls on who can buy guns. Regulations such as this are now in place in Canada. The history of the two countries are vastly different. Americans have always had guns at home. The individual states felt the need for American citizens to be armed and the armed citizen provided their own ammunition and weapons. There existed a frontier tradition in the U.S. with expansion to the west and constant battles with the native Indians. As well, the Americans separated from Great Britain with military action. This was not the case in Canada, since Canada separated peacefully from under British rule. It doesn’t help the abolitionists that Americans are constitutionally entitled to own a gun. In 1995 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms estimated that there were 223 million firearms in the United States. In 2005 18% of U.S. households possessed hand guns compared to 3% in Canada. In 2011, 47% of the adult U.S. population lived in households with guns. The number of guns in the United States is increasing and if an incident as horrendous as Sandy Hook does not change the attitudes, nothing will.
I would be negligent if I did not discuss the differences in attitudes to the respective health care systems. Americans believe, and they are fed propoganda, that the Canadian system is inefficient and completely dominated by the government, and that you must wait months to received medical services that you need immediately. This is a complete fallacy. Emergency treatment is available if needed, but if a patient can wait, they wait. This means that there is not an oversupply of facilities that can give everybody unnecessary immediate help at exhorbitant costs. Without going into the details of each system, there is a bottom line. Canadians are willing to pay extra taxes so that all citizens are covered, while the American attitude is……if I work hard and can pay, why should I cover the slacker who cannot. Canadians are in general more community minded. Americans feel “everybody for themselves”. This is not true for all Americans and all Canadians.
