@philwrite - Please point to the budget lines to prove this

Here's a better idea - read carefully - take $1.4 billion from the available funds stashed away by Con provincial governments (from funding given by the feds already) & pay medical workers, including nurses, better. No need to cut CBC funding. Easy when you are actually motivated

— Phil van Wulven (@philwrite) September 16, 2022

Lately this has been a common claim from people who think that the evil publicly funded healthcare system is falling apart not because all public systems fall apart but instead because "evil governments have stolen the cash".

(Fun aside: remind them that they can't demand the government run healthcare and then be upset that the wrong government got in)

So the government of Canada supposedly gave provincial governments an extra $1.4B dollars (all non-inflation adjusted, of course). Let's look at the 2022 federal budget [pdf] (which will contain 2021 actuals and will of course have tables full of actual numbers, right?)

Of course not, why would a federal budget contain such silly frivolities. Now you can try to look at the gap between 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 numbers and discern for yourself whether this looks like more money or less than the $1.4B which Phil claims was sent to the provinces.

Instead let's start looking at provincial budgets and see if we can find where this money went! Let's start on the left coast. 

In 2020/2021, the BC Government spent a "mere" $22.231B on "People's Health Care" which sounds about as communist as...well, it actually is.

In 2021/2022 however, they apparently received (a share) of $1.4B in this much ballyhooed extra bit of spending. How much did they "stash away"? Well, they now spend $23.882B which is...uh...$1.651B higher. That means that I'm done. I've proven Phil wrong: the British Columbia government alone spent more on healthcare this year than the entire federal increase. And what outcomes has BC received for their big spending push? Whoops! CBC reports that "B.C.'s health-care crisis is unrelenting". Funny about that.

Well, I'm sure that when Phil accused "Con provincial governments" he didn't have John Horgan in mind. So let's look at Alberta, where I've already established public healthcare has too much money and needs to be cut back. The 2022 Alberta budget uses actual documents with numbers, showing that again $20.285B was spent on (non-COVID) healthcare in 2020/2021, decreasing in 2021-2022 to...oh, no, wait, they went up as well, to $21.418B, an increase of $1.1B. Remember this doesn't factor in the COVID numbers (BC presumably does), adding an extra $3.148B. So already one Conservative government has spent $1.1B of the $1.4B...but at least it's working out good for us and oh right there's a "nightmare" healthcare breakdown going on.

Let's do one more for fun. The 2021/2022 Saskatchewan budget called for $6.535B in healthcare spending. The 2020/2021 numbers are, surprise surprise, lower, at a mere $6.362. This is only $0.173B, but already Alberta and Saskatchewan combine for a $1.306B increase in healthcare spending. Unlike Alberta, at least Saskatchewan can rest easy knowing that...no, I lied, Saskatchewan nurses claim they've been in a crisis for over a month now. Don't worry though, flatlanders, the budget is going up to $6.823B in 2022/2023, I'm sure that will fix it!

Ontario and that horribly right-wing Doug Ford are...oh, right, increasing their healthcare spending from $64.4B in 2020/2021 to $71B in 2021/2022. Hey, isn't that increase $6.6B, almost five times higher than the amount that Phil said "conservative provincial governments" were refusing to spend (collectively, nationwide) and would (presumably, the tweet doesn't make it clear) solve the crisis? With so much money going into the healthcare system, finally we've found a oh wait nevermind: Ontario hospitals and long-term care facilities are in crisis.

It's starting to look like Phil's talking out of his ass, doesn't it?

Longtime readers won't be surprised by this, of course. The ultimate problem is public healthcare: so long as it's "free" to users and the financiers never have the chance to audit the books, it will continue to cost more and more and continue to underperform and fail more and more spectacularly. Paying the workers isn't the solution: in fact, every public healthcare worker is already overpaid by a significant margin. Cutting their pay makes a lot more sense. On a more long-term and global solution, a private-public hybrid system might at least partially fix the practical if not the moral problems. However, until all Canadians have the right to refuse to fund the healthcare of people we don't wish to fund (on an individual rather than collective basis, of course), we won't have a fully operable and accomplished system.

What we certainly can't do is take steps forward while also wasting money on a propaganda network that constantly amplifies the misinformation of nurses unions and people like Phil. Which is why the CBC must be disbanded. Then we can work on dismantling a healthcare system in perpetual crisis.

Happy "Red Indians Are Too Primitive to be Educated Day"

 

 

It's been a full year since we first covered the ludicrous federally mandated day to believe in a lie: to wit, that the Indian Residential School System was anything other than a gloriously noble yet ultimately impossible attempt to fix the primitive thought patterns inherent in the stone aged-race that greeted early European discoverers when they landed on North America.

There have been a few changes since that horrible summer 2021 where activists who hate the superior British cultural tradition outnumbered loyalists on Dominion Day, and innocent Christians saw their houses of worship decimated by arson attacks as a result of Rat Bastard 2.0 and his Red Indian stooges committing stochastic terrorism, to use a phrase that nobody had heard of until mainstream parents started learning truths about faggots many of us had long warned about.

Indeed, one of the big changes since then is slowly and inexorably the narrative is shifting. When the "215 dead kids" lie was first propagated, I was basically the lone voice in opposition (feel free to post links to others who examined these claims critically in May 2021). Everybody else breathlessly parroted the false statements of tribal actvists without looking carefully at what was actually happened. Today things are clearing up. The New York Post and National Post both covered the story. True North did a 6-part series and some followups on it. Left-wing vaccine proponent Jon Kay talked about it, and some of the geopolitical ramifications. Just two days ago, Rebel Media (as the company was and should be called) released a documentary about the scandal.

However you'll note there's still an insistence to look at the scandal aspect of this story. There were no "mass graves" found. Or even "unmarked graves" (or a discussion about why that would be a bad thing). For that matter, no graves have been discovered. No human bodies have been unearthed. No evidence whatsoever that the Kamloops Residential School has any Injuns kids buried on or near the site whatsoever. In almost all cases (Glavin/Kay/Malcolm in particular, but even "far right" Rebel Media) the story is the media framing the narrative based on what activists say rather than the cold truth about what's under the soil. Leftists like Jon Kay can almost be forgiven for continuing to revere the wider story as the activists frame it, but not entirely. "Everybody acknowledges Residential Schools were horrible", "it's 100% true that it was a horrible crime perpetuated on them", etc. etc. As Kay writes:

The whole mission of Canada’s church-run Residential School system was to assimilate Indigenous people into white Canadian society, usually against their will, while forcing children to leave their families and communities for months or even years at a time. No one disputes that many students were subject to cruel (and sometimes even predatory) treatment and substandard medical care. Certainly, the death rate for Indigenous children attending these schools was much higher than that for children in the general population. No, I never bought into the idea that there was any kind of mass-murder plot going on at these schools. But it hardly seemed far-fetched that some victims of mistreatment and neglect had been buried in unmarked graves—“off the books,” so to speak—by malevolent white teachers, school administrators, and priests seeking to evade responsibility for their actions.

I dispute it. Just like the graves, the basic facts dispute it. Using charged language which activists use deliberately conceal the truth, Kay (it's unclear how much he's studied this) speaks of "forcing children to leave their families and communities" when he's describing every boarding school ever. "Cruel (and sometimes even predatory) treatment" means...physical work and the strap. He'll discuss the death rate for Red Indian kids in Residential Schools but never bother with the word "tuberculosis"^†. He treated it as read that the teachers and administrators who entered the education profession universally hated their redskinned charges to such an extent that they participated in a massive "shoot shovel shut up" plan in the middle of that aforementioned epidemic. Now true, Kay's paragraph above is partly "in character" as his May 2021 self breathlessly believing the media lies, but unlike the "graves! graves everywhere!" aspect which he now acknowledges probably isn't true he doesn't revoke any of his beliefs.

^† Speaking of TB, to prove a point which I was loudly proclaiming as early as the release of the TRC report, last October Red Indians dug around at the Charles Camsell Sanitorium in Edmonton where TB was treated and were shocked to discover that their "oral history" and "lived truth" of bodies buried in the ground by the hateful and uncaring hospital employees (that bothered to build and fund the bloody facility) was a complete fantasy divorced from the facts. That urban legend hunting is not a good public policy, of course, was never brought up by CTV News.

The insistence to step over ones own feet to exclaim how horrible the IRSS supposedly was seems like a way to try to minimize backlash from (often fellow) progressives. It's the Canadian equivalent of "yes yes blacks are treated so harshly by police but maybe don't burn cities down": "yes yes Injuns were mistreated and Residential Schools have exactly zero redeeming qualities but maybe just maybe try to do honest journalism on this small aspect of the story".

Absolutely not. I rejected it then, I rejected it now. Eventually the entire house of cards will collapse, at least in conservative circles, but for now the truth has to be a lone voice in the wilderness while this perversion called The Truth runs rampant.

A lot of this, credit has to be given, is to Professor Jacques Rouillard at the Dorchester Review which actually bothered to do what the lavishly funded TRC Commission did not: look into what happened to the kids supposedly missing/murdered/converted into body thetans/etc in Kamloops.

In its 2015 report, the TRC identified 3,200 deaths of children at residential schools. Surprisingly, it was unable to record the names of one-third of the children (32%) or for half (49%), the cause of death. At the Kamloops residential school, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) officially recorded the names of 51 children who died from 1915 to 1964. We have been able to find information on these children from the records in Library and Archives Canada and from death certificates held by the British Columbia Archives’ Genealogy resource online which, it seems, was not consulted by NCTR researchers.

Combining these two sources provides a good picture of the deaths of at least 35 of the 49 students (two are duplicates). Seventeen died in hospital and eight on their own reserves as a result of illness or accidents. Four were the subject of autopsies and seven of coroners’ inquests. As for burial sites, 24 are buried in their home Indian Reserve cemetery, and four at the Kamloops Indian Reserve cemetery.

Sure seems a far cry from 215, doesn't it? Also, it seems like the schools had nothing (or at the least very little) to do with any of the deaths. If they lie about this BIG aspect of Residential Schools, don't get mad at me for thinking they are lying about the rest (we know they are vastly exaggerating the sexual abuse).

So what else has changed a year later, if not my steadfast support for the Indian Residential School System and the belief we need to bring it back?

Well, Shiny Pony got caught skipping memorials for his own "we're such horrible people day" and ended up catching waves. That's a nice side bit of trivia. Though it paid off for the Red Indians, his "apology" turned out to be insufficient, with a true apology only in the form of what it always comes down to with the grievances of a tribe of uncivilized and (apparently) uneducatable layabouts: a boatload of my money being wasted on them.

That's certainly been a practical benefit of the past year. I mean sure the Pope came to Hobemma and (unjustly) apologized for the crime of trying to improve their sorry race, but surprise surprise it comes down to more and more and more and more money.

This year, make sure to celebrate that same as last year: having to go to work to pay the taxes so that the same government who claims they are currently engaged in genocide gets to stay home or go surfing, before coming back to work Monday and wasting more and more of that money on the Red Indian people who, no matter how many classrooms you sit them in or how many cheques you write, never rise to functioning members of a civilized society.

Long to reign over us

Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II died yesterday morning (local time) and I amoung all loyal subjects am devastated. She has been our Sovereign my entire life, the only monarch my parents have ever actually known, and as somehow-Prime-Minister Truss noted (where she -- inappropriately, as Nigel Farage and I agree -- also revealed the new King's regal name before Buck House did) was the rock in which modern Britain was founded. Sure that foundation was rapidly increasing irrelevancy in a world where their great contributions to the world were villainized and minimized, but its unclear what concrete steps Her Majesty could have and failed to take.

I first saw her on the steps of the Capri Centre in Red Deer in 1990. I last saw her in Calgary during the provincial centennial in 2005. She will forever be in my heart: she's MY royal, she's MY Queen, and I'll make sure to keep every bill and coin in which she graces and as quickly as possible dispose of King Charles III (why didn't he just change his name to Henry IX?) currency as I come across it. This was incredibly sad day, as South Park mocked, for Canada and indeed the world: we had hoped Her Majesty would have to attend the funerals of both her son and Justin Trudeau but that sadly has not come to pass.

On my second-most recent visit to the UK I picked up a bottle of Mead from Stonehenge which I admit I drank copious quantities of last night in honour of Queen Elizabeth II. I no longer can say "God Save Our Queen" and it will certainly feel weird singing anything else. Unlike 1952, the Empire's focus will not be so much on the incoming monarch as it will be on the outgoing one, and for good reason. After a relative flurry of monarchical succession in the years after Her Majesty Queen Victoria's death (Edward lasted 9 years, George V was the anomaly with almost 26, followed by the 327 days under Edward VIII and 15 years of George VI) we had just shy of three quarters of a century of stability at "Buck House".

That's highly unlikely to continue, with Charles likely to last less than two decades if not one, William (who is, believe it or not, forty) to be around a quarter century, and by then who can predict poor Prince George's fate? In 1952 the world was greeted with the novelty of the second Queen in slightly over half a century (and the realm's sixth ever) and a girl of whom not a lot was known. That we know all too much about Charles III is one of the reasons we don't really like him.

Perhaps it was Elizabeth's youth which "saved" her early on: it was understood that we would be getting a new monarch for likely a very long period, and therefore it was much more natural to be looking ahead as opposed to looking behind. Or perhaps that in the wake of the Second World War the mindset of the populace was more towards the future which surely must be brighter than the past we all collectively endured. Instead, we have a distant past (which she for many signified, as Joel Abbott noted) which was distinctively brighter and better, with an uncertain but likely darker future both in the poetic sense of the term and a literal sense, with the "green energy" policies which the new Sovereign enthusiastically supported in the form of out-and-out lying to his (we can now confirm) future subjects and various other groups around the world. When she came in we were a world newly at peace looking forward to the economic prosperity that would bring. When she left we were newly at war (psychologically, at the very least) and had angry people demanding that this economic prosperity be abandoned because plastic straws were just too useful.

Alas that sounds like some socioeconomic analysis of the world under Charles III which I am presently at no interest in engaging. This will continue to be a week and weekend of mourning, where I will drink more English (not UK mind you!) beverages and reminisce about a great woman who symbolizes an even greater institution. She is sadly gone but happily no longer the victim of the daily struggles of our mortal toil: I'm happily still here but sadly forced to fight on to stave off the twilight. She couldn't reverse the knob but she could help tamp down the hands on the dimmer switch.

Not a lot survives from 1952. Harry Truman was in the White House, Joe Stalin was in the Kremlin, Chairman Mao had just taken over in China. The British Empire was still a phrase taken seriously: it was not yet a joke, a punchline, and then a hate crime. Truman, Stalin, Mao are all long gone, but, until today, the Queen endured. Most of her cousins in the other European monarchies did not. She was a survivor, and they weren't. Ours is not an age of kings, and those born to royalty have to be pretty nimble.