On Canada Day

On this day it is often difficult for us not to feel smug when we look at so much of the world beyond our borders. While such complacence is never a good idea, in her column today Susan Delacourt reminds us we have much to be thankful for, especially vis-à-vis the United States:

Happy Canada Day in the age of COVID-19 — the border between this country and the United States has never been this sharply defined, literally and politically. As many states in America are tumbling back into a resurgence of the virus, Canada and its health-care system are slowly emerging from the crisis in much better shape than our neighbour to the south.

The increasingly dire situation in Donald Trump's Amerika has prompted a turnabout in the thinking of Wendal Potter,

who used to work with the Cigna health-insurance firm, [and now says] he [is] sorry for all the lies he used to tell about Canada’s health-care system and pointed to the COVID-19 response in our two countries as proof of which one was better.

Potter’s Twitter thread confessed that big money was spent in his business “to push the idea that Canada’s single-payer system was awful & the U.S. system much better.” Now, however, he said it’s clear “it was a lie & the nations’ COVID responses prove it.”

Potter has now posted a video as well, called One Pandemic, Two Countries, which plainly states: “When it comes to keeping people safe from COVID, Canada has the United States beat by a long shot.”

Here is that video, and Happy Canada Day, everyone:

Finally, for those interested in this gap between America and Canada on healthcare, I tried to spell it out a bit more in this video. Thank you for spreading this message. We need to break the U.S. free from the greed of the insurance industry. pic.twitter.com/pcSkyMj8ee

— Wendell Potter (@wendellpotter) June 26, 2020