Bruce Dowbiggin
Unsustainable: How Covid-19 Blew Up Single-Payer
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In 1983, his authority gone and his popularity exhausted, PM Pierre Elliot Trudeau launched a global “peace” tour in which he presented himself in world hot spots as an honest broker for disarmament. The stunt failed, Trudeau quit the PM job, and the Liberals (now under John Turner) were clobbered by Brian Mulroney.
In 2022, his authority gone and his popularity exhausted, PM Justin Trudeau has launched a global Reset tour in which he presents himself as an honest broker for the worldwide ESG and climate-change agenda. Judging by polls this stunt will work about as well as his father’s grandiose pretension.
Which is inexplicable, because the nation that voted for JT (okay, 33 percent of the nation voted Liberal last fall) is a dumpster fire on many fronts. Let’s choose the one nearest to Canadian hearts: Healthcare. Or what’s left of it after Trudeau’s Covid policies.
This cri de coeur from a nurse on Vancouver Island sums up the current crisis: “Every med/surg nurse tonight that I know will have 8-9 patients. We are 3-6 deep in hallways. That is 8-9 sets of vital signs that need to be done at the very least every 4-6 hours, iv medications, fluids, flushes, line changes and starts that need to be going or happening constantly, pain medications, drains, catheters, sutures and staples, admits discharges, dressing changes, turns, toileting, brief changes, conversations with doctors, doctor’s orders, pharmacy, family phone calls, feeding, sips of water, operating room preparation, post operative assessments, double chart checks, emergency medications for pain, blood pressure, seizures, infections, not to mention charting alllll of those things, violence reports, being hit kicked punched on every shift by those we are trying to help, yelled at by family members because we aren’t doing enough or the family member is in the hall or they haven’t seen a doctor (who by the way are drowning themselves and doing the best they can). All of those things that need to happen, FOR 8-9 PATIENTS for 12 hours day, day after day after day for 35-50 dollars an hour!!!! this is not ok!!!!!! We can’t keep doing this! People will die!! It is not safe. We are only human and we are tired, over worked and leaving this profession at record breaking numbers.”
What to do? Whatever the Media Party might think, the Tommy Douglas dream of one-stop health care was done in by the Covid surge. Having 200 cases nationally in serious condition on any one day has led to this nurse’s despair. As many as a third of hospital beds in the northern states of the U.S. are filled with Canadians. There is deep cynicism. @StephenPunwasi “By the hospital, I mean in the hallway at best, since emergency healthcare is blowing up in every province across the country. We really need to elect people who aren’t just in office because they get off on dunking on their political opponents.”

Alternatives have been proposed— and ignored. Healthcare consultant Francesca Grosso says, “Hospitals should be for acute episodic care and care for extremely complex patients with high risks or highly complex, rare or risky surgery. Low-acuity surgery should be done elsewhere. We need to build community supports. Surgery, home care, better primary care (to provide 24-7 supports-yes this means bring back the good old on-calls). Stop sending everyone to emergency departments.”
In the G&M André Picard dares to dream. “Imagine if… we actually did something radically pragmatic and recognized, as a starting point, that there is a role for both public and private funding and delivery in health care, but neither is a panacea.
“Germany has better health care because it has extensive private health insurance; the Netherlands has a better public-health system because it offers extensive coverage of prescription drugs; France doesn’t have long wait lists, because it allows surgeons to practise in both public hospitals and private clinics; Denmark has the best eldercare because it offers home care and long-term care universally; and so on… In Canada, on the other hand, we have the worst of both worlds: a largely unaccountable public system, and an almost-not-regulated private system.”
Yet the Michael Moore romantics won’t acknowledge that their class-free dream is irretrievably fractured. So risk-averse politicians say they will never support tinkering with the healthcare sacred cow. For Trudeau and the invested parties in single-payer health care the easiest answer is to simply throw more money at the monopoly. (Printing money being Justin’s answer to everything.) If we just had X more nurses and doctors, goes the remedy.
No one in authority is blamed, no one is replaced. The medical boards for doctors and nurses refuse to liberalize their guidelines, leaving International workers out of the loop. In the case of Covid czarina Teresa Tam, she receives a whacking great bonus for needlessly locking down children. Media promote the unicorns at the expense of the herd. So Trudeau flies to Costa Rica or Tofino.
Interestingly, American healthcare— especially as it relates to the Covid fiasco— is experiencing an epiphany. The Centre for Disease Control has fallen on its sword, admitting its many failures on vaccinations, transparency and lockdowns. “To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes. From testing, to data, to communications.”

The architects of the federal government’s Covid task force— Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx— are finally gone or going after their lies promoting vaccines were exposed. @GreenSmoke1776 “If you’ve studied vaccine development, you’d know the impossibility of making a Corona Vax, that they’d been failing on for 2 decades. But all of a sudden, MULTIPLE different companies develop one with different formulations within a few months?”
The background materials denied Americans about vaccines, masking and isolation are finally being seen. A judge has blocked the Marine Corps from discharging unvaccinated Marines. It can be done. Will Canada tinker with its vaunted healthcare system or actually reform it?
Trudeau Sr.’s departure led to NAFTA, the most dramatic departure for Canadian trade with the U.S. Could it be that Trudeau Jr.’s departure might herald a similar sea change toward better healthcare in Canada? Be still my restless heart.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft YearsIn NHL History, , his new book with his son Evan, was voted the eighth best professional hockey book of by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted seventh best, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Bruce Dowbiggin
NFL Ice Bowls Turn Down The Thermostat on Climate Change Hysteria
Oh, the weather outside was frightful. But the football was so delightful. Week 15 of the NFL season was a cryogenic success of snow and sub-zero temperatures. Here were the temperatures at game time this weekend.
Chicago: -11 degrees C.
Cincinnati: -12 degrees F.
Kansas City: -8 degrees C.
New England: -2 C (with an 87 percent chance of snow).
Philadelphia: -2 degrees C.
New York -1 degree C.
Pittsburgh: -7 degrees C.
For fans of NFL football none of this seemed out of character with late-season football. There are legendary games played in arctic conditions. The windchill for the 1967 Dallas/ Green Bay NFC championship was -25 C.
Chargers at Bengals: Jan. 10, 1982 (-24 C, feels like -39 C).
Seahawks at Vikings in NFC wild-card matchup Jan 10, 2016. -21 C with wind chill -25C
Dolphins at Chiefs: Jan. 13, 2024 (-4 degrees, feels like -27 degrees)
As recently as last week’s Bills win over the Bengals games are often played with drifts of snow on the field and the mercury bottoming out. While Canada’s Grey Cup game is played at the end of November it’s still had some brutal weather history of its own.
The point of this meteorology meandering is that, according to our good King Charles III and many other doomsday cultists the concept of snow and cold was supposed to be a figment of the past by now. For almost half a century Michael Mann and the climate prophets of IPCC have been predicting the end of snow and the onset of warmist floods and burning forests. They gambled trillions of the public’s dollars on the certainty that the public would buy computer modelling and data-distortion predicting doom.
For decades it has worked. The careers of people like critic Mark Steyn have been ruined, heretics declared and fortunes dissipated by the trust-fund fanatics who bankroll wackadoodles like Stephen Guilbeault, the convicted felon who Trudeau made Minister of the Environment. No matter how absurd or devious the source, it was a gospel that the fiery inferno was coming next Tuesday. But the weather has remained stubbornly resistant to Elizabeth May’s catechism of climate.

Yet, some dedicated climate advocates and their followers are finally changing their tune in the face of their own observation of lying liars like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. The share of Americans who say climate scientists understand very well whether climate change is occurring decreased from 37 percent in 2021 to 32 percent this year. A similar October study from the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute found that “belief in human-driven climate change declined overall” since 2017.
Reports the uber-liberal L.A. Times: “The unraveling of climate catastrophism got another jolt recently with the formal retraction of a high-profile 2024 study published in the journal Nature. That study — which had predicted a calamitous 62% decline in global economic output by 2100 if carbon emissions were not sufficiently reduced — was widely cited by transnational bodies and progressive political activists alike as justification for the pursuit of aggressive decarbonization.
But the authors withdrew the paper after peer reviewers discovered that flawed data had skewed the result. Without that data, the projected decline in output collapses to around 23%. Oops.”
Even stalwart media apologists for climate hysteria like the Times are starting to have doubts. Under the headline “The left’s climate panic is finally calming down” they describes “Erstwhile ardent climate-change evangelist Bill Gates published a remarkable blog post addressing climate leaders at the then-upcoming COP30 summit. Gates unloaded a blistering critique of what he called ‘the doomsday view of climate change,’ which he said is simply “wrong.”
Trump-besotted American Democrats seeking to soften their Woke image before the 2026 midterms are likewise carving out more moderate positions on climate “that could well deprive Republicans of a winning political issue with which to batter out-of-touch, climate-change-besotted Democrats. But for the sake of good governance, sound public policy and the prosperity of the median American citizen, it would be the best thing to happen in a decade.”
Sadly Canada under Mark Carney remains a staunch climate warrior. The removal of Guilbeault as federal Environmental Minister may have seemed a step toward sanity, but there is no hint that the billions of dollars from hidden money spigots will be closed down any time soon. The B.C. government’s acquiescence to the climate propaganda of Indigenous bands shows no sign of abating. Indeed, it is just ramping up in the land claims that threaten to make home ownership a thing of the past.

PM Mark Carney is a dedicated temperature fabulist going back to his days as governor of the Bank of England. His first fights in Canada were over taxing carbon and hobbling her energy industry. As we wrote in this November 2024 column, the certainty in which the Canadian Left revels is actually dividing, not uniting citizens.
So perhaps if enough citizens spend an afternoon shivering in the stands of a wintertime football game we might achieve a small piece of sanity and learn that that , while climate is always changing, it’s not worth the price we’ve paid this century.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his 2025 book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Hunting Poilievre Covers For Upcoming Demographic Collapse After Boomers
For those not familiar with hunting seasons in Canada it may come as a surprise that the nation has a year-round hunting season. That would be the targeting of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre by the massed army of Liberals, their bots and the richly endowed media pack. Forget he’s never held power. He’s to blame for the ills in Canadian society.
It has been a good hunt. After floor-crossing by dissident CPC, the Liberals are one seat from the majority that Canadian voters denied them in the spring. (They’ll likely get the majority soon.) MPs who a day earlier were at Conservative Xmas parties suddenly sang the praises of Carney. MPs in ridings targeted by the Chinese suddenly joined Team Elbow Up.
All the while the media corps landed blows from their perch. Robert Benzie: “I know that Premier [Danielle] Smith is very unhappy privately with Pierre Poilievre because she thinks that [MOU motion] is undermining this [pipeline] project.” The nadir of the media dog pile was formerly eminent scribe Robert Fife who sniped, “Conservatives persist with cute legislative tricks, while the government tries to run a country.” Run a country. That’s rich.
From his lips to Liberal brains, however. “.@CBCNews and @AlJazeeraWorld viewers consider themselves uniquely informed, says @ElectionsCan_E report. The two TV networks were named by self-described “informed” voters when asked where they got their news. “
It is, seemingly, a great time to be a Liberal. Or not. While Operation Poilievre was gathering steam for Xmas polling revealed that Liberals and Conservatives remain locked in a tie, and Canadians continue to express ambivalence about the country’s direction, mixed feelings about their leaders, and sharp divides by generation, region, and policy concern. These generational discrepancies continue to be buried.

As was the case in the spring, the Liberals are supported only by the Boomer generation that swallowed Elbows Up nostalgia like a fat man on a donut. The under 60s demo at every level shows the current Carney agenda is a loser for them. In the segment of house-rich Boomers the Libs lead 50-31 over CPC. But in every other category it’s “how can I get out of here faster?”
The 45-59 demo it’s 46-36 Conservatives; 30-44 it’s a whopping 48-31 CPC; 18-29 it’s 40-39 CPC. A healthy chunk of Liberal supporting from the collapse of NDP vote. Where they used to poll in the 20s, the highest demo shows 11 percent support. Otherwise Poilievere would be PM.
Meanwhile, research now finds that 54 percent of Canadians say the growing number of newcomers to the country threatens our traditional customs and values— an increase of sixteen points since 2020. Over the same period, the share of Canadians who say immigration strengthens our society fell thirteen points to 35%
In short, the Carney Circus of marrying Canada to China and the EU is a card trick that will be exposed shortly. But where do we see the Ottawa press corps attention to this impending demographic snow plow? As we wrote in March “It’s not hard to see the (under 60s) looking at the Mike Myers obsession with a long-gone Canada and saying let’s get out of here.
Recently former TVOntario host Steve Pakin attended two convocations. The first at the former Ryerson University, (switched to Toronto Metropolitan University in a fit of settler colonizer guilt.) The second at Queens University, traditionally one of the elite schools in the nation. Here’s what he saw.
“At the end of the (TMU) convocation, when Charles Falzon, on his final day as dean of TMU’s Creative School, asked students to stand and sing the national anthem, many refused. They remained seated. Then, when the singing began, it was abundantly noticeable that almost none of the students sang along. And it wasn’t because they didn’t know the words, which were projected on a big screen. The unhappy looks on their faces clearly indicated a different, more political, explanation.
“I asked some of the TMU staff about it after the ceremony was over, and they confirmed what I saw happens all the time at convocations. Then I texted the president of another Ontario university who agreed: this is a common phenomenon among this generation at post-secondary institutions.”
At Queens, where Canadian flags were almost non-existent, O Canada was sung, but the message of unrest was clear: “Convocation sends a message of social stability,” Queen’s principal Patrick Deane began in his speech. “It is a ceremony shaped in history. You should value your connection to the past, but question that inheritance. Focus on the kind of society you’d like to inhabit.”
You can bet Deane is not telling them to question climate change and trans rights. As Paikin observes, “if we fail to create a more perfect union, we shouldn’t be surprised when a vast swath of young people don’t sing our anthem the way so many of the rest of us do.” So why are the best and brightest so reluctant to see as future in becoming the new professional class that runs society?
In the Free Press River Page searched the source of their discontent. “If the Great Recession, Covid-19, and the spectre of an artificial intelligence-assisted ‘white collar bloodbath’ has taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them. This insecurity, compounded by the outrageous cost of living in many large cities, has pushed the PMC’s anxieties to the breaking point.

“Add that to the triumph of identity politics in professional class institutions like universities, corporate C-suites, non-governmental organizations, and media—itself a byproduct of inter-elite competition as many have observed—and what you have is the modern left.
“… they’ve already come to the baffling conclusion that there’s no difference between class struggle and child sex changes. More to the point, the socialist mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has only ever stood the test of time in Anabaptist sects. It requires a religious devotion to self-sacrifice that is not characteristic of this anxious and hyper-competitive class—as many actual socialists have spent the last decade warning.”
The tsunami over immigration has caused severe dislocations— as PM Steven Harper predicted in the 2015 election debate. He was shouted down by the dopey dauphin Justin Trudeau who opened the sluice gates to every kind of progressive nonsense. Which is now evident.
Like all people addicted, CDN Boomers don’t want the truth. They want performance theatre, T-shirts and hockey games. They blame Trump for their predicament, caught between grim realities. Will they take the 12 steps? Or will their kids have to tell them the facts as they escort them to the home?” We’re now seeing the likely answer to that question everywhere in Canadian society.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his 2025 book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books
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