Scorched Earth Government
How Canada’s universal health care dies.
We all remember how sore losers behaved when we were playing board games together as children. Winning was everything to them, and if they lost, they’d flip over the board and scatter the pieces or throw some other sort of tantrum. They seem to have missed the point that the goal was shared time together with others, and that losing a game of scrabble wasn't the end of the world, or even your day. Many of us remember parents encouraging those kids to lighten up, or understand that it wasn't a personal slight against them if the dice rolled sixes on someone else’s turn.
That was before certain political movements started actively celebrating and encouraging that kind of immaturity in their members. It may sound naive, but I genuinely believe that there were times in our history when the majority of elected representatives seemed largely interested in providing a public good by working together to make effective policy.
Those days are long gone. Today’s politicos proudly state that their only purpose if they lose an election is to do everything in their power to hurt and undermine the party in power while they’re in office. To make it impossible for them to accomplish any legislative goal, even if that goal is something that helps citizens. Winning is everything. Good governance? Not…
