Dear America:

Hello, fellow North Americans. Or, as some of you people say, “Hey, y’all.” Canada here, your neighbour to the north. I’ll give you a minute to Google a map of North America, look north (or “up”), and there we are. We’re the neighbour who’s not always trying to bust into your house. (That would be Mexico, which is south, or “down.”)

Can we talk? Neighbour to neighbor? (See the difference in spelling? That’s a Canadian thing. Or actually a British thing, but that’s another story.) We’ve been hearing a lot these days about the debate you’re having over health care. We’re not eavesdropping or anything, but to be honest, you people are kinda loud. When you have a “debate” over something, everybody hears it.

Not to be rude, but frankly, I don’t care about your health care debate. It doesn’t impact me in any way, so if you want to continue with your current system — I hear there are about 50 million of you who don’t have health insurance, but hey, that’s your problem — I really don’t care.

But I hear that Canada is getting dragged into the debate, and not in a good way. Some of your politicians are weighing in with the typically reasoned debate we’ve come to expect from your politicians.

Take Louie Gohmert, a Republican congressman from Texas, who said in your Congress on July 9: “I know enough about Canadian care, and I know this bureaucratic, socialized piece of crap they have up there. One in five have to die because they went to socialized medicine.”

Now, that’s not very nice. Also, a pack of lies.

Then there’s Republican (why are they all Republicans?) Paul Broun of Georgia, who said on July 10: “Life is precious. Some would say, ‘Well, she’s 85 years of age; we should just let her die.’ And that’s exactly what’s going on in Canada and Great Britain today. They don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society, evidently.”

OK, I’m trying to be polite here, but what kind of assholes do you people elect down there?

Sorry. Maybe that was a little extreme. But your politicians are painting Canadians as a bunch of heartless bastards who prefer to put their old people on ice floes and let them float out to sea, and I take exception to that. What we do with our decrepit old people is our business.

Worse, one of our very own people is being used by your people to trash our health care system. You may have seen a Canadian woman named Shona Holmes on TV ads, appearing before your Congress, and mouthing off on FOX “News” (does anyone take that crap seriously?) and CNN. In the ads, she says bluntly: “If I’d relied on my government for health care, I’d be dead.”

Holmes says she had a brain tumor, but couldn’t get treatment for six months in Canada (which she later amended to three months). In desperation, she went to the U.S., where her doctors said she needed immediate surgery. She went back to Canada, couldn’t find a doctor to do it, so she mortgaged her house and paid the $97,000 US to have the “life-saving” surgery in the U.S.

As always, there’s more to the story. Turns out Shona didn’t have a tumor, but a benign cyst. She had some vision loss due to the cyst, but it was temporary and reversible. There is no doubt she was having problems, but she had to wait for treatment here, but not in the U.S., where you can get quick treatment for anything if you’ve got the money.

The fact is, my American friends, if you have a life-threatening medical situation that requires immediate treatment, anyone in Canada can get it. While there are stories like Shona Holmes, there are far more stories from people who had real brain tumors and various other life-threatening situations, and got top-quality treatment immediately. Sometimes it takes longer than it should for some procedures. Nobody’s happy with wait times, but it’s one of those tradeoffs we make as a country to ensure everyone gets equal access to health care.

And if you still believe that Canadians have “crappy” socialist health care, that one in five of us die waiting for treatment, and that we have less of an appreciation for human life than you do, ask yourselves this question: If our system is so terrible, why do Canadians, in poll after poll, express strong satisfaction with our system (stronger than yours, in fact), and recoil at even the possibility of adopting the American system?

I’ll be honest. We have a pretty inflated opinion of our system; it is far from being the best national health care plan in the world, even though a lot of us think it is. My fellow Canadians love to look down on the money-grubbing American system. Canada is weird that way. We’re probably the only country on earth that can be smug and humble at the same time.

I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of both systems — I love your immediate access to top-quality care, but hate the fact that illness and medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in your country — but if you’re going to compare our system to yours, at least get your facts straight.

And by straight, I mean not from FOX News.

Your friend,

Canada

Maurice Tougas is the former Liberal MLA for Edmonton-Meadowlark. mauricetougas@live.com