By the way, speaking as an Edmontonian, I have to comment on the health care issue. The reason why the system is overloaded as it is -- especially emergency roooms in our city -- isn't because of a fundamental flaw within the system. In fact, I highly doubt the half a million dollar stat that was randomly supplied is even true.
The real reason is that there aren't enough doctors entering high-demand front-line sectors, such as family medicine, and the restrictive caps that the government imposes on these doctors. To give you some perspective on this: every doctor's office is
privately owned but publicly funded. In other words, a doctor or company has to open their own office and the government will give X dollars per patient. However, there is an artificial cap as to how much the government will pay. Couple that with an abundance of patients, and you can see why family care is in its current state -- long waits, shortage of doctors, and so forth. This effect overflows to things such as emergency care as people will simply go to the emergency ward as an alternative. This effect also affects things such as preventative care, because the family doctor is first in line for preventing many conditions.
How do we fix this? Encourage more students to specialize in family medicine, raise or eliminate the patient cap, etc.
SpectreFire said:
The biggest problem so far is that none of the major parties have a strong charismatic leader with a real vision for the future of the company.
Another election isn't going to change that, and honestly, if one IS held, I'd probably prefer the Conservatives over the Liberals. The Liberals honestly just have no idea what they're doing right now, I accept they'd end up doing worse than whatever the the Conservatives do. Unless they find themselves a new Chretien or Trudeau, I expect the Conservatives to stay in power.
All signs at this moment point to the CPC
gaining seats. However, six weeks is a lot during election time and anything can happen.
