It’s a sort of a Mark Steyn/Colby Cosh social conservative/libertarian dissection of Canadian ex-pat “artists”, and the Obama and Obamaton (scare quotes more important here) “health care” and other personal responsibility-shredding, socialist pretenses and memes.
I think this line sums it up best: “America’s ‘health care’ debate is not about ‘health’ or, as President Obama likes to say, ‘controlling costs.’ It’s about something more basic.”
.
Why do you leave the one you love?
To mark Dominion Day (as you’d expect a squaresville loser like me to call it), the New York Times asked 11 Canadian expatriates to write on “what they most miss about home.” The cutting-edge funnyman Rick Moranis riffed on toques and beavers and the lyrics of God Save the Queen, raising the suspicion he’d simply recycled his beloved Dominion Day column of 1954—which is not just environmentally responsible but very shrewd given New York Times rates for freelance contributors.
But thereafter the expats got with the program. The musician Melissa Auf der Maur, after years in the “American melting pot,” pined for “the Canadian mosaic.” But the great thing about the Canadian mosaic is that it engages in “a national conversation about literature like a big book club,” so the bookseller Sarah McNally said she missed “the pride and simplicity of a national literature, which probably wouldn’t exist without government support. We even have a name, CanLit, that people use without fearing they’ll sound like nerds.”
Multiculturalism, government books, using phrases like “Canadian mosaic” with a straight face, hailing the ability to say “CanLit” with a straight face as a virtue in and of itself . . . These are all excellent answers. But David Rakoff, “the author, most recently, of Don’t Get Too Comfortable,” cut to the chase:
“There is no contest about what I miss most about Canada. It is universal medical coverage. Just thinking about it, and its absence here, can send me into complete despair.”
Well, the natural reaction is just to roll one’s eyes. But don’t try that at home, kids: the wait time for eye-roll dislocation-correction surgery is up to two years at the Royal Victoria. So Colby Cosh, a rare non-expat Canadian, chose instead a hoot of derision, paraphrasing Mr. Rakoff thus:
“Yeah, I got so upset I almost thought about packing my shit and going home so I wouldn’t be in complete despair anymore.”
[…]
Canada has done everything David Rakoff, Sarah McNally and Melissa Auf der Maur want—not least in their own fields. It taxes convenience-store clerks to subsidize books and writing and publishing and that wonderful “national conversation about literature like a big book club” in which everyone’s membership dues are automatically deducted from your bank account whether you go to the meetings or not. And still Mr. Rakoff and Ms. McNally and Ms. Auf der Maur leave. They applaud the creation of a “just” and “equitable” society, and then, like almost all the members of the Order of Canada you’ve actually heard of, they move out. Despite commending the virtues of a social “safety net” for you and everyone else, they personally can only fulfill their potential somewhere else, without one. Usually in a country beginning with “Great” and ending in “Satan.” …
Classic.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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