O CANADA: CRACKING THE CODE ON HOW TO BE SOCIALLY GOOD

You Have To Love Those Crazy Canadians.

As it used to be with all things Scandinavian, so now with much in the
realm of social policy that emanates from north of the border.

Welfarism was the Scandinavian - northern European - cry. Government health
care - government "care" of just about everything, because government knows
what's best for people better than do the people themselves.
Correspondingly lofty taxes to pay for diminished service. Flight from God.
Illegitimacy, easy divorce, family collapse. Diluted drug laws. Pacifism.
Sloth.

Lots of license without much responsibility. Government enhancement of the
self-centered self - an abundance of the things that make your everyday
sociologist's heart beat pit-a-pat: humming, finding your karma at the
convergence of forces, doing your own thing. Don't worry, be happy.

You know.

And you know, the U.S. should emulate the northern European countries, as
all the right people urged it to do, because Scandinavia had cracked the
code on how to be - you know - Socially Good.

Scandinavia found in Canada a similar sister. Early on - remember, during
Vietnam? - Canada proved particularly hospitable to peacenikky refugees
from the American draft selective in their opposition to the U.S. effort to
stanch the flow of Communism there. Maybe it's something in northern
waters, or perhaps it's what all that cold weather can do to the brain.

ANYWAY, comes now in Canada a flight from right reason, a gadarene rush
over the edge of normalcy. Your correspondent long has owned a log cabin
well north, just shy of the Canadian border - so, from demographic
spillage, he well understands attitudes in northern latitudes. Canadians
are marvelous people, but recent pronouncements are revealing their country
as Haight-Ashbury north, with black flies . . . .

. Who can ever forget Canada's single-payer health care system, which
hillaries everywhere ballyhoo as the worldwide paradigm despite (a) its
ineluctable downward spiral and (b) its determination to drive physicians
and patients south? Hear The New York Times: "A recent [Canadian]
government study indicated that 4.3 million Canadian adults - or 18 percent
of those who saw a doctor in 2001- reported they had difficulty seeing a
doctor or getting a test or surgery done in a timely fashion. Three million
Canadians are unable to find a family physician, according to several
private studies, producing a situation all the more serious since it is the
family doctor who refers patients to specialists and medical testing."

. After the European fashion, Canadians seemed to lead their U.S.
counterparts in ideologizing, morally corrupting, and emptying their
churches - too many of which now stand either vacant or as museums and
community centers.

. Canada's Supreme Court has ruled that no federal inmate - including
murderers, rapists, and thieves - can be denied the right to vote in
federal elections.

. ALONG ABOUT the time Canada was following the French example and
resolving not to join what President Bush termed "the coalition of the
willing" to oust Saddam Hussein, an aide to Canada's Prime Minister
reflecting Berkeleyist sentiment in the Canadian realm ungently termed Bush
a "moron."

. Not only has Canada moved to decriminalize possession of small amounts
of marijuana. Overseen mainly by motorcycle gangs and Asian organized crime
groups, the cultivation and trafficking of marijuana are major Canadian
businesses. What's more, some of Canada's provinces and cities - e.g.,
Vancouver - have set up injection sites ("shooting galleries") for drug
junkies and euphemistically call them "treatment" centers.

. In a smell-the-coffee assault on the traditional nuclear family, Canada
has followed the lead of Belgium and the Netherlands in federal sanction of
homosexual marriage. In the U.S., only Vermont recognizes those so-called
nuptials; other states such as Massachusetts and New Jersey have adopted,
or are considering, certain domestic-partner protections. Given the U.S.
Supreme Court's recent ruling on the Texas sodomy law, the debate now will
move to whether the U.S. should continue to restrict marriage to
heterosexual unions, as a 1996 federal statute requires. Meanwhile,
love-struck homosexuals will have to head north of the border to make it
legal - there, anyway; they'll have to wait, maybe forever (and a good
thing, too), for recognition of their "marriage" here.

In these many ways, Canada has put a chill in the cultural air. The
tendency of self-appointed high-brows here and in Canada is to term all
such movement - all such developments - "progressive." But their
proposition fails to recognize the truth that not all forms of motion are
necessarily progress in the sense of advancement: Moving to the rear and
going to Hell (as in Canada now) are forms of motion, too.