Layton: the final enigma

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 4:49 AM - 150 Comments

[Olivia Chow] won’t reveal the nature of [Jack Layton’s] final illness: “Jack’s wish is that we don’t talk precisely about what kind because we want to give other cancer patients the kind of hope they deserve and should have. If we talk about this kind of cancer, or that, then if you have that particular kind, you would be really worried…” –The Star, Tuesday

Pardon me, fellow Canadians, but this is preposterous. Olivia Chow’s explanation doesn’t even make sense on its own terms: in the absence of information about what kind of cancer killed Jack Layton, patients with any kind of cancer at all might be frightened or upset by his sudden demise. She is denying us information that could ease the minds of the vast majority of these people. But then, this isn’t the first time we’ve been given a strained, unconvincing excuse for secrecy when it comes to Jack Layton’s health, though it is likely to be the last.

When Jack Layton was first diagnosed with prostate cancer last year, his secretary Brad Lavigne told Canadians that we would not be receiving details of Layton’s treatment because, basically, we are too stupid to handle it. Cancer sufferers, Lavigne argued, might perceive such a disclosure “as general medical advice” and conclude that the same therapies “might be suitable for them.” This was an amazingly brazen answer in an era in which “awareness” is worshipped like a tiki. Jack Layton might have been the first cancer victim in decades who believed that his disease did not provide him with a morally binding opportunity to educate others—that, in fact, his duty was to conceal. The question nobody asked: what if there were prostate cancer patients who might learn, by means of Layton’s example, of a treatment that was truly “suitable”?

Instead, Lavigne’s bizarre rationale was accepted, and questions about Layton’s later hip fracture were shrugged off, even though Canadians have abundant, well-founded reasons to suspect politicians, as a group, of habitually queue-jumping and seeking private care outside the country. The NDP cannot shut up about how Tommy Douglas gave us medicare like some cornball Prometheus bringing fire unto primeval man; its leaders therefore might be regarded as having a special responsibility to rise above such suspicions.

This would be the case even if Layton hadn’t availed himself controversially of private clinics in the past, and it would be the case even if it weren’t for the mysterious affair of April’s disappearing “hip replacement”, when we were all asked to believe that Layton’s sister, who was travelling with him and essentially acting his physical therapist, got an exceedingly rudimentary detail of his treatment wrong. Could happen! It would have been awfully simple for him to confirm it with medical evidence!—he said so himself, and offered to provide that evidence!

But by that time, no one in a position to ask was interested: the adversarial relationship between politician and media had already broken down. It has been pointed out incessantly in defence of Layton’s privacy that Canada, unlike the U.S., has not established a full-disclosure norm in health matters for important politicians. What nobody observes is that the U.S. adopted this norm for very good reasons—reasons with labels like Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy. Long experience of republican government has taught Americans that politicians will tell merciless, outrageous lies about their health status to secure electoral advantage unless a full-disclosure norm is aggressively enforced by the press.

Jack Layton, of course, was never the chief magistrate of a republic—just a man who claimed to be running for our prime ministership in earnest, and, later, a officer of state with responsibility for assembling and leading an alternative government. Still, eventually Canada will, like the U.S., begin to oblige men in his position to be excruciatingly forthright about their health. And eventually someone will spill the beans about what killed him. In the meantime, 4.5 million Canadians who voted for a party led by Jack Layton will just have to wait and see what they actually end up with.

Go big, go home

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 2:50 PM - 25 Comments

Brian Mulroney offers some free advice to Stephen Harper.

“We make enough mistakes in politics but it’s important that you try to get the big things right,” the 71-year-old former Conservative prime minister says in an interview from his Montreal law office. “History remembers the big-ticket items.”

… His advice to Prime Minister Harper, especially given the partisan fighting that is so much part of a minority Parliament, is to create a blue ribbon panel of non-partisan, distinguished Canadians. “Someone has to provide some unbiased, thoughtful but effective leadership in the thinking on this,” he says. “Without some new thinking and some visionary approaches, health care is going to consume 70 to 75 per cent of provincial budgets.”

Setting aside what lessons Mr. Mulroney’s premiership may provide about the wisdom of striving for big change, Mr. Harper already dismissed this specific idea in an interview with Postmedia two weeks ago. Continue…

The Commons: One thing he can say for sure

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 7:49 PM - 46 Comments

The Scene. After the Prime Minister had escorted into the House the two newest additions to the government side, after the government side had delighted in the arrivals, and after the two MPs—Robert Sopuck of Dauphin and Julian Fantino of Vaughan—had officially surrendered their free will and taken their respective seats in the far southwest corner of the room, Mr. Harper returned to his own chair and awaited the first complaint of the leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition.

Michael Ignatieff’s lament this afternoon would be for those left waiting hours in emergency rooms across the country. By Mr. Ignatieff’s reckoning, the government had neglected to act sufficiently these last five years and, furthermore, the Prime Minister himself was not adequately supportive of the Canada Health Act. How, Mr. Ignatieff thus wondered, could the government be trusted to protect the public health system?

Mr. Harper stood and dispatched with this perfunctorily, lamenting for cuts to provincial transfers made by Liberal governments during the 1990s and boasting of how many billions his government has dutifully handed over in more recent years.

Having heard this version of events before, the Liberal leader was quick to respond that whatever Mr. Harper’s government had managed to transfer had been budgeted for by a Liberal government in 2004. Switching to English, he shook his fist in the Prime Minister’s direction and reviewed both the premise and the indictment. “The federal-provincial accords run out in 2014. The government has no record on public health. There has been no federal leadership on this issue for five years,” he declared. “The Prime Minister is heard to muse about how he would like to get rid of the Canada Health Act and he says that any plan to bring help to families to look after their loved ones at home is reckless. How can Canadians trust the government to defend public health?”

Mr. Harper stood and repeated his previous points, his right index finger emerging to wag and point variously. But here then the Prime Minister was apparently compelled to punctuate this fall sitting with a statement of great definitiveness. Continue…

Toward 2014

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 11:35 AM - 82 Comments

In a series of speeches today from Caroyln Bennett, Hedy Fry and Ujjal Dosanjh, the Liberals are laying out the parameters of their health care agenda.

All of this will require federal leadership and partnership between governments, which is what Canadians expect. We want our governments to fight for Medicare, not over Medicare. We expect the social contract that Medicare represents to be honoured, not abandoned.

The federal government has the jurisdiction, the role, and the responsibility to defend the national interest and our shared objectives: to ensure that Medicare survives and thrives, to ensure the principles of Medicare are respected by enforcing the Canada Health Act, and to share in the cost of the system by providing funding to the provinces and territories.

Amid the chaos, a few kind words for the Tea Party

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Win McNamee/Getty Images

From a call for hope in 2008 to a cry of anger in 2010. The politics of the United States is nothing if not malleable.

After Barack Obama’s historic and hope-filled ascension to the presidency two years ago, the American electoral scene has been swamped by disillusionment over the policy direction of the federal government, massive increases in public spending, persistent unemployment and a sense of unfulfilled national promise. The surprising success in this week’s mid-term elections of the Tea Party movement, a loosely organized group of mostly Republican voters, has revealed a legitimate and deep-seated anger among American voters. It may be flawed, but the Tea Party cannot be ignored.

Inspired by an on-air rant in February 2009 by CNBC business editor Rick Santelli, the Tea Party has quickly grown into a political movement with very specific interests. Its supporters are hyper-focused on limiting the powers of the federal government, lowering taxes and bending Washington’s ear to these demands. Critics contend, with some justification, that such simplicity ignores the complexities of the real world. And a few high profile Tea Party candidates are clearly not ready for prime time. But simplicity sells. Grassroots populist movements such as the Tea Party have a long and respectable history in North America because of their ability to express popular sentiment. And anger seems a perfectly understandable emotion for Americans to be feeling in 2010.

Continue…

The U.S. Congress is now a parliament; get used to it

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 11:50 PM - 39 Comments

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Senate health-care bill, which means (because both houses have passed identical bills) that President Obama can sign it into law.

One thing many people have pointed out is that this is the first time in U.S. history that such a huge piece of legislation has passed with votes from only one party. All the big initiatives of Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency, like civil rights and Medicare, passed with votes from both parties. This bill, on the other hand, received not a single Republican vote in either house.

This has been, and will be, cited as evidence that the bill is a bad one. But I don’t think it says much about it one way or the other, because — and this is also frequently pointed out — the two parties in the U.S. are very different from the way they were. Back when Medicare passed, both parties had their liberal and conservative wings. Similarly, the Civil Rights Act was opposed both by segregationist Democrats from the South and conservative Republicans like Barry Goldwater who felt it violated states’ rights. Today, the parties basically don’t have liberal and conservative wings. The Democrats still have something resembling a conservative wing (as witness the fact that a bunch of their members didn’t vote for this bill), and if the Republicans regain the majority, they’ll elect a few members who are to the left of the party on some issues. But it’s clear that one party is the conservative party and the other is a liberal party, and they are expected to vote more or less on party lines. When a member seems like he or she is going to break with the party, he or she usually falls back into line if the leadership requires it, as Bart Stupak did and as moderate Republicans usually do.

What creates a lot of the weirdness in the U.S. system is that it’s one that evolved in an era of lax party discipline, and the rules have never really adjusted to the current quasi-Parliamentary arrangement. The best-known example is the filibuster. It’s something that grew out of the old system where the “nays” and “ayes” didn’t split evenly along party lines, and Senators of both parties might team up to filibuster. Now, with the more ideologically divided parties, it’s as if there’s a Parliamentary system where the majority has no power to pass anything without the minority party’s consent. This may or may not be desirable, but it certainly creates some weird incentives.

The Republicans have done a very good job of adjusting to the new reality. And not only by using the filibuster (which, until Scott Brown was elected, they couldn’t even use without Democratic defections), but by understanding the effect that party discipline has. As Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell explained recently, he and his House counterpart John Boehner realized they could reduce the popularity of the Democrats’ initiatives by denying them any Republican support:  “Republican unity in the House and Senate,” he said, “has been the major contributing factor to shifting American public opinion.” Though it may operate differently in the U.S., it’s still a dynamic that is familiar in Parliamentary systems. The majority wants to pass something. They have the votes. The minority’s job is to unite in opposition, sour the public on the majority’s ideas and convince the public to put them in charge.

On the other side, one reason Nancy Pelosi has emerged as the star of the Democrats is that she understands this new dynamic. She is famously partisan and disdainful of deals with the opposing party, which means that she has the same attitude as her Republican opposite numbers, and is able to get things done in the new system. So after Scott Brown, some of the more “bipartisan” types wanted the Democrats to go for a scaled-down health care bill that might attract Republican support. As this long article explains, Pelosi said no: she would take nothing less than rounding up the votes for a comprehensive bill, and she convinced President Obama to do it her way.

The reason she was right is that there’s very little likelihood that they could ever have passed the smaller bills. The Republicans and Democrats agree on nothing: they have fundamentally different ideas about the role of government, health care, the environment and almost everything else. Both the Republican leadership and base dislike the idea of giving the Democrats bipartisan cover. Anything important that the Democrats want to do this year (in what might be their last year in the majority) they’ll have to do on party lines, and the same may well apply if the Republicans take back the majority. For better or worse, the U.S. is now becoming more of a Parliamentary government like ours. Well, if they’re going to have Canadian-style Socialized Medicine ™ they might as well have Canadian-style government.

Update: Here’s a link to David Frum’s already much-discussed post, where he argues that the Republicans could have Continue…

Revolt of the booboisie

By Colby Cosh - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 6:00 AM - 40 Comments

Speaking of health care reform in the USA… if you need a demonstration of what it’s up against, study the apoplectic response to new guidelines for breast cancer screening issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. The USPSTF has decided to recommend that women aged 40-49 should no longer bother obtaining mammograms as a matter of course; that women 50 and up need them only once every two years; and that breast self-examination is largely useless. The result has been the creation of an instant coalition of rage between conservatives paranoid about “death panels”—behold, an example of the real thing, already doing its genocidal work!—and conspiracist women paranoid about a male-dominated medical profession and its apparent desire to do away with them. (Some people, of course, manage to be both at the same time.)

Confronted with such a tag team, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius couldn’t throw her task force under the proverbial bus fast enough. She promised that the new guidelines “won’t set US policy”. In practice, she has thus established frequent breast cancer screening as a sacred taboo. The evidence on the costs and benefits of intensive screening is still evolving, but the debate is over. Even if other clinical agencies come to agree with the USPSTF, as they might, neither Medicare nor future Obamacare will be politically able to budge from the orthodoxy of routine annual screening for every woman over 40.

The key word here is “routine”. The coalition of excitables is behaving as if the USPSTF recommended that no woman under 50 should ever get a mammogram. What the USPSTF said was that the decision to start early regular mammography is, given present evidence, too complicated to be the subject of a simple fiat covering the entire populace. “The decision to start regular, biennial screening mammography before the age of 50 years,” they said, “should be an individual one and take patient context into account, including the patient’s values regarding specific benefits and harms.”

Every woman has a different risk profile, not only for breast cancer itself, but for the legitimate harms that can arise from overdetection, ranging from excess radiation exposure to complications from needless biopsies and surgeries. It is NOT, contrary to what some of the excitables would have you believe, a simple matter of avoiding the pain of mammograms and the psychological stress from false positives. (But, at that, it might be worth asking some of the more affluent critics: if more mammograms are inherently better for you, why stop at one a year? Why not one every two weeks? What price peace of mind?)

As Steven Pearlstein observes in a brilliant column for the Washington Post, the whole spectacle is about as unedifying as could be imagined. Of course, if you’re an American against nationalized health care, or just a Canadian who appreciates the benefit of having a radically different health system just a few hours’ drive away, you can take comfort in the overpowering evidence that the American public is still not ready to relinquish the benefits of personal control over the consumption of medical services. (Even if regulation of insurance programs has rendered those benefits largely theoretical.)

But one still doesn’t like to see what one might regard as the “right” side of the debate win for the wrong reasons—namely, that Americans and their media are no longer capable of exercising rudimentary logic or understanding the most basic nuances of science. Such a passion-wracked polity cannot survive as a liberal-democratic republic for too long, with or without socialized medicine. I mourn a little when I read a passage like this in the comment section of the San Jose Mercury News:

Ironically, mammograms do save lives. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force acknowledged as much in its report. For example, since 1990 the breast cancer mortality rate among women age 40-49 decreased 3.3 percent a year, largely due to mammograms. But breast cancer is relatively rare in that age group, so the task force decided the risks of mammograms, including false positives that lead to anxiety and unneeded treatment, outweigh the benefits.
Tell that to any woman who was diagnosed in her 40s. I know several. I bet you do, too.

An important point underlying the USPSTF’s new guideline is that breast cancer is dramatically overdiagnosed in women under 50. Incredibly, the author of this op-ed, Patty Fisher, thinks the fact she knows a lot of women under 50 who were diagnosed with breast cancer is a refutation of this! (She has also told a flat-out lie, of course, about what the task force actually said; it acknowledged that for many women, the benefits of aggressive early screening may in fact outweigh the risks.) The relevant number, for the purposes of discussing the guideline, is not simply the number of women between the ages of 40 and 49 who have been diagnosed with breast cancer because of mammograms. The relevant number is the number of women between 40-49 who would forgo mammography until the age of 50 because of their risk profile, and then die of breast cancer specifically because the lack of early detection failed to catch a truly dangerous, fast-growing tumour. And the evidence suggests that there really aren’t that many of those women.

The San Francisco Chronicle went further in the quest to put a “human face” on the debate, hunting for individual women who have had breast cancers detected in their forties. Again, without access to extensive case histories, the reader cannot judge whether application of the USPSTF guideline would have actually harmed these women. But they are personally convinced, whatever mere statistics or even the details of their own cases might say. “I can’t believe [early mammography is] not saving a lot of women,” fumes cancer survivor Laura Scanlan. “It saved me.”

Well, there you have it. The great American syllogism for the 21st century. X benefited me, therefore X must be good for everybody, and not bad for anybody. I’m every woman: it’s all in me.

Somehow Randy Couture must be behind this

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 1:44 PM - 51 Comments

It sounds as though Brock Lesnar’s chiropractor thinks that Canadian health care is somehow to blame for the mystery intestinal illness that is threatening the all-American manbeast’s Ultimate Fighting career. I’ve occasionally had occasion to point out in print that chiropractic is a pseudoscience cooked up by a weird Canadian grocer solely on the basis of bizarre “spiritual promptings,” received from “the other world,” about the biological basis of disease. The response from practitioners and loyal patients is always the same: that’s not us anymore. Chiropractic has left its grand, kooky theoretical and anatomical theories behind and embraced scientific method. Responsible chiropractors no longer claim plenary power to heal or comprehend the whole organism.

It’s funny, though, how often we still run across characters like Larry Novotny, who appears to regard himself as qualified to comment on a modern hospital’s handling of an intestinal infection. What’s important to understand is that evidence-based medicine is at the heart of the political struggles over health care now going on in the United States. Obama’s bright boys feel confident they can stem the growth in medical expenditures in the U.S. if practices with weak or nonexistent evidence of helpfulness can be suppressed on a national scale. Since the Canadian health care system is associated in the public mind with the Obama health program—even though Canada is actually pretty inept when it comes to using evidence to decide what treatments it will fund—chiropractors and other potentially endangered Medicare billers have a clear vested interest in spreading fear and uncertainty about Canadian medicine. (U.S. Medicare “only” pays chiropractors for “manual manipulation for subluxation of the spine.” But that is the essence of what chiropractors do; it is practically the definition of their art. And you don’t need to prove you actually have any sort of malformation of the spinal column in order to qualify for compensation.)

In short, there could be no better or more opportune anti-Obama narrative/rallying cry than “The Canadians messed up Brock Lesnar!” I hasten to add an important caveat: the Canadians may, in fact, have messed up Brock Lesnar!

Our turn

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 17, 2009 at 1:18 AM - 30 Comments

This should perhaps feature prominently among the questions asked of every party leader whenever they next respectively make themselves available to the press.

“We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press. ”We know that there must be change,” she said. “We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands.”

… ”It’s not about choosing between an American system or a Canadian system,” said Doig. “The whole thing is about looking at what other people do. That’s called looking at the evidence, looking at how care is delivered and how care is paid for all around us (and) then saying ‘Well, OK, that’s good information. How do we make all of that work in the Canadian context? What do the Canadian people want?’ “

Doig says there are some “very good things” about Canada’s health-care system, but she points out that many people have stories about times when things didn’t go well for them or their family. ”(Canadians) have to understand that the system that we have right now – if it keeps on going without change – is not sustainable,” said Doig.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Drudge has, as of this hour, deemed this a top item for his readers.

'I don't feel qualified to intervene in the debate' (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 12:53 PM - 17 Comments

For those unsatisfied by yesterday’s demurring, here is an excerpt from Stephen Harper’s reply to the Speech from the Throne in October 2002. Possibly the last time he’s allowed himself to say these sorts of things out loud in a public place.

Continue…

'I don’t feel qualified to intervene in the debate'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 10, 2009 at 9:26 PM - 51 Comments

The Prime Minister sat down with ABC’s Jake Tapper today for a chat about continental relations, trade and health care.

Most interesting might be the exchange on health care, during which Stephen Harper proved rarely reticent. That portion of the conversation after the jump.

Those interested in what Stephen Harper might say if Stephen Harper had something to say about wait times in Canada might consult his party’s 2006 election platform. A report this June from the Wait Times Alliance—entitled Unfinished Business—noted slight improvement from 2004.

Continue…

'I don't find Canadians particularly scary'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 10, 2009 at 3:44 PM - 2 Comments

Asked by a fashionably bearded Alex Panetta from Canadian Press, the President of the United States of America reconfirms our non-threatening national identity.

'It's a false debate'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 7, 2009 at 12:35 PM - 44 Comments

Bob Rae wades far enough into the American health care debate to say we should stay out of it.

If the U.S. falters in their quest for a better system, it will be their loss. I don’t really hear many voices in their political system arguing for “the Canadian solution.” It’s a false debate. The questions are simple. Should anyone be denied health care because of their income, disability, or illness? (No.) Should patients be able to choose their doctors, and advocate for speedy, effective treatment? (Yes.) Should insurers, taxpayers, and premium payers be worried about how to control costs as an ageing society combines with great technological advance to produce an expensive mix? (Yes.)

Keep Canada out of the U.S. debate. We’ve never suggested exporting our system. We have our own debates and our own issues, and because of the moral choices we made 40 years ago they are different from the American paradigm. We should be proud of what we have, but we need to keep the focus on how to improve it, how to combine access, excellence, and innovation. We shouldn’t treat health care as some kind of taboo subject. We should keep what we have and make it better. And hope our friends in the U.S. will find their own answers to the questions that lie at the heart of health care everywhere.

Don't let them tell you there's a monster under your bed

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 31, 2009 at 2:28 PM - 4 Comments

Jack Layton talks health care at Huffington Post.

No care for life-threatening conditions, no choice, exorbitant costs, bureaucrat control, poor outcomes — these are the bogeymen of the right-wing smear campaign. And like all bogeymen, once you look under the bed they don’t exist.

Our system does have flaws. We need better prescription drug coverage, better remote access to care and better practices in hospitals and clinics. No honest advocate for our health care system would dismiss these things. But Canadian health care works — and works well.

This apparently actually happened

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 12:25 PM - 44 Comments

Surely this calls for a debate. Do you suppose Ari Fleischer could get Ujjal Dosanjh or Jack Layton on The Factor?

Surely in the next breath, Mr. O’Reilly said “just kidding” or “not” or “psych” or something. Right?

Our short national panic is over

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 4:02 PM - 42 Comments

Michael Ignatieff appears in public. Says things.

“The thing that struck me is why isn’t someone in this government getting up and saying ‘don’t trash the Canadian health care system in the United States.’ Who’s standing up for Canada here?”

“Don’t drag Canada’s good  name into the mud in the United States. We’ve got enough problems with the United States right now with the buy-American stuff, with the thickening of the border.   But every Canadian is proud of this thing and we don’t like seeing it dragged into the mind and I can’t understand why the Harper government is completely silent on the issue. I won’t be silent.”

'This just in: no one in the United States dies at all'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 11:54 PM - 15 Comments

An hour before Barack Obama’s primetime press conference, Jack Layton addresses the nation.

The nation, if this “Ed” fellow is any indication, has no time for Mr. Layton’s Tommy Douglas stories. The nation just wants answers.

The ghost of Tommy Douglas? (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 3:34 PM - 2 Comments

Rob Silver wonders if Ujjal Dosanjh, Jack Layton and a Conservative to be named later might be better put to use debating the state of health care on our own airwaves.

We should take some pride that the Canadian health-care model is playing an important, if cartoon-like role in the U.S. debate over the future of their health system.

There’s only one small problem, actually maybe two: 1. The status-quo of the Canadian health-care system is completely unsustainable; and 2. Rather than having a debate in Canada about how to fix our health-care system (since the “generational fix” of five-years ago didn’t quite get us there), we are off bragging about the unsustainable status-quo to other countries, convincing them we have the magic answer to health care.

Granted, this wouldn’t be as much fun without Rick Sanchez.

Why do you leave the one you love?

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 175 Comments

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.” Continue…