Tag Archives: Jack Layton

News

NHS employees leapfrog their own waiting lists to access private health care

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Story from the UK Times. (H/T The American Thinker via ECM)

Excerpt:

The National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists.
More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.

Figures released under the Freedom of Information act show that NHS administrative staff, paramedics and ambulance drivers have also been given free private healthcare. This has covered physiotherapy, osteopathy, psychiatric care and counselling – all widely available on the NHS.

[…]The health department defended the practice and said sending doctors, nurses and other key staff for private treatment helped to get them back to work.

This is actually standard for socialized medicine. In Canada, leftists fly to the United States for health care. They know they’ve wrecked the Canadian system. It’s like Barack Obama and public school teachers sending their own children to private schools. It’s just hypocrisy.

News

Prime Minister Stephen Harper polling in majority territory in Canada

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It’s a Parliamentary system, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s currently has a minority government.

But check out the latest poll results from Dr. Roy:

w-fed-vote-graph-cbc

(Click to see enlarged image from CBC)

About the Ekos poll, courtesy of the National Post:

The polling firm this morning reported that the Tories have 40.7% support among Canadians, pushing the party past the symbolic 40% mark and into majority government territory if an election was held now (which it won’t be). The Liberals trail with 25.5% support, with the NDP a distant third at 14.3%. Ekos says the Conservatives are “comprehensively ahead.”

The results put the Conservatives up a full percentage point over the polling firm’s results last week, while the Liberals, NDP and Bloc are slightly down. (Interestingly, the Greens are slightly up, with 10.5% support; they were at 9.7% last week.)

“The Liberals are under siege everywhere they turn,” Frank Graves, president of EKOS, said in a statement. “Even new Canadians, under- 25 Canadians, and the university-educated appear to be turning against them. Most stunning of all, the Conservatives now have a lead among women of almost 11 percentage points.”

The telephone survey was conducted between Oct. 7 and Oct. 13, 2009, for CBC. It included 2,729 Canadians and is considered accurate within 1.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The PDF of the poll is here.

There are a total of 308 seats, and Harper needs 155 to have a majority. The projection from this poll that the Conservatives would get more than 155 seats, and get their majority, if the election were held today. Anything better than 40% usually means a majority.

To compare, here are the results from the last federal election, held on October 14, 2008:

  • The Grown-Ups (Conservatives) got 37.7%
  • The Socialists (Liberals) got 26.3%
  • The English Communists (New Democrats) got 18.8%
  • The Green Communists (Greens) got 6.8%
  • The French Communists (Bloc Quebecois) got 10.0%

Here’s a map that show who voted for whom:

706px-Canada_2008_Federal_Election.svg

A “minority” government means that you need the support from another party to get over the 155 barrier so that you can pass a piece of legislation.