From the Fraser Institute

By Mackenzie Moir and Bacchus Barua

Among a group of 31 high-income countries that have universally accessible health care, Canada has among the lowest availability of doctors, hospital beds, and most medical technologies—and some of the longest wait times, finds a new study released today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.

“There is a clear imbalance between the high cost of Canada’s health-care system and the value Canadians receive—particularly in terms of availability of medical resources and timely access to care,” said Bacchus Barua, director of health policy studies at the Fraser Institute and co-author of Comparing Performance of Universal Health Care
Countries, 2024.

The study compares 31 universal health-care systems in developed countries using over 40 indicators.

In 2022, using the latest year of comparable data and after adjusting for age, Canada ranked among the top third of health care spenders—4th highest for spending as a share of the economy (11.5 per cent) and 9th highest for spending per person.

Despite Canada’s high level of spending, availability and access to medical resources is generally worse than in comparable countries.

For example, Canada ranked 28th (out of 30) for the availability of doctors, 25th for hospital beds, and 25th for psychiatric beds.

That same year, Canada ranked 27th (out of 31) for the number of MRI machines available per million people, and 28th for CT scanners.

Crucially, among the nine comparable universal health-care countries that measure wait times, Canada ranks 8th (second-worst) for patients who waited more than a month to see a specialist (65.2 per cent), and the worst (9th out of 9) for patients who waited two months or more for non-emergency surgery (58.3 per cent).

“Canadians are increasingly aware of the shortcomings of their health-care system,” said Mackenzie Moir, policy analyst and co-author of the report.

“To improve health care for Canadians, policymakers should learn from other countries around the world that do universal health care better.”

Authors:

Mackenzie Moir

Senior Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute

Bacchus Barua

Director, Health Policy Studies, Fraser Institute

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Walmart, America’s largest employer, says it will remove sexualized and transgender products targeted at children, review all funding of pro-LGBT ‘pride’ initiatives, end ‘racial equity training,’ and stop participating in the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.

The campaign to “de-woke” corporate America has claimed its biggest win yet, with the news that retail giant Walmart is abandoning a broad range of “diversity” initiatives it had previously invested heavily in.

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck reported that Walmart executives detailed to him a range of policy changes the company has committed to, amid left-wing cultural causes falling more out of favor with the general public.

The company plans to stop participating in the LGBT pressure group Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, to “identify and remove inappropriate sexual and / or transgender products marketed to children” via third-party sellers on its website, to “Review all funding of Pride, and other events, to avoid funding inappropriate sexualized content targeting kids”; to “not extend the Racial Equity Center which was established in 2020 as a special five-year initiative”; to stop factoring identity quotas into arrangements with suppliers; and to discontinue “racial equity training” as well as use of the terms “LatinX” and “DEI.”

“Remember, Walmart is the #1 employer in America with over 1.6 Million Employees and they have a market cap of nearly $800B,” Starbuck said. “This won’t just have a massive effect for their employees who will have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected but it will also extend to their many suppliers.”

“Our campaigns are now so effective that we’re getting the biggest companies on earth to change their policies without me even posting a story outlining their woke policies,” he added. “Companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back. The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are now the trend, not the anomaly.”

Walmart is the biggest corporate scalp Starbuck has claimed yet, but by no means his first. With past campaigns, he has successfully pressured Jack Daniel’s, John Deere, Tractor Supply, Lowe’s, Toyota, and Coors to drop similar policies.

In recent years, left-wing activists have used “diversity, equity, & inclusion” (DEI) and “environmental, social, & governance” (ESG) standards to encourage major U.S. corporations to take favorable stands on political and cultural issues such as homosexuality, transgenderism, race relations, the environment, and abortion.

Political and customer backlashes to such activism has translated to business woes for companies such as Disney, Bud Light, and Target. Former President Donald Trump’s defeat this month of outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris for the White House has also been seen by many as further evidence of the general public rejecting woke ideology, which may have further influenced Walmart’s decision.

Exit polling by the pro-Democrat firm Blueprint found that the statement “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” was the third-biggest reason for why overall voters chose not to vote for her, and the number one reason why swing voters rejected her and voted for Trump instead.