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What is important to you? I have identified several issues that are important to me. They are:

Universal Health Care
Jack Layton's NDP has made a firm commitment to preserve and improve the present system and has earmarked a lot of money to pay for the upgrades. The Conservatives want to open up the system to private health care and that will destroy it. The Liberals are wishy-washy on the issue; I suspect they will open up the system to private health care also. Layton wants to fund the training of more Nurses, Doctors and other health-care providers. Isn't that a more effective means of shortening wait times?

Child Care
The future of our country rests on the shoulders of our children. They must have first class day care and better educational opportunities from pre-school through University. Since Mom and Dad both have to work these days, doesn't it make sense to have government licensed and regulated day care centres in every neighbourhood? These centres would filter out the pedophiles so prevalent in family-style day care and provide pre-school socialization and educational opportunities for everyone’s kids, especially those from very poor homes. That's what Layton wants to do and it makes a lot of sense to me. Harper wants to give every family a check and let them fend for themselves. I'm not sure what the Liberal plan is, does anyone know?

Post-Secondary Education
Another thing that bothers me is the fact that ordinary working-family kids don't have many opportunities when they graduate from high school. Who can afford the high costs of tuition and books these days, much less the minimal costs of living? What's a kid to do? Either get a job flipping burgers or try to get into trades training of some sort. Even that's expensive. Essentially, we are throwing our young people away after high school, what a waste of young minds! Surely we can afford to spend another four years of education preparing them for the workplace. I agree it shouldn’t be entirely free but we shouldn't be burdening them with a heavy load of debt at the beginning of their careers. We must make higher education more affordable, not raise tuition fees!

The Environment
We live in a sick world. We dump all our emissions into the atmosphere, landfills, lakes, oceans, rivers, and then wonder why the smog is so bad, we find turds on our beaches, our lakes are dying and we have multiplicity of health problems. Should we change? I think so, if only to stop 2200 people in Ontario from dying of asthma every year. If we can save a few lakes and slow down global warming, well, that's just a bonus.

So, which party is committed to stopping the environmental damage that our beloved corporations are inflicting on our environment? Both the Conservative and Liberal parties depend heavily on Corporate donations to fill their massive campaign war chests so they owe a great debt to corporations before they are ever elected. The NDP struggles along with mostly private donations from ordinary folks like you and I. Please note that the NDP has a comprehensive Environmental plan that will work and create jobs and create new technologies in the process.

   

You forgot the most important one


KICK THE LIBERALS OUT OF OFFICE.

   

You forgot military

   

NDP will be Commons' voice of moderation: Layton

A minority Conservative government led by a tax-slashing Stephen Harper should be counterbalanced by the moderate and people-friendly NDP, leader Jack Layton told a crowd at the Toronto Board of Trade Tuesday morning.

Layton painted his party as one of the middle ground, saying New Democrats are far from the extremes of the Conservatives, who would eliminate social programs, and the Liberals, who are falling apart at the seams.

Layton also repeated his call, first made yesterday, for Liberal voters to just give him one chance, saying Liberal Leader Paul Martin needs a "time out" after years of unfulfilled election promises.

"The Martin Liberals said they would fix the democratic deficit and, instead, they run a tightly-centralized, patronage and command-controlled machine," Layton said.

   

ok a little bit of last minute NDP propagande there

   

Your post is incorrect. Layton is for PUBLIC Health Care not "Universal Health Care"

In case you have had your eyes closed for a good part of a decade, the system is already filled with private care options. Mr. Martin's own doctor owns a private clinic.

Layton won't have the money to fund more doctors and nurses because he'd have to go and buy back all of the private clinics in Canada which will cost billions.

   

So you at alqaeda...Sorry NDP are the opposite of conservative. You are at the Totalitarianism of the extreme. Give him a chance? Sorry, we gave NDP a chance in ontario and BC. They failed. No more chances for you.

   

The principal tenant of Canada’s healthcare is that everybody regardless of location, or financial and social position WILL have access to timely and quality medical care. Only the most hardcore of lieberals will maintain that this has been achieved. As evidence, the Supreme Court recently stated that wait times are unacceptable and that prohibiting private healthcare is an infringement on the rights of Queerbecers. Additionally, the Canadian Medical Association recently passed a resolution favouring private health insurance.

Lieberal apologists focus on one type of insurance in the US claiming it is a replacement for government healthcare. Since the US has no public health system this is a misleading and erroneous comparison. Canada’s publicly funded healthcare system ranks a dismal 30th in the world and what sets it apart from the 29 countries that have better systems is that they allow a two-tier system to exist which augments and enhances the public system and never ever ever has there been reports of shortages in one system at the expense of another in any country operating a two-tier system. (Lieberals tend to attribute shortages in the Canadian public system to migrant healthcare professionals exploiting the higher pay of the US private system)

The actual comparison costs of the system are also misleading as we are comparing the cost for partial coverage to full coverage/expenditure in the US and most other developed nations. As an example, the life saving drug Herceptin used to treat breast cancer costs $35,000 per treatment and is only available in 7 of 10 provinces. The remainder of women afflicted with advanced breast cancer are limited to a choices of death, move to another province or seek private care in the US. Valcade is a new cancer drug approved by Health Canada that costs $50,000 per patient and one that Ontario in particular refuses to pay for in spite of almost all other provinces picking up the tab. People suffering from Fabry’s disease (1 in 100,000) are denied access to this $250,000 drug because the Provincial Common Drug Review agency claims it is “too expensive”. This in spite of the fact that it is available in 40 other countries. The American example of expenditure to which many in the media so smugly point, is a compilation of billings divided on a per capita basis whose results are skewed by the Canadians (and others in the world) who are forced/chose to seek care in the US due to the inability to access treatment in their own country and does not accurately reflect domestic consumption.

Examples of refusals to provide new life saving/enhancing care are rife throughout the Canadian system and provincial health systems have been historically slow to introduce new and less invasive surgical techniques. The Ontario government recently was in the spotlight for their continued limitation to allow patient access to PET scanners that are very common in developed nations. You can now access private MRI in BC at a cost of about $4000.00. It’s a start but without plenty of competition it does not compare to the same service in Montana offered for about $500.00. Embarrassingly the state of Michigan across the border from the most populous Canadian province may have more MRI machines then are in all of Canada combined.

According to Statistics Canada, public healthcare spending between 20000-04 grew at an average rate of 8.1% per year compared to 3.5% for provincial revenues, 2.4% for inflation and 4.6% for GDP. Even the most particularly thick lieberal should be able to recognize this is unsustainable at the current rate let alone trying to accommodate the baby boomers who are anticipated to crush the system in the coming decade. The current tab for healthcare in Canada is collectively 96 billion annually. Not taking the baby boomers into account and continuing the cost saving measures to deny select medication and expedient care, the system will still wind up consuming MORE TAX REVENUE THEN WE CURRENTLY COLLECT, adjusted for inflation, (in my estimate) by 2014. Since we are already arguably the most heavily taxed country in the world - paying between 48-62% of income depending on jurisdiction - the only way to maintain the system is to continue taking an ever greater percentage of income, denying services and medication or a combination of the two.

When radio talk show host Peter Warren recently asked Harper if he would seek private care in a foreign country if a family member was suffering and couldn’t access the Canadian system he said he would. The same question was immediately posed to Jack Layton and he stated that his family was so committed that they would be willing to die waiting for service and had pre-agreed to this. (Martin we know already uses the US and private Queerbec systems) This illustrates the crux of the problem; lieberal(NDP) ideology, and presumably that of their supporters, is so fixated on a public health system which they use in part to define their nationality that rationale debate is stifled and any input from Conservatives, or even knowledgeable Libranos, is immediately dismissed as irrelevant without any meaningful erstwhile debate.

The US model most Albertans and almost all Canadians will agree, is not one that we wish to emulate. It is telling that the Canadian system believed by so many in this country to be the best in the world, is routinely lauded as an example of what not to do by many other developed nations who tweek their systems. We should put pride on the backburner and seriously look at the other 29 and learn from their mistakes and successes so that we can truly build the world’s best system.

   

Yeah I agree we need some sort of private health care mixed in with the public......but being young its not a huge concern.....

Take your vitamin c and you'll be healthy and won't need health care....

   

I cant say I agree on that one. I keep myself pretty healthy and I have still gone to the doc a few times.

I would still like to think that public healthcare is viable. I also think that NO public money should ever go to private health care at all. If its private, keep it that way. But at the same time we have to make sure that public health care doesnt turn to shit if the private sector gets a little to hyped up. Seems like a hard balance to me. I dont think clinics should be prospering from the unhealthy though. No one should get rich off of the suffering of others.

   

All doctor's offices are private clinics. Doctor's get paid, doesn't that mean they are receiving public money?

   

Last time I went to a docs office I didnt pay him out of my own pocket. So I would have to assume that its more public than private. I take out my healthcare card and Im in. Although I guess you can pay for it up front....never really thought about it so I dunno aboot that one.

But why are all doctors offices considered private?

   

Face it. It's inevitable.

The Worlds best health care is in France according to the WHO which is a full two-tier system

Now, who cares if a company is able to offer a great service to the public for the same price it would cost to operate a similar pubic facility?

Unions.

Just like private MRI clinics in Toronto. If your Dr. recommends you to one, it's paid for by OHIP. It runs smoothly, efficiently and the facilities are well cared for. No labour disputes.

   

Yes. I agree. As long as a private sector does not take control of the health sector it would probably be a great asset. But a look at the states and the the health sector there takes advantage of people is brutal.

I just cant bring myself to like the idea that one person with more money than me can get BETTER care than I can simply because he does infact have that money to spend on it. Its just a typical world of $$= better. Which is something I think should at all costs be kept out of things like health and well being. lol, then again I watched star trek and loved the no monitary idea. communism at its best right?

   

What does NDP plan on doing for the military, or should I say to?

   

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