TRUE NORTH COLUMN: Hungry for socialism? Well, socialism would leave you hungry.

While many low-income Canadians do sadly have trouble putting food on the table, and the price of food is climbing thanks to inflationary government policy, imagine how much worse things could be if Canadians listened to the promises of activists and academics who want our country to become socialist.

SecondStreet.org regularly speaks to Canadians who have immigrated from countries like the former Soviet Union, Venezuela, China, and more, for our Survivors of Socialism series of videos. 

This is a diverse group of people – they look very different from each other, they speak different languages, some are older, some are younger, but they all seem to have some things in common. 

Let’s go through a few quotes.

“You wake up thinking ‘what am I going to eat?’ and you go to bed thinking ‘what am I going to eat?’” – Aime Despaigne, Canadian from Cuba.

“We were always struggling. My parents always tried to make ends meet. So, if they could feed us a mouthful, they would be happy. I felt always hungry.” – Yali Trost, Canadian from China.

“I remember we had to line up sometimes two, three hours before they opened the (grocery) store. There could be a lineup for like a mile.” – Viorica Robinson, Canadian from Romania.

“If you were not ideologically orthodox, then your children and your family might suffer because they would not get enough food.” – Marco Navarro-Genie, Canadian from Nicaragua.

Three different continents, three different languages, thousands of kilometers in distance, and these Canadians all had that experience in common. Growing up, they were always hungry. So what’s the common thread? Socialism. 

Interestingly enough, this isn’t a problem throughout the world. Gather a group of new Canadians from Ireland, Australia, Japan and Chile, and the odds are pretty good they would have had a childhood with a full stomach. 

In socialist countries, the government gets the final say on food production. They run the farms and decide who gets how much food. 

Sure, people can scrape by on government breadlines and go to the black market when needed, but the reality is that food is always on your mind when you live in a socialist country.

Well, unless you’re in government. Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslavian communist defector who had a working relationship with Josef Stalin, shared some of the Russian dictators’ eating habits in his book Conversations with Stalin.

“The variety of food and drink was enormous—with meats and hard liquor predominating,” Djilas wrote. “Everyone ate what he pleased and as much as he wanted; only there was rather too much of urging and daring us to drink and there were too many toasts.”

Less than a decade before this dinner Djilas had with Stalin, around 5 million Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin’s watch in the Holodomor.

Or look at China. In recent decades, the communist country has made several economic reforms, which have improved the lives of its citizens. (Though they’re still a brutal authoritarian regime.) But go back a few decades to dictator Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. Any photo of Mao would show you that he wasn’t exactly a skinny man. He certainly ate his fill, but under his watch, somewhere between 30 and 45 million Chinese starved to death.

Famine for thee, but not for me. That’s the socialist way.

So next time you run across a college student who’s just read Marx and is hungry for socialism, show them this article and let them hear for themselves what it’s really like to live in a socialist country.

Because if they get their way and turn Canada into a socialist regime, they’ll be hungry in a much more literal way. 

Dom Lucyk is the Communications Director with SecondStreet.org, a Canadian think tank. 

This column was originally published in True North on September 28, 2024.

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Prevention – reduce demand in the first place

If Canadians lived healthier lives, we could reduce demand for emergency services, orthopaedic surgeries, primary care and more. 

For instance, if you visit the Canadian Cancer Society’s website, you’ll read that “about four in ten” cancer cases are preventable. The Heart and Stroke Foundation notes that “almost 80 percent of premature heart disease and stroke can be prevented through healthy behaviours.” A similar number of Diabetes cases are also preventable. 

Many joint replacements and visits to ERs and walk-in clinics could also be avoided through healthy living. 

To be sure, not all health problems can be avoided through healthy living – everyday the system treats Canadians with genetic conditions, helps those injured in unavoidable accidents and more.  

But there is an opportunity to reduce pressure on the health care system through Canadians shifting to healthier lifestyles – better diets, more exercise, etc. 

To learn more, watch our Health Reform Now documentary (scroll up) or see this column. 

Partner with non-profits and for-profit clinics

European countries will partner with anyone who can help patients. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s a non-profit, a government entity or a private clinic. What matters is that patients receive quality treatment, in a timely manner and for a competitive price.  

In Canada, governments often delivery services using government-run hospitals instead of seeing if non-profit or private clinics could deliver the services more effectively. 

When governments have partnered with non-profit and private clinics, the results have often been quite good – Saskatchewan, Ontario and British Columbia are just a few examples of where partnerships have worked well. 

Canada should pursue more of these partnerships to reduce wait times and increase the volume of services provided to patients.  

To learn more, watch our Health Reform Now documentary (scroll up) or see the links above. 

Make cross border care more accessible

In Canada, citizens pay high taxes each year and we’re promised universal health care services in return. The problem is, wait times are often extremely long in our health system – sometimes patients have to wait years to see a specialist or receive surgery. 

If patients don’t want to wait long periods, they often have to reach into their own pocket and pay for treatment outside the province or country. 

Throughout the European Union, we also find universal health care systems. But a key difference is that EU patients have the right to go to other EU countries, pay for surgery and then be reimbursed by their home government. Reimbursements cover up to what the patient’s home government would have spent to provide the treatment locally. 

If Canada copied this approach, a patient waiting a year to get their hip operation could instead receive treatment next week in one of thousands of surgical clinics throughout the developed world. 

Governments benefit too as the patient is now back on their feet and avoiding complications that sometimes come with long wait times – meaning the government doesn’t have to treat those complications on top of the initial health problem. 

To learn more, watch our Health Reform Now documentary (scroll up) or this shorter video. 

Legalize access to non-government providers

Canada is the only country in the world that puts up barriers, or outright bans patients from paying for health services locally. 

For instance, a patient in Toronto cannot pay for a hip operation at a private clinic in Toronto. Their only option is to wait for the government to eventually provide treatment or leave the province and pay elsewhere. 

Countries with better-performing universal health care systems do not have such bans. They allow patients a choice – use the public system or pay privately for treatment. Sweden, France, Australia and more – they all allow choice. 

Why? One reason is that allowing choice means some patients will decide to pay privately. This takes pressure off the public system. For instance, in Sweden, 87% of patients use the public system, but 13% purchase private health insurance. 

Ultimately, more choice improves access for patients. 

To learn more, watch our Health Reform Now documentary (scroll up) or watch this short clip on this topic. 

Shift to funding services for patients, not bureaucracies

In Canada, most hospitals receive a cheque from the government each year and are then asked to do their best to help patients. This approach is known as “block funding”. 

Under this model, a patient walking in the door represents a drain on the hospital’s budget. Over the course of a year, hospital administrators have to make sure the budget stretches out so services are rationed. This is why you might have to wait until next year or the year after for a hip operation, knee operation, etc. 

In better-performing universal health systems, they take the opposite approach – hospitals receive money from the government each time they help a patient. If a hospital completes a knee operation, it might receive, say, $10,000. If it completes a knee operation on another patient, it receives another $10,000. 

This model incentivizes hospitals to help more patients – to help more patients with knee operations, cataract surgery, etc. This approach also incentivizes hospitals to spend money on expenses that help patients (e.g. more doctors, nurses, equipment, etc.) rather than using the money on expenses that don’t help patients (e.g. more admin staff). 

To learn more about this policy option, please watch our Health Reform Now documentary (scroll up) or see this post by MEI.