‘No eyes, no teeth, no low-level crazies’
I’ll try to make this quick so we can get to the video.
When I was 11, my family moved from suburban Maryland to Toronto.
On our journey to citizenship, we set out to determine what it meant to be a Canadian.
I found out my French wasn’t as good as I thought when my grades weren't half as good as they'd been in the states. Canada meant rigorous education.
Even though Toronto is a much bigger city than I’d ever lived in, my parents handed over those paper student TTC tickets and sent me to explore. Canada meant safety.
My sister joined the local hockey league. I joined the Reach for the Top team. We were eager to find and celebrate what—to our untrained eyes—represented the quintessential Canadian experience. Canada meant participating in community.
A comedy nerd from a young age, I plunked down after school in front of reruns of 'The Royal Canadian Air Farce' and 'This Hour Has 22 Minutes.' Old episodes gave me a garbled civics lesson and the flavour of political flubs and failures on this side of the border. It caught up on who the prime minister was, what actions of his could be easily ridiculed, and I got a crash course on the main drivers of our country, both moral and economic.
Comedy—as with all art—is an important reflection of cultural values. One thing asserted over and over on these TV shows was the value (and Canadianess) of having a universal healthcare system. My parents, too, gushed over how wonderful and surreal it felt to leave an ER or a family doctor visit without having to pay. It made me proud to be here, thinking that compared to my mother country, Canada had found a way to be smarter—and kinder to its people.
That pride has transformed into a thick miasma of stress in the past decade, as the healthcare system’s latest period of intense strain has pushed things to a cracking point. As an adult, I am less naive, but I do retain admiration for real political will that pushes governments to give policies teeth. To try, to fail, to reevaluate with open eyes, to try again.
In my content-consuming opinion, Canadian political comedy lost its footing for a while—jumping the shark right around the time the character Princess Marg Delahunty showed up in former Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s driveway and he clearly didn’t know who she was so he . . . ran away.
But the alarming rhetoric from the U.S. administration about Canada has galvanized nationalism once more and 22 Minutes is sort of . . . back on form, maybe? Videos about switching to Canadian products at the grocery store are going genuinely viral and the comedy team appears to be taking stock, once again, of what it means to be Canadian.
So, I’m not surprised to see them throwing the mic to the ghost of Tommy Douglas—in a bid to point out how absurd it can seem that universal healthcare in Canada doesn’t include drugs, eyes, teeth and mental healthcare. Those in healthcare professionally know the policies are a patchwork and this is a massive oversimplification, but you get the point.
One of the worst things about political turmoil—the failure to cooperate up to and including acts of war—is that it’s a distraction. Politicians all over the country are finding their own ways of saying we refuse to be pushed around as a nation—and it needs to be said.
But the problem is, we don’t have time for this.
Canadians need access to more and better types of care. The people who provide them with it need to be robustly compensated, given proper resources to provide that care, and be cared for in return. Innovation. Efficiency. Equitability. These words mean nothing if we can't focus.
In this democracy, we don’t merely elect officials. We must remember that we also pay them, with our tax dollars, to use the significant legislative powers at their disposal to solve real problems.
While uncertainty lies ahead, let’s keep our core values on the front burner. And to quote 'Letterkenny,' a new breed of Canadian comedy program: “Get after it!”