"Oh, Canada" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Oh, Canada

The week after the November elections, the number of Americans inquiring about becoming Canadians went through the roof. For a lotta folks, it had to have been intriguing to discover that our neighbor to the north isn’t just colder; they’re kinda smart. First, they’ve managed not to let their population get out of hand. They’ve got some 33-million people up there, and we’ve got 35 million in California alone, 280 million nationwide. They also live healthier. Not only do they get American-made drugs for less than we have to pay for ‘em, but they pay about half of what we do per capita each year for all their health care yet in addition to not getting sick as much or as badly as we do, they live a coupla years longer.

Well, That’s enticing and I hear Vancouver is very comfortable, but for most of Canada winter is a bear; for crying out loud, two of their provinces are so out there their last name is territory. And they have those black flies in the summer.

I don’t suppose many of mah fellow ‘Mericans actually went through with an address change, but if they read the news last week, the politically-directed among them must have been nudged closer to the moving van. That’s because Canada announced that they weren’t going to participate in building a missile-defense shield.

They aren’t going to squander billions of dollars on hardware, nor are they going to let the lunatics in Washington put our missiles on their soil. Good for them. We shouldn’t be messing with this stuff either since it was a bad idea from the get-go and we can’t make it work anyway; another test failed last week. The missile didn’t even fire, and all it had to do was hit a target with a homing signal on it.

Another thing Canada did -- and mind you, this is just a coupla weeks after The Bush Boy went to visit their prime minister -- was they said they would provide sanctuary for any Americans who wanted to avoid being sent to Iraq to be cannon fodder. A hundred thousand American men fled over the border rather than go to Vietnam, not too long ago.

I’m not moving to Canada because this piece of the United States is the garden spot of the world. Also, I’m an American and if I don’t stay and work to get my country back on track, I wouldn’t be able to hold my head high anywhere in the world.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.