Recently, I was reading something interesting from National Review. It looked at some numbers out of Canada that were downright fascinating.
You see, the Great White North has two things many here have long favored – single-payer healthcare and assisted suicide. More people want the former than the latter, thankfully, but enough want both for me to have concerns.
These same people tend to think we should be like Canada on other things, too, such as gun policy. They believe guns kill people.
However, a piece by National Review points out something interesting:
What a debacle. More than 15,000 people died in Canada in one year because they couldn’t access care in the country’s collapsing socialized health-care system. From the Toronto Sun story:
Close to 15,500 people died waiting for health care in Canada between April 1, 2023 until March 31, 2024, according to data compiled by SecondStreet.org via Freedom to Information Act requests across the country.
However, SecondStreet.org says the exact number of 15,474 is incomplete as Quebec, Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador don’t track the problem and Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia only provided data on patients who died while waiting for surgeries – not diagnostic scans.
SecondStreet.org says if it extrapolates the unknown data, then an estimated 28,077 patients died last year on health care waiting lists covering everything from cancer treatment and heart operations to cataract surgery and MRI scans.
Holy cow!
But it gets worse. About the same number of people were euthanized in Canada in 2023. Some asked to be lethally jabbed because they couldn’t access health care in a timely fashion.
So around 30,000 people die waiting for healthcare that never comes or are euthanized by the Canadian government.
In fairness, some of those who die waiting likely would have died no matter what, just as some of those euthanized were likely going to pass away regardless.
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However, I'm willing to bet it wasn't all that many, though we'll never know.
Meanwhile, how many Americans were killed with a gun in 2023, which mostly lines up with this time period? 13,529.
The United States has more than eight times the population of Canada, and even massive death and destruction brought about by our gun policy pales in comparison to the number of people the Canadian government managed to kill during that period.
Even if you just counted the euthanizations, the death toll is higher not just on a per capita basis but in raw total numbers as well.
Yet, that number is doubled when you count the deaths that were the result of inaction on the part of the Canadian healthcare system.
"But you didn't count suicides!" someone will argue, but I'm going to reject that right out of the gate. If you're supportive of Canada's MAID system, you don't get to lash out about people taking their own lives here in the US, regardless of what method they use. That's why I'm only counting homicides.
This is truly disturbing, to say the least.
What we do know for certain, though, is that guns don't kill people. Canada kills people.
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