Party Machines

I heard an interesting anecdote today.  A former bar employee told me a story about two women and a VLT.  It seems these women were sitting in a bar, where they could regularly be found, watching a man play a VLT and eyeballing the large “bonus” that was available on the game.  The man finished playing, without “winning” the “bonus”, and left the bar.  One of the women immediately moved in to start dropping money in the machine.  The other woman, asserting that she was there first and so the VLT was hers to play, grabbed the seated woman by the hair and pulled her off the stool.  A fight ensued.   “Fisticuffs!” the gentleman telling me the story exclaimed.  “Actual fisticuffs!  It was crazy…these women were both there to lose all their money and they were actually fighting over who would get to lose it first!”

Anecdotal evidence is no sound basis for serious policy initiatives, of course, but you have to talk to a lot of people to find someone who doesn’t have a comparable story related to the insanity of government sponsored VLTs in bars all across this province.  From this man you hear a story about the welfare cheque that gets returned every month to the provincial coffers by way of the VLT bill insert slot.  From that woman you hear about the divorce in the family because the husband or the wife had a gambling addiction that was out of control.

The biggest VLT addict in the province is, of course, the province itself.

I wonder if Nova Scotia’s politicians fall asleep at night and dream about rows of 7s and swinging bells and and the 140 million dollars or so per year that VLTs contribute to the general coffers.  Unfortunately, as so often is the case with mainstream party power, the government forgets that all equations have two sides.  This equation has 140 million dollars on one side, and all the related social costs of gambling addiction on the other.

Look at this story from the May 31 edition of the Chronicle-Herald, about Green Party leader Ryan Watson’s position against VLTs and the responses from the opposition parties, which range from the cryptic to the absurd.

NDP leader Darrell Dexter cited the need to maintain government control over VLTs as necessary because otherwise “you may well be chasing those people into unregulated Internet gaming where there is no form of control.”

Liberal leader Stephen McNeil cited a government conflict in removing VLTs from bars because they also exist in First Nation communities where the government lacks jurisdiction.  “You can’t allow them in one part of Nova Scotia and then not in another part,” he said.

And Finance Minister, Jamie Muir, said:  “They are going to be here anyway…The most appropriate role for government is to regulate and make it safe and secure and responsible as possible.”

These are all probably politically sound things to say, but do not stand up to even the most cursory analysis.  Both Dexter’s and Muir’s responses could, for example, be equally well applied to crack or heroin.  By not providing a safe outlet for crack users to obtain their fix, the government is driving them into unregulated crackhouses “where there is no form of control.”  Similarly, crack is going to be here anyway (have you heard any claims of outright victory in the drug war lately?), so would Mr. Muir assert that “the most appropriate role for government is to regulate and make it safe and secure and responsible as possible.”  I rather think not.

As to Mr. McNeil’s claim that we can’t enact legislation that applies one set of rules to First Nation parts of Nova Scotia and another set of rules for the rest – perhaps he can explain the ready availability of, for example, cheaper cigarettes from First Nation outlets.  The whole reason we have designated parts of our country as First Nation Territorries is exactly because different legislation applies to them.  Sure, as Mr. McNeil asserts, the province could (and should, probably) engage in three-party negotiations between Ottawa, Province House and First Nations to address the role of VLTs on Native land, but this should in no way deter the provincial government from taking action regarding the other VLTs in the province.

The Green Party’s dedication to developing a sustainable, self-sufficient and socially responsible Nova Scotia has been setting a political trend in prompting  the other parties to start addressing these themes.  The Green Party is firmly opposed to having the government in the VLT business and encourages the big 3 parties to similarly adopt this socially responsible position.  Sadly, I don’t think we can expect any major announcements to that effect.

Back to school

I have to be honest here.  I would like to see change in how the education system works, but I’m not entirely sure what I want the finished product to look like.  I’m not even sure there is a perfect finished product, unless you could design a system so fluid it could mold and adapt to the specific learning mechanisms of every individual child.  Let’s face it, we all learn best by different means – check out this video by a 16 year old with Asperger’s Syndrome for a wonderfully descriptive explanation of this – and an education system that could adapt to the child instead of forcing the child to adapt to it would certainly have advantages beyond measure.  And not only do we all learn best differently, we all learn different things differently, too.  This has a lot to do with our natural talents, and even more to do with our natural interests.  Our best education system would take best advantage of our natural talents and interests.

Our public schools have adapted somewhat in recent years to an approach based on individual learning plans, but  have yet to progress toward individualized curriculum.    Certainly the best possible education system we can design should be a primary social goal.  There is much to be done, though, before such an adaptive public school system can be accomplished.  And that begins with a community dialogue.   Toward such an end, the Green Party platform calls for “broad consultation with parents, teachers, school administrators, paraprofessionals, academics, psychologists, and students.” The italics are there, right in the platform,  because somehow it seems we rarely ask the students, even though they have the deepest and most direct interest in education.  New Brunswick is looking at a novel approach by giving students direct representation on district education councils.  That might be a good place for Nova Scotia to begin.  It seems to me that we can never have the best possible school system until:

a) we ask the students directly: “How do you learn best?” and ” What do you learn best?”,  and

b) we adapt to their answers.

Tomorrow I will be at Dartmouth High School with Green Party leader Ryan Watson.  I want to talk to students about electoral participation.  And I want them to talk to me about what they want from an education.  I’ll let you all know how it goes.

If we’re not using our democracy, we might as well put it away

“Parties scramble to find candidates to run in election” says the Chronicle-Herald headline.  It seems all the big parties were doing some last-minute filing of candidates to beat the 2 pm deadline yesterday.  Electoral participation is down on both ends.  People are less willing to vote and less willing to run, too.  We think that if we can’t win, we shouldn’t run.  That if the candidate we really want can’t win, we shouldn’t vote.  It’s sad, really – because elections should be about the dialogue as much as they should be about who wins.  Elections provide the golden opportunity for an engaged citizenry to speak in loud and clear voices, because they are the time when the entrenched power structure is actually listening.  Elections provide a golden opportunity for an engaged citizenry to have a broad and open conversation about the direction we want our society to go.  I’m telling you, I love democracy.  I get goosebumps.

I just wish we used it better.

Lets face it, no matter which of the big parties win this thing, the actual governance of Nova Scotia isn’t likely to change that much.  The NDP use to look ideologically distinct, but Darrell Dexter got a little whiff of power and flew to the right as fast as his Tory blue signs would carry him.   Premier MacDonald’s proposed stifling of youth rights notwithstanding, it is difficult to distinguish between the philosophical perspectives of the big three parties.  They are all behaving, well, like Liberals.

In the last provincial election, we had 59.89% voter turnout.   That means that 271,984 people who were eligible to vote decided to have no say in the matter of who would govern them.  271,984 people!   They have their different reasons for not voting, but some form of apathy or frustration is always hovering around the top of the list. 

Who cares? They’re all the same, right?  There is almost no ideological or philosophical distinction between the parties.  The only means of telling them apart is by the colours on their ties and on their signs, and even this line has become blurred.

Who cares? They’re all the same, right?  This is often said derisively with allusion to the notion that politicians are somehow universally criminal.  This is absurd, of course.  Some politicians have been criminals, it is true, and they do get the most media coverage.  But most politicians who actually get the chance to govern, I would guess, are hard-working and honest people in a tremendously difficult job.   Deciding how to allocate precious public resources (and how to acquire them in the first place) is a pretty tricky business and one that will always result in disappointing someone.  The politician’s job is to get elected representative.  The representative’s job – if he or she is doing it well – is to see that the resources are all allocated so that they are doing common good and not just special interest good.  The citizen’s job is to ensure the representative is doing his job well.

Who cares?  The person I want in won’t win, so I’m just wasting my vote. The only way to “waste your vote” is to not use it.  Our system isn’t perfect – not by a long shot.  There is desperate need for democratic reform so that the final composition of the legislature more accurately reflects the popular vote.

Here’s how many people voted Conservative in the last election, giving Rodney the keys to the premier’s office: 160,119.  That’s 111,865 fewer people than didn’t vote at all.  In fact, even if you throw in the 94,872 votes the Liberals got with the Tory lot, you would still have a larger majority of non-voters.  That seriously blows my mind.

Here are the election results expressed as percentages of eligible voters instead of actual voters:

PC – 23.615%

NDP – 20.666%

Liberal – 13.992%

Green –  1.387%

Independent – 0.022%

Non-voter – 40.113%

Twenty-three percent made Rodney the premier!  23!  Clearly, we must have problems with our democracy, since we just leave it lying around, hardly ever using it.

Mainstream parties never have a vested interest in intensive democratic reforms, such as the introduction of proportional representation.  Mainstream parties seem to actually benefit by the low voter turnout and the first-past-the-post system.  Mainstream parties pander to the known voting demographics – watch them at their business luncheons – and ignore the disenfranchised, further disenfranchising them.  They don’t vote so they don’t matter.   Remember, although a good elected representative is doing his job by listening to constituents between elections, too, a good politician only has to listen during elections.  If you don’t vote, they have no incentive to listen.

Here’s a nice dream: 100% voter turnout.  I know it’s a pipe dream – even in places like Australia, where they take electoral participation seriously enough that they have mandated voting by law, they don’t quite hit the golden 100 mark – but it’s still a nice dream.

And, the last number I will throw out, here are the chances of the collectively disenfranchised changing the electoral system if they don’t actually get out and use their right to speak and their right to vote: 0%.

Power to the people

Much is made in the media and by opposing political parties of the “costing” of the various platforms.  Perhaps rightly so.  Voters certainly have the right to know how their elected officials are going to spend their money.  Knowing the cost of a what a party says it will do is important, but knowing the costs associated with failure to act is equally important, if far less often far less looked at.  We look at cost, but rarely at cost-benefit. This is partly because it is so much harder to see.

For instance, it is easy to look at the NDP promise to cut the 8% tax on electricity, which appears to be the talking point of its energy platform, and calculate how much it will cost in terms of reduced tax income.  By accounts I have seen, it’s twenty some-odd million.  Chump change, really, where the taxpayer is the chump.

What this policy fails to address, in terms of the government and public relationship with the province’s electricity producer, is the cost (and sanity) of leaving an essential resource in the monopolistic hands of a for-profit corporation.  According to May 6 edition of The Chronicle-Herald “Emera Inc. reported net earnings Tuesday of $62.8 million (56 cents per share) for the first four months of fiscal 2009, compared to $69.4 million (59 cents a share) for the same period in 2008…”, while wholly-owned subsidiary “Nova Scotia Power’s earnings were $52.5 million in the first quarter of 2009, down from the $57.9 million earned during the same period in 2008.” Poor kids. There were probably some disappointed shareholders.

Let’s look at that again.  In the first three months of 2009, Nova Scotia Power made $52,500,000 in profit.  Multiply by four, since there are twelve months in a year, and we get a rough net income of 210 million dollars, give or take a few million.  Guess where they get it?  That’s right, from you, from me, from the very same people who the NDP are now promising to save just over 10% of that amount by cutting the HST on electricity.  Indeed, this may lead to greater profits for NSP if people are encouraged by the ‘lower’ rates to use more electricity.  And all this for a company that, until 1992, was actually owned by Nova Scotians themselves.  Nova Scotia Power controls the energy flow in Nova Scotia and is beholden, not to the the taxpayers of Nova Scotia, but to its parent company, Emera Inc., which itself must count its own shareholders interest as primary. That, surely, is madness.

Which leads me here, to one of the greatest mistakes in the modern history of Nova Scotian government policy: the privatization of Nova Scotia Power.  It is time to undo that mess, and no party platform speaks to the costs of not doing this.  Imagine that instead of saving us twenty some-odd million in HST the government ought never to have been collecting in the first place (don’t get me started on the practice of plastering sales taxes on universal necessities), we could be saving Nova Scotians $210,00,000 per year by removing profit as the incentive for power generation and distribution. Or we could be taking some portion of that enormous pile of cash to reinvest into alternative and environmenatally sensitive means of power production. Or into a massive education campaign about conservation. Or into reinvestment into the communities whose landscapes and livlihoods are scarred by virtue of the power generation happening in their own backyards. I’m sure we could all think of a lot of things to do with a collectively saved $210,00,000 per year.

But fiscal considerations aside, electricity is simply too critical a need with too specialized a source to leave it in the hands of for-profit enterprise. It’s time Nova Scotia brought the power back to the people.

Fishers, food, and farmer’s markets

Here’s a bit of insanity: Nova Scotia imports 90% of its food supply.  Imagine that – something so fundamental as food, and we seem to have no problem having no plan to increase and guarantee local production.  This makes our food supply subject to all sorts of nonsense and international goings-on over which Nova Scotians – citizens and government alike – have absolutely no control.  Like the cost of the fuel necessary to ship all that food.

The cost of gas jumped to over a dollar per litre again this week.  That means the cost of importing the vast majority of our food just went up as well.  This is surely bad news for Nova Scotians.  I know it’s bad news for my family.

Seriously, the next time you visit a Sobeys or a Superstore, try to count the “Product of Nova Scotia” stickers in the produce section.  You won’t have to count very high.

The government of Nova Scotia ought to be doing all it can to encourage local food production, and local markets too, as a direct and sustainable means of getting the food to the public.  Through our farms and our fisheries, we can surely drastically increase from 10% the amount of home-grown food we consume.  By a happy coincidence, these very things are elements of the Green Party platform.

But it not just farmers and fishers who need positive direction and support from the government.  Citizens all over the province should be encouraged to grow some of their own food.  Even in the urban areas, where green space might be at a premium, there is the option of rooftop gardens, of small container based gardens on decks, of unused corners of backyards.  There are a myriad of means toward developing greater food security, and direct citizen action at the personal level is as critical to that development as is a sustainable and overarching government policy.

It’s not easy being Green

I lost a potential vote yesterday, and I admit I was sad to see it go. With such modest goals as I have, every single vote counts. The potential vote was lost to what the writer referred to as defeatism. You can read the whole comment on yesterday’s blog.

I understand the criticism. My admission that I will not win the riding of Dartmouth South-Portland Valley in the election on June 9 may well be a fundamental error. Politically speaking, it is probably an unwise thing to admit to the people whose votes you seek. Yet, given that I am running in a riding where only 308 votes were garnered for the Green Party in the last provincial election, and where the (now reoffering) incumbent won over 48% of the vote, beating her nearest opponent by over 1400 votes, and where the riding specific operating budget is $0.00 (although I do have some party produced generic signs and pamphlets, meaning we couldn’t afford to put my name on them), I rather thought the assertion that I could come out of political obscurity and actually win the election would appear kind of delusional. And given the choice between appearing delusional and appearing politically unwise, I decided to err on the side of caution.

Here’s the thing I never understood about politics. I never understood why we so often end up electing a guy – or a party – just because he had the good sense and good fortune to hire the slickest marketing firm. Politics is about manipulating people en masse. Policy is about protecting the same people. It is absurd to me that because one is good at the former, we should entrust them with the latter. If anything, the desire to mass-manipulate the voting public should preclude anybody of being worthy of the public trust. Me, I’m bad at politics.

I count lying as manipulation, by the way, and this is what I would be doing if I stood in someone’s door and said to her face I could win. And it would be that most awkward kind of lie, because both of us would know it was a lie and neither of us would want to say it. Me, for the shame of having to admit such a thing, and her, because it would cut precious nanoseconds off in her attempts to close her door in my face. No, I can’t say such things.

But I can talk about the democratic process, about a first past the post system where the only thing that matters is to come in first and where anyone who admits he cannot do that is therefore not even worth having his ideas heard. I mentioned the reoffering incumbent in my riding, Marilyn More of the NDP. She won the last election with 48.05% of the vote. That was a pretty big majority by the standards of some ridings in the province. That’s some kind of math where 48.05% makes a pretty big majority. It means, of course, that 51.95% of all the people who took the time to vote in this riding voted against the person who won. This is standard issue stuff in our representative democracy.

I’d like to see that change. There’s a lot of things I’d like to see change, but I’m clear-eyed and realistic enough to know that change must sometimes be incremental. Electoral change is one of them. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be the MLA for my riding. I would desperately love to sit in Province House and argue for long term sustainability, for democratic reform so that over 50% percent of the actual voters aren’t disenfranchised after the fact, for environmentally friendly means of electricity production, for the fact that teachers and other child development professionals are the greatest human resources we have at our disposal and ought to be rewarded as such. Absolutely, I’d love to be your MLA, but not so much that I’ll look you in the eye and tell you it’s likely when I know it isn’t.

I am a realistic idealist, if there can be such a thing. I believe great things can happen in our society, but they cannot happen all at once. If my modest pursuit of 500 votes, and if the modest pursuits of the full slate of Green Party candidates across this province (for whom my blog should in no way be contstrued to collectively speak), can help put sustainability into the political discourse, then we will have scored a political victory whose meaning will be far better understood in elections to come.

1 of 500

We’ve been out campaigning lately, Charlene and I.  We’ve been writing about politics and policy.  We’ve been tweeting and blogging and facebooking.  We’ve been knocking on people’s doors, talking to them and – in a drastic departure from the way things usually work – we’ve been listening to them too.  Here are some things we heard at various doors describing the current crop of politicians at Province House:

Bastards, crooks, criminals, in it for themselves, don’t care about Nova Scotia, screwing us.

Jeesh.  Talk about electoral dysfunction.  No wonder we have such low voter turnout – political cynicism is keeping us away from the voting booths in droves.  And so people were somewhat surprised to hear from me, surprised to meet someone out campaigning but readily acknowledging that there is no way he can win.   And let’s face it – I won’t win.  In fact, I don’t think I’m giving away any state secrets when I say that nobody from the Green Party will be sitting in Province House come June 10.

No, I can’t win – but I can contribute to the political discourse.  I can go knock on doors and talk about the importance of electoral reform and sustainability and the critical need for, but the sad lack of, long term vision from a group of politicians who can only see things through the time span of an election cycle.   When I stand on somebody’s doorstep and talk to them about Nova Scotia, I am not making any promises.  I am not offering to pave their streets with gold and fill their emergency rooms with new beds and keep young hooligans at home at night where they belong.   The only thing I have to offer is a voice, and a small voice at that.   So I ask some people to add their voice to mine, that it might ring a little louder.  So that, even if I cannot sit in the legislative assembly, the folks who do sit in there can hear us anyway.

I’m only looking for 500 votes, and that isn’t a whole lot.  But it’s enough siphoned away from the big three parties (remember when there were just a big two parties, and the NDP championed things like electoral reform and long term visions – those were the days, huh?) that somebody will have to listen.  The more people we can get to vote green, the more the mainstream parties have to notice that Nova Scotians are fed up with standard issue politics.  The more people we can get to vote green, the more the mainstream parties will have to notice that cheap ploys to score short term political advantage are no substitute for clear, long-range planning about the sustainability of our province.

I met a woman yesterday who was out in her garden and jokingly threatened to turn her hose on me if I talked about the election.  She was one of the people who used the word ‘bastards’ in her assessment of the people who currently populate our political landscape.  By the time we finished talking, she offered to put up a Green Party sign for me.  Turns out she doesn’t hate politics the way she thought, she hates politics the way it’s so long been done and she was refreshed to hear it might actually be done a different way.  She agreed to be one of the 500 people I am looking for.

Then I had a friend over last night who told me that if I said the truth to people, they wouldn’t vote for me.  He said that people will only vote for the politician who tells them what they want to hear – and that they will vote for that politician even though they know he’s lying.  I reject that premise.

And as I wander around my riding of Dartmouth South-Portland Valley, I’m looking for 500 other people who reject that premise as well.  Will you be one of them?

Pin the tail on the scapegoat

There’s one thing Premier MacDonald recognizes about Canadian democracy: senior citizens vote in huge numbers and kids don’t vote at all. How else to explain the new policy proposal that dropped out of his mouth today, that children fifteen years old and younger ought to be bound by a curfew keeping them home between the hours of 1 and 6 a.m? Here’s something he said in defence of the proposition:

“We believe that this is a tool that’s not only needed but necessary. When you see the crimes that we have seen in the last few weeks, I’m sure there’s not a senior citizen or a community member that wouldn’t agree.”

I’m sure. But I still have a question, in two parts if you’ll permit me Mr. Premier. Which of the spate of violent crimes that we have seen in the last two weeks were:

a) committed by youth fifteen years old or younger, and

b) committed between the hours of 1 a.m. and 6 a.m.?

I will give you the opportunity to answer these directly as I will submit them for consideration at the June 2 debate.

It is the most blatant example of pure political oportunism and pandering that I have seen this election. Seniors are afraid of the recent surge in violent crime. Fair enough, I don’t blame them. One of the recent murders happened just three doors from my house, where I live with my wife and children. It’s unsettling – I get that. But the man who was arrested for the crime was a man in his fifties, and the crime happened in the early evening. Early enough that when I got home from the early show of Star Trek, my neighborhood was crawling with police. How would the proposed curfew law have prevented that crime? This brings me back to my previous question, slightly rephrased.

Mr. MacDonald, exactly which of the recent crimes would have been prevented by this curfew of yours? Exactly which of the victims would not have become victims if, during the years you were premier (note the use of the past tense), you had been able to enact such a draconian law curtailing the freedoms of Nova Scotian youth and, by extension, their parents?

We are supposed to live in a free society. We already disenfranchise vast numbers of our youth by denying them political say, and now MacDonald wants to punish the whole lot of them for the sake of scoring some political points with the province’s seniors. That’s called scapegoating and is absolutely the lowest form of campaigning. MacDonald has long had no respect from me as a politcal leader, but now has precious little going for him as a human being.

I hope the seniors of this province, and all those who would fall prey to this anti-youth fearmongering will see this Tory trick for what it is – a cynical ploy with a rotten contempt for the principles of freedom and equality on which our society is supposedly based.

Attack of the Clones: The Nova Scotia Leaders Debate

Did anybody catch any of our would-be premiers last night in their clone-off?  I know we all missed some of it, because nobody can hear perfectly over the sound of semi-stifled yawns. There they were, three men in standard issue monochrome collars and standard issue monochrome jackets issuing standard issue monochrome political talking points. Yawn.

The Chronicle Herald summed it up best with the headline: If boring debate had a winner, it was McNeil.

But it went beyond boring. From the first question, the candidates were almost indistinguishable from one another. Chronicle Herald reporter Amy Smith asked New Democratic Party leader Darrell Dexter and Liberal leader Stephen McNeil a very sensible question. Namely, if they each planned to honour the spending commitments of the sitting Tory government, as they have claimed, how will they pay for all those promises without running a deficit themselves?

Ms. Smith’s question had referred to the fact that the Tory government had tried to hide the deficit, and this seemed to be the only word McNeil picked up on. McNeil answered that the province in in deficit, deep deficit, and how do we find our way out of deficit, and let’s not be fooled we’re in deficit. He did not, in other words, come anywhere close to answering the question.

Darrell Dexter, in sharp contrast to his opponent, chose to focus on talking about the Tory deficit. He failed to mention his promise to uphold Tory spending or why he he defeated a budget he intended to honour, triggering an election that would itself add significantly to provincial spending and thus to the deficit he was so keen to talk about.  He promised a balanced budget but did not address how he would accomplish such a thing.  He did not, in other words, come anywhere close to answering the question.

Meanwhile, erstwhile premier Rodney MacDonald offered a pat answer heralding an eight year long tradition of Tory balanced budgets and how this budget is balanced and how even the big banks said so, because everyone believes what the big banks say like how they’re increasing our service charges and reducing in person service and charging 19% on our credit cards to serve us better. And, he added, isn’t Darrell Dexter scary?

The “debate” went on like this for some time. A reporter would ask a question, a monochrome jacket would dodge the question while taking jabs at another monochrome jacket for being just the wrong shade of grey. I was reminded of one of an old Simpsons episode, where, bent on dominating the planet, aliens Kodos and Kang take over the bodies of the US Presidential candidates. One of them declares, “It doesn’t matter which one of us you vote for, your planet is dooooomed!”

If there was any distinction between the candidates, it was in the degree of their disingenuousness. Each of them accusing the other of playing politics, concealing costs, making false promises, being in the hands of big oil, being in the hands of big unions, etcetera etcetera. Along the way, each of them promising a way forward, a path to the future, strong leadership, strong stewardship, etcetera etcetera.  Yawn. Sorry, I couldn’t hear that last bit. It was as though the three of them had a pre-debate meeting with a shared thesaurus. “OK, if you get to use ‘leadership’, then ‘stewardship’ is mine.”

Good news, Nova Scotia. It doesn’t matter which of these men become our monochrome premier on June 9. They will all gilt the emergency rooms with gold at virtually no cost to us, and always – like Kodos and Kang before them – twirling, twirling, twirling toward freedom.

If only there had been a fourth voice at the debate.  Maybe something not so monochrome, something with some colour.  I don’t know – Green, maybe?

Oral Fixation

Here’s a funny story.  Eleven years ago, I can pinpoint it precisely because my oldest son was just an infant then and is an incorrigible eleven now, I had a terrible toothache.  Terrible teethache is a more accurate assessment, because the decay and the damage had infected a whole section of my mouth.  And it ached, throbbed, pounded.  Relentlessly.  The pain was such that I was kept awake at night and incapable of anything productive in the day.  I had a job but, like so many jobs, it was one without a dental plan.   And, also like so many jobs, it was a minimum wage one.

Dentists are expensive.

So I couldn’t afford the preventative trips to the dentist that might have helped me avoid the situation.  I ignored the gradual deterioration of my teeth until, eventually, it became an emergency.  I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t work, and I was certainly of no assistance to Charlene with our baby.  It was a perfectly serviceable job – but to get paid, one actually had to be able to do the work.  It wasn’t like having a Senate appointment.  The financial hardship was amplified by the fact that we were, at the time, a single income family.  In the year and a half leading up to Gabriel’s birth, we were self-employed in the book business, and Charlene was thus not eligible for maternity benefits.  Eventually I called social assistance and asked for help with dental costs.

“I have a job,” I told them,  “But I can’t do it if I can’t make the pain stop, and I can’t make the pain stop if I can’t afford a dentist.”

They told me that in order for help with my mouth, I would have to be on social assistance.

“But I don’t need to be on social assistance,” I said, “I just need a dentist.”

It doesn’t work that way, they told me.  By the rules of the bureaucracy, I actually had to accept more assistance than I was asking for in order to receive the help I was asking for.  I took it, I admit, and what young father on a minimum wage job with intolerable tooth pain wouldn’t?  But I didn’t ask for it, and I wouldn’t have looked for it had the system permitted social assistance to address dental problems directly.

Or, better yet, if dental health were regarded as a fundamental part of bodily health and covered accordingly under MSI rules.   It is somehow a sign of madness that we have separated the teeth and gums, almost alone amongst all body parts, to be uncared for by government run health care.  We can have a doctor examine almost any single other organ, orifice or abcess (inside or out), but if it’s in the mouth it is on our own dime.  That is, on one of the dimes we have left after we have contributed so many of our other dimes to the public coffers that we might have the best and most inclusive health care system in the world.

I honestly just don’t get that.  I think we should be able to go to the dentist just like we can go to our GP, and we shouldn’t have to worry about whether we’ll be left with enough money for rent and food and diapers.