They passed a law that said big companies have to PAY to post links to articles.
On the surface it was to go after places like Google News that would summarize an article, link to it for attribution, but people would rarely visit the original article fueling the advertisements that funded the media.
However to nobody’s surprise, the government cocked up the legislation for the problem. They made a law that required the to pay for links, so the big companies just went… Ok, no links, no bill.
Obviously they didn’t think this through, they wanted money to flow from Google/FB to Canadian media for a real problem, but in the effort to seek a way to tap the money for taxes, over legislated without understanding the problem and ended up with no links, no taxes.
You know… this one is really complex.
Nobody feels hesitation to seek the help they need based on funds, but now due to access or wait times.
It wasn’t always like this, in the 2000s it was marvellous, I remember having a medical scare, showed up at the ER, got triaged right into a doctor because it was time sensitive, saw the doc, got an examination, got cleared, and discharged $0.
Now I feel apprehensive about seeing my local clinic for a sprained ankle.
Now you may wonder why? Is the system failing? Well…yes, and no.
In the last decade or so, we’ve seen a strong ultra-right push to “prove” the system is broken and we need to copy the way the US has it (so the politicians friends that own pharma services etc… get lucrative deals from the govt) by sabotaging it directly and saying “look, it’s broken”
One very clear instance, in my province (AB) during the biggest health emergency we’ve seen in our life time (COVID) our health minister made it his life’s mission to piss off the medical community, under funding programs, firing component leaders in health and replacing them with yes men, and ripping up the doctor/nurse contracts.
What we’ve seen is docs and nurses leaving on droves as we doubled down on COVID hardship and squeezed the money out of frontline workers instead of going after the real problem which was lazy/corrupt middle management and supply chain problems.
To make things worse, our lab services was a crown-run (means it’s a govt funded business, which can think bigger because they don’t have to seek profits so hard, just efficient use of government funds) and they cancelled that contract to replace it with a private sector business.
Since this wait times for lab services have multiplied 10x, costs to consumers became a thing (it was free before) and all that government funding has disappeared.
So lose, lose, lose for the People.
So it’s gotten worse, because the people in charge at the government are gifting, and killing it on purpose.
Would I trade it for your system? Not in a heartbeat, never, we just need to solve our fucked up politics and get people who care in power.