Ralph Nader brings his campaign to Canada

Ralph Nader, the loonie left’s perennial presidential candidate, brought his presidential campaign to Canada this week. But then, chances are he’ll do a lot better running for president in Canada than he’ll do in the US, as his ideas for fixing what ails the US are more in line with the way Canadians tend to see things.

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At a speech in Toronto to some 150 supporters, Nader praised the Canadian government’s single-payer healthcare monopoly, Stephane Dion’s proposed carbon tax scheme as well as Canada’s multi-party political system. It’s clear that Nader is getting his information about Canada’s healthcare system from socialist shills who want everyone to be equally miserable, or else the idea of waiting for months for an MRI or an appointment with a specialist is perfectly acceptable to this dinosaur. As for the carbon taxes he lauded, it’s yet another item to which he doesn’t appear to have given a great deal of thought. The carbon tax scheme currently being floated by the Liberals in Canada will only increase energy costs and won’t reduce carbon emissions by one smidgeon. But then most socialists, including Nader, are more committed to form than to function. Praising Canada’s multi-party political system is another of those old-timey socialist shibboleths to which people like Nader pay lip service. All the multi-party system has managed to achieve in Canada and in many other jurisdictions, most notably Italy and Israel is to ensure that a minority party can obstruct the will of the majority. A two-party democratic system, such as that found in the US, is the surest way to enact laws that best reflect the will of the majority of the people. And while we Canadians pride ourselves in our tolerance of those who are in the minority, this tolerance is beginning to have a deleterious effect on the rights of the majority of Canadians. Otherwise individuals with strongly held religious beliefs could not legally be punished by Star Chamber type bodies, such as human rights commissions. At one point Nader asked one of his supporters to solicit funds for the campaign from the audience, an effort that saw almost no Americans present respond, but found many Canadians willing to toss in a few bucks. Maybe it had to do with the fact that a $4,600 donation would result in the donor receiving a gift of Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed. While the book managed to raise a fair amount of alarm over automobile design in the 1950s and 1960s, it also resulted in a plethora of safety and emission features that added thousands of dollars to the cost of an automobile with very little benefit. What’s more, much of what Nader wrote about the Chevrolet Corvair was later disproved by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who tested the vehicles against Plymouths, Volkswagens and other vehicles in 1971. What’s sad about Nader is that he’s stuck in the distant past, as frankly most of what he advocates originated with 1960s campus radicals or old-line socialists of the Tommy Douglas ilk. But I can understand why he’s taking his campaign outside of the US, as his shopworn nattering isn’t finding much purchase there. Maybe Nader’s next campaign stop will be Rumania or some such place.