By Dennis Lund

“Canada — for Americans it’s almost like visiting another country.” — Lindsey Baxter

THE JOKE ABOVE, FROM A FORMER COLLEAGUE, hockey hooligan and Canadian friend, emphasizes the similarities between the two nations. There are distinctions, but they are often distinctions without a difference.

Canadians watch our economy much closer than we watch theirs, as their economy is more dependent on ours, certainly more so than the reverse. Thus, the Congressional Budget Office’s recent release of its annual budget and report was in the local newspapers here in British Columbia.

Because of current unsustainable economic policies, the report paints a dark picture of our future. Pierre Lemieux of the Montreal Economic Institute, writing in the National Post, has figured out what escapes President Obama, Keynesian economists and seemingly all 64 million people who voted in favor of such spendthrift policies: “The continued deterioration of U.S. federal public finances is not due to tax cuts but to spending increases.” Lemieux correctly describes the dire situation not as a “fiscal cliff” but as a “fiscal precipice.”

Waterboarding was again in the news after outgoing CIA Director Leon Panetta’s admission the interrogation tactic was used by the CIA in the hunt for Osama bin Laden — a hunt in which the U.S. was assisted by 54 nations, according to “Globalizing Torture,” a report by Amrit Singh of Open Society, which focused in part on Canadian Maher Arar, who claims to have been tortured in Syria after a CIA rendition.

Last week, Panetta stated the following:

“In order to put the puzzle of intelligence together that led us to bin Laden, there were a lot of pieces out there that were a part of that puzzle. Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used. But the fact is we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that.”

Remember the Bush haters who infested City Park and how upset they were over Abu Ghraib and waterboarding? It has now been confirmed that Obama regularly oversees the drone kill list, yet their silence on this subject is testimony that their years-long “demonstration” was never actually about the war — that Iraq was just an excuse to vent their hatred for George W. Bush.

Maybe now, given Panetta’s confirmation, we can state that Obama owes his biggest success to waterboarding, which Bush approved and Obama opposed. In other words, to borrow a phrase, “It’s all George Bush’s fault.”

Canadian health care, we have been told, is the envy of civilized society. Some facts indicate otherwise.

The Frasier Institute of B.C. released a report last year confirming that more than 46,000 Canadians left Canada to seek medical care in the U.S. because of extreme waits for certain types of care, including general surgery, ophthalmology, internal medicine, urology, orthopedic surgery and gynecology.

For Canadians seeking U.S. health care, the Toronto Globe and Mail offered these tidbits:

• In the U.S., patients with cash are king: (For) many hospitals … having a patient in a bed at a lower rate is better than an empty bed.

• No one pays the rack rate; expect about a 30-percent price cut if paying cash.

• Don’t feel you have to be in big medical centres; hospitals in Oklahoma and Montana may pleasantly surprise you with impressive outcomes.

• Consider hiring a medical broker, some of whom have good connections and special provider rates.

Voter suppression, the canard we have heard too much about, has apparently spread north. Canadian conservatives, perhaps inspired by their Republican counterparts, now stand accused of the same.

The difference is that in Canada, they are not whining about it like U.S. Democrats — they are actually going to court to do something about it.

In one case a man is charged with telling people by phone that their polling location had changed and then giving them a false address. Though not a nice thing to do, one has to ask: If a person falls for this ploy, were they really about to make an informed vote?

In a second trial, two “victims” of voter suppression made their case:

Helen Eddlestone, 86, is visually impaired and, as reported by Post Media News, “In 2008, she wasn’t allowed to vote because the only identification she brought with her to the polls was a Canadian National Institute for the Blind photo ID card, which wasn’t on the list of accepted documents. Eddlestone had documentation at home, but found the round trip to her home and back to the polling station too much of an effort for her and opted not to vote.”

It sounds like she forgot her wallet. This is supposed to warrant a court case against “voter suppression”?

The second case involves Rose Henry and Clyde Wright, who “were able to vote in 2008. Both argued they haven’t always had proper identification, Wright because he has frequently been homeless, and feared not being able to vote in the future.”

So it appears these people are in court because they might forget their wallet?

In B.C., they have had the good sense to have voter ID laws; some provinces have had them on the books for many years. The case quoted above is an appeals case that went against the forgetful litigants. In the original trial, the judge “ruled that voter identification laws did increase the burden on citizens, particularly ‘economically disadvantaged and homeless citizens,’ that could prohibit some people from voting in future elections.” But the judge said that outcome was a reasonable limit on the right to vote if it meant preventing voter fraud and reinforcing trust in the electoral system.

Good to know that common sense prevails north of the 49th parallel.

Dennis Lund graduated from California State University-Long Beach with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1981 and has resided in Benicia since 1992.