Canada Quality Of Life Essay

“Ain’t I a woman?” was a speech given in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Convention at Akron. It was given to a former slave by the name of Sojourner Truth. Truth was a well known anti-slavery speaker who was born into slavery and gained her freedom in 1827. The speech tells of Truth's experiences as a woman of color. The speech points out how even though they are fighting for women’s rights, they should also be fighting for the rights of blacks.

First of all, Canadians worry too much about diversity to become a whole. Everyone is very different from each other. Each region has their own views, their own rules, their own holidays and even their own cultures. The entire country does not have a certain dominant, widely shared characteristic, or even widely shared feelings or instincts. Hutchison believes that Canada is different because it is still learning how to become a well established nation.

Canadians often find a great source of pride in our health care system because it is “free”. When living next to a country that loudly boasts about its freedom and other such aspects, it is hard to stand out on a global level. That is why most citizens are misguided when they try to compare our health system to that of the United States. Indeed, if you look at the facts, we do have a better system but it is quite irrelevant to compare the two since we are both organized and financed differently. The United States spends more money on their system but does not reap the benefits that more money should offer. Often, the only gain from the comparison is a political one. The federal government’s as well as the provincial governments’ funding has lead to the provinces being too hospital heavy, meaning that there aren 't enough low cost/more efficient facilities in existence such as long-term care facilities, which causes more patients to go to the hospital, which in turn causes more money to be spent than if the patient had been able to go elsewhere. Two key reasons why our health care system is so expensive are the cost of the drugs and the compensation that doctors receive. In order to keep up with the rising cost of our health care, Dalton McGuinty privatized services like physiotherapy and optometry and, “…Also froze the budgets of twelve departments other than health. There was the classic health-care spending trifecta: higher

When discussing health care systems, Canada’s is often used as a possible model for the US. The two countries systems are very different being that Canada has a single payer, mostly publicly funded system, while the US has a multi-payer, heavily private system. So much of the appeal of the Canadian system is that is does more for less. They provide universal access to health care for its citizens, while almost one in five non-elderly Americans are uninsured. Many of these findings come from the results of the Joint Canada/United States Survey of Health from 2002-2003. This survey revealed that the health status is for the most part similar in the two countries, but income-related health disparities exist. For example, Americans in the poorest income bracket are more likely to have poor health compared to their “counterparts” in Canada. In "Health Status, Health Care, and Inequality: Canada vs. the U.S.," (NBER Working Paper 13429) June O 'Neill and Dave M. O 'Neill take a closer look at the U.S. and Canadian health care systems. They examine whether the Canadian system delivers better health outcomes and distributes health resources more justifiably than the U.S. system. After conducting their own research, they have different findings then the survey. They feel that in the US we have too many outside factors contributing to our health to really be able to compare the two systems. Let’s take a deeper look into the different systems.

In the spectrum of OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, Canada has higher poverty rates and inequality of incomes than most. From 1994 until 2008 Canada has shown steady economic growth, yet the increase in wellbeing of Canadians was not strong enough in comparison. 1 After the 2008 recession, the gap between the Canadians at the top and the ones at the bottom of the pay scale continue to grow, resulting in the decreased wellbeing of those on both extremes of the socioeconomic ladder, often seen in unbalanced societies. With the living wage in Toronto being about $18.52 an hour between two working parents with two children in 20152 about 3.3 million workers earning less than $20,000 in Ontario as

Canada before working towards becoming a just society was a very discriminative place. During the events of World War One,WWI black and Chinese Canadians were prevented from joining the war along with aboriginals. Women were treated the same at the time, it was common for most women to stay at home wives and take care of the children. This was the stereotypical family at the time and was believed to be the ideal family too. Canadians thought poorly of minorities and even claimed it was to keep them safe, the aboriginals were an example, Canadians claimed the enemies might believe that they are savages which was a reflection of how they truly felt. Minorities were clearly being treated worse than the majority, they were seen as inferior and only good for

Most Canadians are very proud of their health care because it provides citizens universal coverage on the basis of need. However, in the recent decade, Canadians have observed obvious deterioration in the quality of the system in regards to waiting times, availability of the best technology, and adequate numbers of doctors and nurses. The apparent decline within the system has made many Canadians more open to a variety of options than they were a decade ago, provided that the core elements of the system are preserved and that these changes lead to tangible improvements in quality without damaging accessibility. In the article Canadians’ Thoughts on Their Health Care System: Preserving the Canadian Model through Innovation by Matthew Mendelsohn, he stated that 1/3 of Canadians support the two-tiered healthcare system, which offers its citizens an option of public or private health care. Canada will benefit from a two-tier health care system because it will shorten waiting times, other countries with two-tier healthcare have proven to be successful, will encourage doctors to return and stay in Canada, introduce competition and give citizens freedom to choose.

Now that you are up to date with currents events I will briefly touch on some strong point of the Canadian democratic system. Citizens in Canada indirectly hold power in a free electoral system and are given better representation and more freedoms for their citizens than other systems of government. The freedom of speech, freedom of political expression, and the freedom of the media allow citizens to vote in favour of their own interest. Democracy in Canada is rooted on the grounds of equal rights; this gives people equality before the law, human rights, free and fair elections and so on. In comparison to the Third World, power is in the hands of the “Big Men”, the police and army are the ones who hold control not the people and where corruption is a norm, Canada may look like a utopia. Another strong point in the Canadian political system is everyone no matter race or sex has the right to vote as long as you are a Canadian citizen over the age of eighteen. Until the 60s/70s parties would make up electoral boundaries this was done to increase the number of votes in that location this is called gerrymander, this was unfair because certain parties had an advantage over others. However, now under the Electoral Boundaries Commissions this problem does not occur and no party has the upper hand over another. Interestingly the

In order to sustain the health care system, the Canadian government needs to strategically plan for the years ahead and invest more in preventative care rather than curative care. Canada should enforce non-medical health policies which are not only going to promise healthy living for

Unemployment currently sits at a seven point two percent as of March two thousand thirteen. This is a slight increase recently but has gone down from about eight point seven percent back in two thousand nine, the labor force has also increased by roughly one million people since the middle of two thousand nine. There has been a big boom for Canada since the American financial crisis which definitely affected the livelihood of Canadian citizens. Canada is unique because it is officially a bilingual country. This is an important factor when considering doing business in Canada. Canada has a constitutional monarchy which also has three branches of parliamentary (Legislative, Executive, and Judicial). The head of state is Queen Elizabeth the second. Canada is one of the top ten trading countries in the world; they are a very globalized country. They have a varied culture in Canada a major factor in this may be because it has the highest immigrations rate per capita in the entire world. The country itself prides itself on the multiculturalism that it promotes as a society and as a government. They come from British and French ancestry but also have a big influence from the Canadian people that instantly make Canada a very diverse market. Canada also ranks eleventh highest in human development as of March two thousand thirteen according to a Human Development Index study conducted by the United Nations Development Program.

A better welfare state system does not only express the life quality of a country, it also benefits its residents not being harmed by disease or worrying about funds to be invested for health. In Canada-wide, each provincial health care system covers all the basic diagnosis and treatment to ensure Canadians are healthy and worriless. The only difference between each province is what bonus health bonuses apply, including optical, dentist and etc.

Having lived in Canada when I was 8 before the US-Canada magazine dispute occurred, I found myself thoroughly engrossed in Canadian culture. It seemed a perfect culture, built to protect domestic interests and despite the potential division between countries, created a safe environment where people were unafraid to leave doors unlocked, due to almost no crime. The peaceful and respectful nature of most Canadians isn’t just a fluke, the country was designed this way, and one of the primary influencers of this strategy is the media. Watching the news in Canada, the focus is positive, the message is positive, there is no forced fear of sense of doom as we see here in the US. Life is about being sustainable, not so much a struggle to the top of the food chain, but working together, instead of separating and segregating groups. That is except the region of French Quebec; however, Quebec is like a whole new country in itself.

Canada is regarded as one of the wealthiest industrialized countries in the world. This indication is contrary to the well-being reality affecting Canadians. Despite being part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD), Canada has lagged behind her otherwise wealthy counterparts in the industrialized countries being position 19 out of 22 nations (Breznitz and Zysman, 2013). This has been attributed to the precarious levels of poverty in a majority of Canadian households. The country has not recognized any official poverty measurement although other universal measures such as LICO is used for measuring relative poverty, a more determinable measure of poverty for wealthy countries.

When asked to describe what makes Canada unique compared to other countries, many outsiders might yell out “Hockey!” “Cold Weather!” or “Free Health Care!.” Health care is definitely one of Canada’s most noticeable trademarks when compared to the United States, but the reality is that our health care services are not what they are made out to be. Canadians tend to take pride in the fact that they have a Government funded health care system, but the system is failing at a rapid pace. One can gage the quality of health care in our country while at the emergency ward in any hospital, where most Canadians realize its downsides. The Government spends most of its budget towards health care but Canadians are not feeling an improvement. Waiting

The World Health Organization defines quality of life as a person’s perceptions of their position in life in the setting of the culture and value systems in which they live in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns (Krageloh et al., 2011). The WHOQOL-100 was developed by the World Health Organization composed of many different doctors and other healthcare providers in order to develop an assessment that could be used internationally and cross-culturally to measure a person’s overall quality of life and well-being, instead of a specific disease. This assessment led to the development of the WHOQOL-BREF, which is an abbreviated version of the WHOQOL-100 because the WHOQOL-100 is too lengthy for practical use; WHOQOL-BREF includes instructions for administering and scoring the assessment. The purpose of this assessment is to provide quality assessments in healthcare, focus attention on all aspects of health, and produce interventions that increase focus on a patient’s well-being (Harper, 1996). There were three main stages to the development of the WHOQOL assessment. The first stage of development consisted of the establishment of a definition of quality of life and how the assessment would be used internationally. The second stage of development explored the quality of life cross-culturally among different fields to establish relevance to the quality of life assessment. The third stage of