OUR OWN GOVERNMENTS ARE DOING US IN

Did I miss the referendum? You know the public referendum which asked if Canadians were agreeable to letting all the corporate wrong doers off the hook in exchange for free (mostly) health care to fix us up after we have suffered the consequences of corporate negligence and malfeasance. This is somewhat of the similar mindset as the debate currently underway regarding citizens/employees giving up their right to sue employers for injuries received on the job in exchange for no fault workman's compensation.

There are obvious problems with both scenarios of course. For example if a press takes off your hand and arm on the job, all the compensation and retraining in the world will never get you your arm back. Similarly nobody can guarantee that your hopefully new job will either pay as much or be as secure as your old one. Finally that loss of a limb is permanent. Prosthetics are getting much better but I haven't seen any lineup of people wishing to exchange their original limbs for any prosthetic on the market.

Our health care system can sometimes be described as miraculous. Other times not. So, courtesy of government and corporate negligence, you've contracted cancer. This could be from bad air in industrial Ontario or even coming up from the Ohio valley. Thousands of Canadians die from air pollution every year. Will all the cancer surgery, chemotherapy or radiation ever fully restore your health? It sure as hell won't make you as good as new even though it hopefully will save your life. Then there are hidden issues such as spraying of Agent Orange in Gagetown, New Brunswick. How about spraying of railroad lines, power corridors, highway ditches and commercial forests to reduce undergrowth and weed out specific tree species to allow for greater growth of others? How many companies here in Ontario were using Agent Orange decades after industry knew it was extremely poisonous? Why in the name of God was it being used in Ontario AFTER the Vietnam War? Hell why was it ever allowed to be used in Vietnam in the first place? Dow Chemical and others were having cloracne and other health issues in the 1930s.

My family and everybody else's family have all been affected by soaring cancer rates. Yes smoking can cause cancer. But fewer and fewer people are smoking while cancer rates continue to rise. Solvents, diesel fumes, pesticides, thinning ozone layers and so much more cause cancer and our governments and scientists and doctors have known the causes for many decades. But there is money being made by individuals and businesses all the while. We certainly don't want to stop the money train do we? For decades Dow, Monsanto, Hercules, Uniroyal, Hoescht and so many other companies have been raking in the money with their toxic products. Yes they've been trying to mitigate their lethality and the side effects to both humans and the environment but for some reason actually stopping production is always their very last choice. $$$$$$$ And our governments run interference for them against us.