[LINK] "That French remedy still works"

The Globe and Mail's Lysiane Gagnon argues ("That French remedy still works") that Canadians interested in health care should seek to learn from the experience of other systems, like those in western Europe.

Anyone who dares criticize the overly rigid Canada Health Act meets a standard reaction: "So you'd rather live with the American system, where 40 million people are deprived of health insurance?" This is an irrational reaction, as if there were only one alternative to medicare. (Let's hope America's health-care system will soon undergo the much-needed reforms envisioned by President Barack Obama.)

The head of the Canadian Medical Association, Robert Ouellet, should be credited for breaking with this obsession with the United States and broadening the issue by using the European experience to promote changes. He recently met health experts in France, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands and uses the European model to call for a blend of public and private medicine in Canada.

The European model is successful, indeed. According to the last World Health Organization ranking, in 2000, the top 20 countries with the best overall health performance were all in Western Europe, except for Singapore, Oman and Japan. France was No. 1; Canada placed 30th and the U.S. 37th.

What's interesting is that most Western European states have lived under socialist governments for long periods, while the Scandinavian countries have pioneered social democracy. Left-wing European leaders have never sought to outlaw private medicine, a fact that contradicts the prevalent view in Canada that allowing private clinics to co-exist with public institutions is a right-wing ploy.

Dr. Ouellet told a reporter that the European experts he met were shocked by the Canadian waiting lists. "They don't get it," he said. That's absolutely true. In Canada, people keep exchanging horror tales about how long they had to wait in emergency wards or for an operation or even for a doctor's appointment. It's a common topic of conversation. In France, a country I know well, waiting times is a subject no one talks about, for the simple reason that people are cared for without delay.

Occasionally, though, my French friends do complain about their health-care system. They say it has deteriorated. One friend, for instance, recently told me that "we no longer can call doctors at their home on the weekend, and house calls are difficult to get." To a Canadian ear, this sounds like a description of paradise.

[LINK] "A year after deadly riots, reporter visits Tibet"

Reuters reporter Emma Graham-Harris reports from a stage-managed Tibet.

I had barely stepped off the plane, gasping slightly in the thin Tibetan air, when our government minder wandered over to tell me plans for an evening of rest and adaptation to the high altitude had been cancelled.

Instead a dash to see Tibet's most sacred temple, and a news conference that dragged late into the night, set the gruelling pace for a reporting trip around China's most sensitive region.

The one-year anniversary of deadly riots and 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's flight into exile are looming in early March. Both are potential triggers for unrest and key tests of China's control of the closed-off Himalayan plateau.

While China has promised the foreign media unfettered access to most parts of the country since hosting the Olympics, Tibet is an exception. Foreign tourists are also banned at present, except for a lucky few given special permission.

So being one of a dozen journalists taken on the first media visit to the region in months was a rare but daunting opportunity.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Why we don't all speak Dutch: Language extinction and language survival"

Thanks to Language Hat for linking to Martin C. Langeveld's essay "Why we don't all speak Dutch: Language extinction and language survival", an examination of how the Dutch language survived for well over a century after the transformation of Dutch New Netherland to English New York and this story's possible implication for minoritized languages worldwide.

The Dutch lost control of their colony in 1664, when the English took over, without firing a shot, during one of the periodic Anglo-Dutch wars of that century. However, the Dutch did not go away after the English takeover, nor did their culture fade away. In fact, despite the fact that only a tiny minority of immigrants to the New York region after 1664 came from the Netherlands, the Dutch language continued to be widely spoken in the New York region for over 200 years. Not until 1764 was English used to preach in New York’s Dutch Reformed churches. President Martin Van Buren (born in 1782 not far from here in Kinderhook and elected in 1836) spoke Dutch at home with his wife. The first 20th century president, Theodore Roosevelt, grew up hearing his grandparents speak Dutch at the dinner table in New York City in the 1860s. Sojourner Truth, the anti-slavery orator and associate of Frederick Douglass, was born as a slave in Ulster County, New York about 1797, and grew up speaking nothing but Dutch until she was eleven years old. Dutch was spoken in parts of Brooklyn into the mid 1800s and is quite likely the origin of the so-called Brooklyn accent.

[. . .]

Although it eventually died out, the survival of Dutch over such long time against all odds raises some interesting questions. Why did Dutch hang on, when the languages of other immigrants, like the Germans, Italians and Poles, typically disappear within a generation or two? And where else, in the world, can we find pockets in which a language survives against improbable odds and without constant refreshment from the mother country? Perhaps most importantly, are there lessons in these examples that may help preserve minority languages that are rapidly disappearing in all parts of the world?

Go, read. Also, thoughts?