Welcome to Michael and us on Will Sloan. Here is always with Luke Savage. Welcome back everyone. There's a breaking story here. I want to just mention off the top. This is from the Washington Post from Lauren Gurley and Jeff Stein.

Top Labor Official Union Leader Among Contenders for Labor Secretary. Somebody sent this to me and I thought it must be a joke, but it's not apparently. The White House is vetting top labor official, Julie Sue, and the president of the country's largest flight attendants union, Sarah Nelson, to lead the Department of Labor after Labor Secretary Marty Walsh steps down and march three people familiar with the matter said Friday.

So look, Sarah Nelson of the flight attendants union is definitely not going to be the next American Secretary of Labor, but that's incredibly cool. I hope someone at the White House falls asleep or something during the vetting so that that happens because Sarah Nelson is one of the coolest labor leaders in the United States right now. Anyway, it won't happen, but one can dream.

Well, we've got a jam packed episode full of interesting things. We've got a good movie on this episode. The Patreon episode this week will not be a good movie to say the least. By the way, you can see some of our Patreon episodes at patreon.com slash Michael and us fact you can see all of them.

Yeah, we'll get the advertisement out of the way right off the top for five dollars a month. You can subscribe at the Al Gore tier. I don't know what that is in euros or Rocky D. Nars or any other currency, but five Yankee dollars a month gets you the Al Gore tier $10 a month gets you the super delegate tier, which allows you to join the tiny elite, which every month gets to make us watch exactly one film. You get to vote in a poll. We got a thriving community on there. If you look at it, you can see it.

We got a thriving community on there. If you like the free episodes, you get an extra episode every single week. You also get all kinds of bonus content interviews that I do in my day job at Jacobin and all kinds of other goodies. So patreon.com slash Michael and us check it out. And for a thousand dollars a month, you can get us to do anything anything folks. All right, listen, I'd like to start this episode by talking just a little bit about Canada.

We have socialized medicine in Canada and we're very lucky. I would definitely not trade our position for the position of most of you listening to this podcast.

But you know, folks, there's an assumption that once people give you a right, it's very difficult to take that right away. And that's not strictly true.

Universal Healthcare in Canada is always under some form of attack. And the most insidious attacks are the ones that come disguised as an expansion of our rights.

You know, a way to make the system better. And this past week in the province of Ontario, where Luke and myself call home, Doug Ford's conservative government, table to bill that will allow for the expansion of private clinics to open and conduct surgeries covered under O-Hip, the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, which is our public health care system.

And this comes presented to us as a way to ease the burden of our overburdened public hospitals, which suffered so heavily during the pandemic.

In Canada, the province has controlled their own healthcare systems and the Ford government, which was already underfunding it, has used the pandemic as an opportunity to show why the system is not working.

And it's true, the system is very bad. I say this, having recently dealt with it very closely. But the problem isn't that too many people are getting cancer.

Back in 2014, Doug Ford's party, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, lost a very winnable election by promising to cut 100,000 public service jobs.

And they obviously thought that this would be a way to harness resentment towards lazy, overpaid government employees.

Well, just to interject to say that one of the funniest things about that was that they pledged as part of something that was billed as the million jobs plan, you know, one million jobs.

The opening sort of like pitch for that plan was we're going to cut 100,000 public service jobs.

But all those people will get new jobs. And from that, a million jobs blew. A mighty oak will grow. Yes, that's right.

But anyway, they quickly found that those 100,000 people vote and they all have friends and family who vote.

And even if you don't know any public sector employees, the idea of somebody else losing their job isn't enough to get you out to the polls.

You know, there's got to be something tangible for you in there.

So now their ideas come presented with words like innovation and disruption and challenging the status quo.

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