Matt Gurney of the National Post posted an inflammatory article yesterday titled, “This isn’t about Harry or Meghan. It’s about Canadians being cheapskates” wherein he accuses Canadians of being cheap for not wanting to cover the estimated $10 million dollar security expense that comes with Harry and Meghan moving to Canada for part of the year.
So, Matt, yes – as your article states, we could each pay an extra few pennies a month and provide the security for Harry and Meghan to live in Canada. Or, picture this: We take those extra “pennies per month” and use it to fund a rare disease strategy that would prevent hundreds of young Canadians from dying annually. And they are literally dying.
I’m referring to patients with Cystic Fibrosis patients specifically, which includes my brother, Christian. I watch him suffer every day while knowing that Canada is one of the ONLY developed nations in the world that has failed to provide access to life-sustaining CFTR modulator drugs. Australia, Denmark, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Greece, Spain, Luxembourg and the United States are ALL providing public access to gene modulators for CF, while Canadian patients suffer needlessly. This medication turns CF from a terminal disease to a manageable illness, increasing the patient’s lifespan immensely. Might I add this is the same disease I already lost my sister to in 2011? I’d rather Canada care more about saving human lives with those $10 million dollars than funding the queen’s grandson’s stay.
Or instead of upholding our destructive colonialist tradition, perhaps Canada should care to see those extra “pennies per month” go to our first nations communities so that they all have access to clean drinking water, as many Indigenous communities have gone for years and years without it, living, as one woman put it, “in Third-World conditions in a First-World country.”
Or those pennies could be used to assist the approximately 35,000 Canadians that experience homelessness on any given night, and at least 235,000 Canadians that experience homelessness in any given year. For example.
So no, Matt Gurney, your sensationalist clickbait heading has backfired. Canadians are not cheapskates. Canadians are kind, hard-working people, and just want to see their own people taken care of with the basic necessities of life before we provide fancy security for wealthy visitors. Perhaps you should want these things too.
