Genuinely curious whats better under Canadian system for the young and old.
The young, old, and those too unhealthy to work full-time. And to answer your question: a better social safety net, IMO.
Edit: Because this topic is flamebait, I'm preemptively declaring that I'm not going to argue about my opinion. YMMV.
The Federal government even had the gall to refuse my 2 year old's passport renewal for example because I only paid the renewal fee, and not an additional fee for the passport getting destroyed before expiration date that was buried under 10 pages of fine print that I missed because we were homeless with a toddler. And they already had my CC# on the application anyway, but because I didn't explicitly mark down the extra fee, the application was refused.
Now we've found a new home in a new town at our own expense, and we can't see a doctor. My 2 year old can't see a doctor. There's not enough doctors and practices won't take on new patients unless you go on a years-long wait list. This is our "free" healthcare. If you're dying, you can go to an emergency room and wait for 8 hours to see a doctor. If you need anything routine you're fucked if you don't have a family doctor. We had one, but our town burnt down and now it'll be years before we have one again.
You know how we access healthcare? We go to Europe. We go to my wife's country of origin twice a year to visit family and get healthcare. I had a surgery there (wait in Canada was 2 years, in the EU I got it done in 2 days), our son has had all his checkups and most of his vaccines done there.
This social safety net is a myth, a theory. It exists until you actually try to access it.
edit - the only help we received was our insurance company, a private corporation. So what's the difference versus the US apart from our much higher taxes and lower wages?
Your second problem is the responsibility of your provincial government. Your Conservative provincial government.
On one hand, I guess your tragic situation is exactly what I'd expect private home insurance to cover, aside from burglary and other natural disasters, but on the other it's becoming an annual occurrence anywhere west of Calgary, and like many other tragedies, massive holes are being exposed in the artificially scarce and super inflated stock of available housing in any given area; living in a town in a national park is somewhat exceptional on every front, but having literally no backup plan if a whole town disappears is revealing of comically inept levels of government. I know some Lytton residents! are also basically camping, waiting on help from the province that may never come.
That is to say, some parts of our social service systems and economy work—or at least aren't horribly broken—if and only if nothing unexpected happens or we don't grow or shrink population wise or culturally at all. There's basically no margin.
One could say things would be better with more money, but that's just a matter of degree, it's not like GDP going up would automatically prevent displacement or create more doctors, it would just give individuals a bit more leverage potentially when something bad happens. We desperately require better feedback loops tied into the bedrock of our society, better incentives.
I know this is true in Alberta (I assume you lived in Jasper?)
