During the year I spent doing research immersed in an alien society - the People's Republic of Canada - I never failed to be impressed by their unique intermingling of institutionalized Socialist incompetence, English-derived cuisine (ugh!), and unfailing goodwill through it all. Even when it really hit the fan, like somebody in the shop zinging off a few fingers with a power saw, the Canuksitani will to somehow muddle on through to even greater failure won out.
Aforesaid digital attenuation was accompanied by the usual PA announcements summoning doctors and whatnot to the scene and warning everybody else away. When everybody in the facility but the doctor finally arrived the bloody stump had been mostly plugged and dressed by the janitorial staff. Its owner plus a beaker full of ice and fingers were being carried away by paramedics amidst a gaggle of managers jabbering into cellular phones (realigning their luncheon appointments). I thought the "CAUTION! WET FLOOR!" warning signs were a genuinely deft touch.
America has OSHA - the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. Its mission is to visit facilities too small to fight back in court and levy $10,000/occurrence-day fines for finding ladders without warning placards about not standing on the top step. OSHA loves forklifts whose operators are not wearing sound-absorbing earmuffs to protect them against OSHA-mandated 120 dB backup dingdongs. The Great Dank North has WMHIS - the Workplace Materials Hazards Information Service. Every chemical bottle, jug, pail, and heap must have attached to it a tiny custom-printed label most of whose surface is devoted to telling the world it is a WMHIS label. In the few square millimeters remaining is crammed in smeared microscopic type all the hazards normally contained within a half dozen 8.5x11 inches of Material Safety Data Sheets (themselves 95% legal boilerplate to cover corporate butts).
Some new tenant researchers were unpacking multiply-nested boxes of harmless materials. They - worked their way through with razor cutter, hammer and chisel, and heavy duty can opener. Cardboard boxes, wooden crates, steel cans, and metallized plastic chemical barrier bags nestedly guarded little bottles of stuff like sucrose. The WMHIS team arrived! They slogged though piles of vermiculite and polystyrene peanuts, splintered wood with protruding serrated nails, torn cardboard with giant copper staples sticking out, opened steel cans with razor edges... They proceeded to bust those poor pudknockers' annual research budget when the brown chemical bottle was found to be WMHIS label-free. It makes perfect sense to me. Those eco-felons should have been shot on the spot, medically disassembled, and recycled into the local hospital's transplant ward. Anyway, nothing is stopping them from hiring a few lawyers and pursuing their sick vision of justice through multiple trials and appeals over a few years' time until they are ultimately told to pay up or die by their duly appointed civil servants. Table sugar is LETHAL if you put enough of it down a rat's face. You just have to pack it in real tight. (Is there a diabetics' warning on the WMHIS label?)
The local computer contains an officially-mandated WMHIS label printing program. Locked within several multi-megabyte files there resides a minimal subset of the whole fuming totality of WMHIS gobbledygook. The program must have been written by Crown hamsters on loan from a toxic waste dump. It is the loosest, most inefficient, slowest most worthless trash imaginable, and utterly non-commercial in its arcane complexities revealed after the 23 minute delay while the data files load. Printing a label entails another 23 minute delay as the data files are searched. The Crown-approved label itself is half the size of a Bandaid, made of recycled paper with the texture of fine sandpaper, and exhibits the chemical resistance of toilet paper. This utter joke made its way into the lab in the only way possible: The Government is the only vendor and you WILL buy it, or go to jail.
Socialist medicine is cut from the same mold as Socialist economics. After two hours in the Emergency Room the truncated employee shifted his all but bloodless remains to the receiving secretary and proceeded to hold the remains of his dripping paw over her computer keyboard, shorting out the hospital's database. He was summarily arrested (Socialist police work in real time) and transported to a prison hospital where he received adequate treatment. Prisoners have rights!
Prisoners have rights, but taxpayers do not - unless it is the right to pay more and more for less and less each successive year. Social welfare, social medicine and 25% of the population being government employees busted the 1993 Canadian budget to a deficit equal to that of a United States' agricultural extension office in Minnesota, $45 billion in the hole, despite Canada having fewer legal citizens than California. Mass murder of civil servants has been triggered by less.
Canada bans private ownership of firearms.