As an active citizen, I always look at the positives and negatives in each government, most notably the Government of Canada because I'm a Canadian citizen. Every day, I discuss government issues with my parents at home and teachers at school. In the light, the Canadian government is a pretty positive government in summary. However, behind the shadow, there are negative things. These are the following issues I discuss everyday:
1. Transport Canada. On November 18, 2010, a Beechcraft Bonanza 33 belonging to Seneca College aviation crashed on the outskirts of Durham Region at night with no survivors. The Transport Canada refused to complete an accident investigation on the accident, saying that it is a "private responsibility, not a government responsibility", contrary to the American Federal Aviation Administration, which takes accident investigations very seriously. Disturbed by the information, it influenced me to doing an essay titled "Canada's Government Is Not A Government". I also heard about an incident where a plane crashed on Canadian waters in which the aircraft operator, which was private, lifted the plane on a barge and urged Transport Canada to complete an accident investigation regarding the crash, of which no one survived. Transport Canada declined the request, again saying that it is a "private responsibility". If the entire scenario of the Air France Concorde disaster were to have happened in Canada, the Canadian government would probably refuse to complete an accident investigation, as based on the current Conservative government, which is a right-wing party. Now I think that the Canadian government is not very responsible in citizen's affairs.
2. Law enforcement. I think that Canada has "too few police"; Canada and its subdivisions do not have enough police to counter terrorism. I visited New York City and District of Columbia on August 2010, and saw the main streets of New York City and Washington D.C. flooded with police, police cars, and police surveillance cameras. All you see is police dominating the streets. Coming back to Canada, I saw the streets of Toronto being almost absent of police, except during peak hours. The huge amount of police in U.S. cities is predominately because of the 911 attacks in 2001. Also, I think that food management in Canada is doing too little to ban the sale of unhealthy food and food being "poisoned", like the poisonous German eggs being reported. On December 2010, I bought several packs of instant noodles from Loblaws only to discovered that they were expired. I quickly refunded those instant noodles. I'm surprised of how the government is not taking this task seriously. Pringles chips were recently discovered to cause cancer in some kind of form, and the Canadian government didn't ban it. Chinese Wonton noodles contained sodium hydroxide (lye) as a preservative, yet the government didn't control the use of NaOH. Tim McLean was murdered on July 2008 by decapitation by a Chinese person onboard a Greyhound bus, yet the courts said that the belligerent was not guilty because of his psychological condition. The man who placed a bomb on Air India Flight 182 was said to be not guilty. I think that Canada is really not taking law enforcement seriously.
3. The Robert Dziekanski Taser incident. On October 2007, the 40-year old Polish citizen was tasered to death by the RCMP at Vancouver Airport. The Polish man was waiting at the airport customs area for probably 10 hours for his mother. He became increasingly agitated, where, near the end, he got into physical trouble when he threw a computer and a small table on the ground. The four RCMP officers tasered him several times before death. In my opinion, I think this is an extremely inhumane treatment because visually viewing his throwing of the computer to the floor means that he probably wanted help, for, at least. Before that, I thought Canada was a pretty positive country. Now, I think that Canada has become a "country of torture and death" and supported people posting posters with "Welcome to Canada" accompanying with a person in the background holding a taser.