WINDSOR, ONTARIO - It is the only place where you can look north from Canada into the United States. And here, at one of the most crossed borders in the world, some realities become clear, such as the nature of the traffic headed southward. While American politicians make a great show of bus tours to Canada, Canadians board buses headed south, in search of medical care.

“The Canadian way,” as they say here, is to have the government run health care. Part of the package is incessant propaganda, much of it through a complicit media, that Canadians are getting the best health care in the world. And as prime minister Jean Chretien recently noted, if there are problems, it’s only because the state hasn’t been spending enough. Under Canadian orthodoxy, this process avoids an unjust “two-tiered” system, in which those with more money can purchase what they need. But even in this dominion of the docile, people know better, even columnists.

Writing in the Windsor Star, Claire Hoy notes that there is in fact a two-tiered system, and maybe three or four tiers. Between 1999 and 2002, the province of Ontario alone spent $67.4 million on pre-approved medical treatments in the United States, the place Canada sends people when it can’t cope. In 1998, according to Statistics Canada, 17,000 were sent to the United States for treatment unavailable or unacceptably delayed in Canada, where the queue is a national institution. That translates to 166,000 Canadians, almost the population of Windsor, receiving health care in the United States during one year.

As Mr. Hoy points out, leviathan health care is not specifically Canadian but was pioneered in Germany by Bismark. This is not a system America should emulate. If we nationalize health care and, in Canadian style, eliminate private alternatives, then Americans would also have to look abroad for care. Perhaps to Guatemala?

There is, however, a lighter side to the Canadian system. During my stay in Windsor a man posed as a “lactation technician” in Toronto hospitals and was only discovered when one of the nursing mothers requested a repeat performance of his services.

Border traffic also moves north, and bristles with ironies. Canada gives asylum to virtually all comers, even those with false passports, but literary and political material gets the heavy treatment. For example, Customs Canada recently held up for 48 hours delivery of a pamphlet, “In Moral Defense of Israel,” from an Ayn Rand society in California while officials decided whether or not it was “hate literature.” Some years ago they also slapped a block on the Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. In this politically correct world, criticism of an ethnic group can bring penalties. But completely exempt is the strident anti-Americanism that practically defines Canada’s chattering classes. Meanwhile, another northward trend is students.

While Windsor, where they build the Chrysler mini-van, is booming, Canada’s economy is not robust and its currency is weak. Therefore, more Americans, seeking to stretch their dollar, seek to attend such prestigious universities as McGill and Dalhousie. As a recent headline put it, “Weak Loonie Lures Students to Canada.”

That is vivid imagery all right. Actually, the dollar coin here features a loon and is known as the “loonie.” But there is a kind of fearful symmetry to it.

K. Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.