By rights, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff should own the H1N1 issue and the botch that the authorities have made of it, just as he should own the health-care issue overall. His party built and sustained our health-care system, which has re-emerged as the main concern of voters. A new poll this week finds a 90 per cent majority approve that "universal" system -- crossing all regions and demographics. Most support is "unqualified," and is highest -- this surprised me -- among the youngest group, the 18- to 29-year-olds. They haven't, on this, been swayed by the individualistic rightward shifts of recent decades, although none of them were around during the original war over medicare.

Drumroll, please. We have rolled out the H1N1 vaccine. It's in the warehouses -- hold on, I'm being told it's now been approved by our tests, though our tests aren't complete and most of them aren't ours and we already knew most of what we now know before this. Never mind. You can get the vaccine, but not yet. And maybe not when you go for it since there's not enough for everyone so we're asking people who aren't at risk not to get it though if they go they can get it. Except in some places. Anyway, it's a Go! ...

In fact, it was CBC news who trumpeted, "It's a go!" They joined the general rollicking mood. Personally I'd like to know where to go to be inoculated against the confusion and lack of clarity surrounding this story.

For Canada's First Nations communities, being denied our basic and fundamental human rights is, sadly, not at all a surprise. So after last week's report that the Canadian government had postponed the delivery of much-needed alcohol-based hand sanitizers to reserve communities with massive outbreaks of the swine flu virus out of apparent "fear" of theft driven by alcoholism in the community, I stopped to think about it for a second. "Same old stupid government perpetuating the colonization of our people," I thought. But there's more going on here that needs to be addressed.