Craig Peterson's Tech Talk

Craig grew up in Canada and left in the 1970s, and this week he put numbers on why. A driver's license in Quebec cost $300 a year. Registration on the family station wagon cost $3,000 a year. Both figures in 1970s dollars. Auto insurance, by contrast, was free — which Craig turned into the sharpest point of the segment: his father remarried, his stepmother got her license at 26, and she totaled three cars. Craig's question was not about her driving. It was about what happens to the premium. "How much does insurance go up? How much is the risk? Zero, of course, because there is no insurance. So what's her incentive to not hit the next telephone pole?" Most of the segment was Craig's family and Canadian health care, told as first-hand stories rather than argument. His father had a heart attack in Toronto and rode in the back of an ambulance from hospital to hospital looking for one not too busy to take a heart attack; when he was finally admitted, the treatment was an overnight stay, an aspirin, and instruction