When Avi Lewis talks about public options for groceries, housing and telecommunications, his critics immediately reach for the word "nationalization," as though the idea of public ownership were something foreign and frightening. It is neither. Nationalization means the state takes over an industry entirely. A public option means the state steps in where the market won’t — serving needs that are too important to leave unmet. What the nationalization framing obscures is something Canadians know from experience: public options and market solutions have coexisted here for generations and the country is better for it. 

Canada is rife with public options. The CBC, Canada Post, BC Liquor Stores, SaskTel, provincial auto insurers — and that's before we get to Petro-Canada and Air Canada, two public enterprises this country built, ran and then sold off when the ideology of the moment told us the market would do it better. These enterprises were acts of pragmatism by governments that understood a basic principle: some things are too important to democracy to be left entirely to the profit motive. 

I know many of those examples are maddening. I won't pretend I don’t scoff whenever I hear Air Canada has won a “Best Airline” award after sitting through a multi-hour delay. But the real question isn't whether public institutions are efficient by market standards — it's whether........

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