Canada is scarcely a country any more. As the CBC shrinks, jobs evaporate and Stephen Harper crumbles federalism in his big fingers, we’re revealed as a nation of chunks, some more appetizing than others.

Quebec and Ontario are loud, B.C.’s the pretty one, Alberta is tarsands rich but socially insecure, and then there are the quieter poor provinces where anything goes. They’re the kids sitting at the back of the class and you worry about them but you don’t want to intrude because, oh, their families are a little ramshackle but they endure.

Rural abuse is easier. In the countryside there’s no one to hear you scream, as Edna O’Brien once said of Ireland and its women.

Rural Nova Scotia is like West Virginia. Newfoundland has the kindest people in the country but the poverty is Mississippian. You can only salute Saskatchewan, the root vegetable of the national table, for trying so very hard. And then there’s New Brunswick.

Last week, we were told that the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton had finally decided to close its doors “after losing money.” No, the clinic had always lost money, huge amounts of it. Dr. Henry Morgentaler had been quietly paying for abortions for poor women for 20 years because the province wouldn’t. And then he died last year, along with his 2002 lawsuit against the province to try to force it to follow Canadian law on basic standards of medicare.

The charade couldn’t go on forever.

There’s always a backstory when cowardly politicians rule small provinces and it always ends with frightened individuals, alone and without ready cash, getting kicked in the teeth.

Women who need abortions are at their most powerless. They don’t form unions, or demonstrate, they’re afraid even to tell close family that they don’t want to have that baby, that they don’t even have the cash to sneak out of a small Atlantic town on the earliest bus to Fredericton to get a clinic abortion.

They certainly don’t have $700 for an abortion up to 12 weeks, or $850 for one up to 16 weeks. So the clinic offered the procedure free. Women from P.E.I., a backwater where abortions are not performed, would travel to a Halifax hospital or the Fredericton clinic. And if New Brunswick women couldn’t get medical permission from two doctors — an old and disgusting process where you have to convince them you’ll do something deranged — then they couldn’t have an abortion paid for by medicare.

So they’d go to the clinic and ask a man who’d survived Hitler’s camps, jury trials, Canadian jails and near-bankruptcy to help them, which he always did. The problem with Morgentaler’s lawsuit was that no New Brunswick woman seeking an abortion dared to agree to be the suit’s public face in court. The fact that Morgentaler himself wasn’t a personal victim of the province’s cruelty did complicate things.

The clinic had spent $105,000 in the past decade on free services, plus more than $100,000 in clinic repairs after flood damage in 2008, plus security costs over the constant harassment by obsessive anti-choice protesters, even in this day and age.

And there the matter stands. The CBC reports that Liberal leader Brian Gallant has asked for a review of the province’s abortion policy and activists are gathering, but I doubt the ruling Tories will agree to it.

Compare this to Ontario where the ruling Liberals have finally done a most wonderful and humane thing for men and women who want to be parents but struggle with infertility. They will fund one round of in vitro fertilization.

It’s not as generous as Quebec, which pays for three tries, but it’s a humane and smart thing to do. The procedure will create one embryo and hopefully one fetus, avoiding the multiple births of possibly unhealthy infants.

“Every child a wanted child.” The Planned Parenthood slogan is filled with joy. Women who don’t want to continue with a pregnancy shouldn’t have to. Women who are desperate for children shouldn’t have to go into debt to get medical help.

Most humans do at some point want to be parents. It’s why children play with dolls, why adults go mad over their pets, that rush of love.

People are desperate to be loved. That might not happen. But when they’re desperate to show love, a compassionate government helps them along.

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Ontario and New Brunswick, compare and contrast.

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