President Obama addresses joint session of Congress on health care, September 9, 2009.

This past Sunday some of us in central Canada were reading about “How Barack Obama lost his mojo.” Listening to his Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Health Care in Washington last night, it was hard to believe that the mojo had ever been misplaced.

Senator Barbara Boxer told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC that the president had shown a “fierce determination” to get the health care job in the USA done. As he said himself: “I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

Canadians, among whom President Obama is apparently more popular than among Americans nowadays, will be pleased that he did mention Canadian health care, in a fair-minded and respectful way: “there are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the [US] system is through a single-payer system like Canada’s … On the right, there are those who argue that we should end employer-based systems and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own … there are arguments to be made for both these approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have … I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch.”

Our present single-payer system in Canada is of course far from perfect.  But according to a recent survey “82 per cent of Canadians believe our system is better than US health care.” It is hard not to listen to the current hyperbolic and often just plain nasty  (and lying) US debate without feeling some relief that we don’t have to go through the same agony here.

Still, most Canadians who watched the president’s Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Health Care last night likely envied  its unmistakable “touch of greatness” (Keith Olbermann, also on MSNBC) – with its moving concluding references to a letter “I received … a few days ago … from our beloved friend and colleague, Ted Kennedy.”

For the great majority of the Canadian people, we will probably still have a better health care system even after President Obama gets his reform project done at last. But if he were actually running in the yet another Canadian federal election we may well be having soon enough, is there any doubt who would be our next prime minister – instead of all or any of Gilles Duceppe, Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton, or Elizabeth May?