Health and Wellness

Canadian Healthcare: Creeping Privatization

Canadian Healthcare: Creeping Privatization

February 1, 2023 at 12:08 pm

Last week,  in Part I of my article on Canada’s healthcare system, I cited the Canadian Encyclopedia entry on “health policy” written by the late Toronto Star medical reporter Marilyn E. Dunlop. In my initial draft, I noted that the Canadian Encyclopedia is kind of wacky (see the “David Dingwall”Read More

Healthcare, Canadian Style Part I

Healthcare, Canadian Style Part I

January 25, 2023 at 3:55 pm

This is, after all, the playbook of all privatization advocates everywhere: starve a public good, wait for it to malfunction, and then claim the free market is required to fix the problem—Mitchell Thompson, Jacobin, January 2023 The current health system does not have a ‘management’ problem; it has an ‘economics’Read More

Healthcare, Canadian Style Part II

Healthcare, Canadian Style Part II

January 25, 2023 at 3:50 pm

Editor’s Note: I broke this article into two pieces (see Part I here) to allow you an opportunity to rest between decades but now it’s time to face the ’80s and ’90s.   Canada’s mania for deficit reduction, although it reached its peak in the ’90s, started in the ’80s.Read More

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

October 28, 2022 at 10:00 am

Medicare-less As I noted in my unburied power lines story on Wednesday, I managed to stay better focused in my research this week, but I cannot spend hours reading old newspapers without occasionally getting distracted. Fortunately, I have Fast & Curious as a sort of catch-all drawer; a place forRead More

How to Heat a Hospital

How to Heat a Hospital

April 6, 2022 at 10:55 am

The headline on a 2021 article  from the Nova Scotia Health (NSH) website declares: Cape Breton Regional Hospital’s new energy centre will be cleaner, greener and more efficient What struck me when I first read this was that it didn’t simply say the new energy center will be “clean, greenRead More

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

Fast & Curious: Short Takes on Random Things

March 25, 2022 at 10:51 am

Pennsylvania Pain I decided to write about the first thing that popped into my head this morning (that wasn’t war in Ukraine) and it was the TV series I just watched, Mare of Easttown, starring Kate Winslet. (Warning: there will be spoilers. If you haven’t watched it and plan to,Read More

Where’s Cecil?

Where’s Cecil?

March 9, 2022 at 12:51 pm

Big thanks to the spectator who alerted me to the latest incarnation of former CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke, who is now with the provincial department of Health and Wellness as  a “project executive” with “Health Capital Projects.” Clarke, whose updated LinkedIn profile states he is an “accomplished public sector leader;Read More

Q2 2021: COVID, Tattoos and Affordable Housing

Q2 2021: COVID, Tattoos and Affordable Housing

December 15, 2021 at 11:54 am

The Spectator‘s coverage this spring was varied, to say the least. From Albert Barbusci’s nuclear waste deal, to the workings of the Verschuren Centre to the province’s third wave of COVID with a variety of stops in between, including a feature I count among my all-time favorites — the oneRead More

Tracking a COVID Vax Rumor

Tracking a COVID Vax Rumor

September 29, 2021 at 1:04 pm

I heard a strange rumor this weekend about anti-vaxxers in Halifax paying a guy — the same guy, in the story I heard — to get vaccinated for them and provide them with proof of vaccination. My first thought was that this had “urban myth” written all over it (theRead More

Daycare in Long-Term Care?

Daycare in Long-Term Care?

September 22, 2021 at 4:49 pm

The Province of Nova Scotia has announced a pilot program to provide onsite childcare for nursing staff, particularly continuing care assistants (CCAs), at the Cove Guest Home in Sydney. During the CBC Information Morning Cape Breton report on the daycare pilot, Cheryl Deveaux, chief executive officer and administrator of theRead More