Working from home I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about this week and then I discovered that Craig Boudreau, head of J. Francis Investments, vice chair of the Cape Breton Regional Chamber of Commerce, Sage of Charlotte Street, had once again taken pen in hand to shareRead...
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...
If the dull roar of a nuclear warhead ever mutates to a deafening and life-ending roar of a nuclear explosion, humanity will be extinguished. Tom Unterrainer, END Info 30, Bertrand Russel Peace Foundation, March 2022 In 1935, retired US Marine Major General Smedley D. Butler (1880-1941), a veteran ofRead...
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
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
Cape Breton University President and Vice-Chancellor David Dingwall has written to his “fellow Cape Bretoners” AGAIN. What are we? His pen-pals? This time it’s a two-page advertisement (once again in the Saturday edition of the Cape Breton Post, not the cheapest medium) telling us why CBU should get a MedicalRead More
Editor’s Note: I caught myself looking rather bleakly at the snow yesterday and decided I needed a timely reminder about embracing winter, so I re-read Paul MacDougall’s 25 November 2020 piece on coping with the cold and I thought you might like to too. There is probably as muchRead More
Pick a lane? I live in the North End of Sydney and on a day a week or so ago when there were three cruise ships in port, I had a sudden vision of the area as a pedestrian-only district. It sounds crazy, I know, because at the moment, theRead More
Editor’s Note: I received my copy of this open letter, released by the Health for All Network on 12 October 2022, from Dr. Monika Dutt, a public health physician in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland & Labrador whom I’ve interviewed in these pages previously and who stated, in an accompanying pressRead More
As the temperature hit 41° C (with the humidex) on Sunday, I found myself thinking of CBU poli-sci Prof Tom Urbaniak’s recent Post opinion piece about our municipality’s woefully inadequate preparations for extreme heat: Severe, extended heat waves were previously rare around here. But our changing climate is changing ourRead More
