Universal pharmacare is a hot topic on Parliament Hill these days.  The concept is simple—a single program that would ensure that all Canadians had free access to prescription drugs.  Canada is the only country in the world with universal health care that doesn’t include the cost of drugs in its coverage. And that doesn’t...

The Canadian government is banning plastic microbeads in toiletries. Although designed to clean us, they’re polluting the environment, putting the health of fish, wildlife and people at risk. Manufacturers and consumers ushered plastic microbeads into the marketplace, but when we learned of their dangers, we moved to phase ...

The fact that science is the foundation for civilization and democracy should be self-evident. Regrettably, that connection seems often to escape our collective consciousness. We tend to think of science narrowly as restricted to high-tech, laboratories, and the development of electric cars or travel to Mars. But everything...

The Selkirk College Students’ Union has launched a manual for students’ union organisers. The Fundamentals of Students’ Unionism provides student activists and organisers a framework to understand students’ unionism and the student movement. “Students are more in debt now than ever in the history of British Columbia and...

Conservative Member of Parliament Mel Arnold wants to make theft of firefighting equipment, which theft causes "actual danger to life,"  a specific Criminal Code offense with a maximum penalty of imprisonment for life. That's the same maximum penalty as mischief causing actual danger to life. Anyone who was evacuated from...

Masses of monarch butterflies fluttering across Toronto’s waterfront. Painted ladies (often mistaken for monarchs) descending on Montreal. Combined with the hottest September ever recorded in the Great Lakes region, it’s been a strange time in Eastern Canada. We should savour the joys of these captivating critters while we ...

“I cheat and I lie, I do what I have to do, to get by — But I know what is wrong and I know what is right — And I die for the truth, in my secret life.” -- Leonard Cohen, In my secret life Interiority and Spirituality The one place we all hold most private, most wholly belonging to our selves, is the inside of our minds, our...

Are we learning anything? Are we trying to solve underlying problems? It's what I've been thinking about as the rinse and repeat cycle of terrorism and mass shootings continues. So many good, innocent people lost. Dreams and legacy unrealized. I don't think it's good enough to just report it anymore with sense of shock, or ...

Last Friday, I tabled my Private Members Bill, C-363, in the House of Commons.  This bill would patch a large loophole in the Species at Risk Act, or SARA, that has allowed previous governments to wilfully ignore scientific advice as to which species need protection in Canada. SARA is designed to be transparent and timely. ...

The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia which was, only a decade ago, a financially sound crown corporation, is on the ropes today. What happened? The information ICBC offers on its “Rate Pressures” web page speaks of “significant external pressures on ICBC’s insurance rates”. From 2014 to 2016 the number of crashes...