Month: May 2011

Overdose inquest: Brockville deaths put focus on prescription-drug abuse

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Dustin King was 19 when he died after snorting half an 80-milligram OxyContin tablet in Donna Bertrand's apartment. Ms. Bertrand, 41, died of an overdose in the same apartment days later.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

She was a 48-year-old mother and former nurse, receiving disability payments for back pain.

He was a fearless 19-year-old known for befriending everyone, who bounced from high school to temp jobs, from one couch to another when he and his dad argued.

They died days apart, in the same apartment, overdosed on drugs.

She had prescriptions – for the OxyContin toxicologists say caused his death, and the cocktail of antidepressants and sedatives they say precipitated hers.

He did not.

An inquest starting in Brockville this week into the 2008 deaths of Donna Bertrand and Dustin King will try to piece together not how they died so much as how to prevent deaths like theirs.

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Out of retirement and into the flood zone: Sodden Manitoba calls on forecasting veteran

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Thursday, May 12, 2011 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

As Manitoba prepares to open a floodgate in the midst of the Assiniboine River’s worst deluge in centuries, the province is turning for help to a forecasting veteran who thought he’d analyzed his last flood when he retired last year.

Alf Warkentin got the call on Tuesday, when a senior official in the provincial government phoned him, pulling him out of retirement to help fight a flood wreaking havoc in the region while testing the mettle of the engineers trying to combat it.

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A different kind of stimulus package: How ending poverty can save the economy

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Photo by Chris Bolin for the Globe and Mail

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY AND TAVIA GRANT
Friday, May 06, 2011 – Globe and Mail

Behind corridors lined with contemporary Canadian art, sitting at a dark wooden table in his downtown Toronto office, Ed Clark offers some economic advice that might not typically come from Bay Street.

Give the poor a tax break.

“I say, ‘Why don’t you cut the taxes of the most overtaxed people?’ It isn’t Ed Clark,” the Toronto-Dominion Bank CEO said in an interview earlier this year. “It’s the people at the low end, because they face the highest marginal tax rates.”

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In Fukushima’s wake, Canadian nuclear plants prepare for the worst

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Photo by Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Wednesday, May 04, 2011 – Globe and Mail

Canada’s nuclear operators are taking extra steps to make plants safe in response to the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe – the first admission that, despite assurances Canada’s nuclear facilities aren’t vulnerable to that kind of meltdown, Japan’s Chernobyl-scale disaster is forcing them to re-evaluate how the industry prepares for emergencies.

In the weeks after the nuclear plant in Japan was damaged in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission asked all operators to review their safety and emergency procedures. Their responses, due last week, assure the national regulator and the public that Canada’s plants are safe. But they also set out plans to make them safer – an indication of a renewed urgency in preparing for the worst-case emergencies, no matter how farfetched.

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