Author: amp

What Supreme Court’s assisted suicide decision means for people in pain

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Feb. 6, 2015 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News

A quarter-century ago Sheila Noyes watched her younger sister die of breast cancer that spread to her spine. “It really did chew it up.”

She watched her mother die of a brain aneurysm and successive strokes that left her paralyzed — “trapped in a body that wouldn’t let her go.”

Now Noyes, riding a wave of optimism after chemotherapy to treat her own breast cancer appears to have done the trick, is exultant in the knowledge she won’t die the same protracted, painful deaths of these two women she loved.

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Data deficit: How are Canadians coping sans long-form census?

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January 30, 2015 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News

Canada’s long-dead long-form census is in the news again.

Liberal MP Ted Hsu’s private members bill, which proposes to bring it back but eliminate the threat of jail time for those who don’t fill out the mandatory long-form census, has brought the issue back to the fore – even though the bill has scant chance of passing when it’s put to a vote in a majority Conservative House of Commons next week.

But if Canada’s gold standard of population data’s gone for good, what does that mean for the individuals, governments, businesses, planners, health authorities (essentially, everyone) who depended on it?

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What to watch for in feds’ new counter-terror law

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January 29, 2015 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News

The federal government’s proposed terror law, set to be unveiled Friday morning, could constitute minor tweaks to powers police never use anyway; or it could vastly expand law enforcement’s power to detain Canadians without charge and clamp down on freedom of speech in the name of fighting acts of terror we have no evidence a clampdown would prevent.

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