Globe and Mail

New $1.2-billion reactor needed for isotopes, Ottawa told

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Friday, December 4, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

Canada has been told to act swiftly and aggressively by building a new billion-dollar multipurpose reactor to secure its isotope supply for the next several decades and to prevent another global isotope shortage.

An expert-panel report commissioned by the federal Department of Natural Resources also recommended adopting supplementary production methods. The panel convened in June in the midst of a global shortage of the radioactive material and as Ottawa was musing about getting out of the isotope-producing business.

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Chalk River workers want to run nuclear facility

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

As the fate of Canada’s nuclear industry hangs in the limbo of unreleased government-commissioned reports, workers at the Chalk River reactor are taking matters into their own hands.

Fearing a looming, but still vague, restructuring of the Crown corporation that operates the reactor, they’ve submitted their own proposal to Ottawa – an ambitious plan that would see Chalk River independent of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.’s reactor business and become a nuclear research giant in its own right.

“The silence” from Natural Resources Canada, says Gordon Tapp, president of Chalk River Technicians and Technologists, “is deafening.”

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Ontario cracking down on prescription pill abuse

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Friday, November 20, 2009 – Globe and Mail

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

In the face of Canada’s growing pill problem, Ontario is moving to change the way opioids are prescribed and monitored.

New regulations to be put in place in the coming months would crack down on prescription abuse and set new benchmarks for how these pills should be doled out in an attempt to deal with the growing numbers of people getting hooked on painkillers across the country.

Addiction experts say the changes are badly needed and should have come a decade ago.

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Canada, you need an intervention

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Saturday, November 14, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

Janey Nagle wasn’t looking for kicks when she began courting a drug habit. The Percocets her doctor prescribed were the only thing that could take away the excruciating pain that lingered a decade after a car accident threw her into a windshield with such force that her face left an imprint in the glass.

For the first two years, the painkillers did the trick. The Perth, Ont., mother of four was able to work and look after her family. But after a while she couldn’t get through the day without the pills’ euphoric effect, and that demanded higher and higher doses.

Fearful her doctor would cut her off, Ms. Nagle looked elsewhere. She spent hundreds of dollars a day on prescription drugs bought off the street, primarily from friends and acquaintances. She photocopied her prescriptions and filled each one repeatedly at pharmacies around Perth, Kingston and Smiths Falls.

“It was a horrible, panicked feeling every morning when I woke up,” says Ms. Nagle, now 43. She remembers the daily dilemma: “How am I going to get them? Where am I going to get the money?”

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Private-clinic patients jump the line for flu shot

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Monday, November 2, 2009 – Globe and Mail
KAREN HOWLETT, ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY AND DAWN WALTON

TORONTO and CALGARY — Patients at private medical clinics in at least two provinces have jumped the queue for H1N1 vaccine during a nationwide shortage of the flu shot, rekindling a debate about the perils of two-tier health care in Canada.

Copeman Healthcare, a private clinic in Vancouver that charges patients annual membership fees of $3,900 in the first year, has already received its first shipment of H1N1 vaccine and is hoping for more soon, said chief operating officer Chris Nedelmann.

Medcan, a clinic in downtown Toronto that charges just under $2,000 for a head-to-toe checkup, received 3,000 doses last Friday, enough for 8 per cent of its patients.

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Tab to keep Khadr out of Canada: $1.3-million and counting

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Friday, October 30, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

The federal government has racked up a tab of more than $1.3-million in legal fees in its continuing bid to keep Canadian Omar Khadr out of the country. And as its latest appeal of a judge’s order to repatriate the Toronto-born Mr. Khadr is set to go to court next month, the bills are likely to keep piling up.

Mr. Khadr, who was 15 when he was detained after a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan, has been held in Guantanamo Bay ever since on five charges, the most serious of which is for the killing of U.S. Sergeant Chris Speer.

In a written statement released earlier this week, the Justice Department stated it has spent a total of $1,335,342.37 on legal fees in relation to Mr. Khadr’s case.

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‘Vandal’ from outer space

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Saturday, October 17, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

GRIMSBY, ONT. — The oldest thing Tony Garchinski, his mother, Yvonne or anyone else on the planet has ever touched fell with such force it cracked the windshield on the family’s Nissan SUV, skidded across the hood and dented their garage door before landing on the ground, breaking into five fragments.

Ms. Garchinski did the only logical thing: She called the police, assuming the odd-looking bit of rock was tossed at the car by a local vandal.

The cops couldn’t do much. They collected information and filed a report, and wondered out loud why the supposed pranksters had bothered to smash in the front windshield, but not the rear.

But 30-year-old Mr. Garchinski, who came across the damage when he went out for a Saturday-morning smoke three weeks ago today, held on to the strange item.

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Church officials alerted to pornography allegations against bishop 20 years ago

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Tuesday, October 6, 2009
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY AND OLIVER MOORE

TORONTO and HALIFAX — Two decades ago, a young man poured his heart out in Rev. Kevin Molloy’s Portugal Cove rectory.

Father Molloy said he was “appalled” to hear about the pornographic images the man allegedly found, as a teenager in the home of a fatherly clergyman, who would befriend boys at Newfoundland’s Mount Cashel home and often take them out to movies or to his home for the weekend.

“Just the fact that he was a priest and this young boy would find this kind of material in the priest’s rectory appalled me terribly,” Father Molloy told The Globe and Mail in an interview last night.

Father Molloy immediately told then-Archbishop Alphonsus Penney about the allegations about what had been found in Rev. Raymond Lahey’s house. Then he phoned Father Lahey, who was in Cornerbrook at the time.

“I said, ‘Bishop Lahey, I’m calling you on a very serious matter…’ He was quite aware of what I was saying.”

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Suspect in N.Y. terror plot has Canadian connection

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Saturday, September 26, 2009 – Globe and Mail
PAUL KORING, COLIN FREEZE AND ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

WASHINGTON and TORONTO — Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan accused of plotting to plant terrorist bombs in New York, travelled back and forth to Canada and Pakistan, U.S. government prosecutors said yesterday.

The Globe and Mail has confirmed that Mr. Zazi travelled to Mississauga.

“Yeah, it’s the same guy,” said Maimoona Zazi, his aunt by marriage, who said she watched Mr. Zazi, a Denver bus driver, on television as federal marshals escorted him to a court appearance.

Last night, CSIS agents were knocking on the doors of homes of Mr. Zazi’s relatives in Mississauga, even as the government was refusing to say if its security forces were involved in the case.

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A father’s loss in Gaza, a major win for Canada

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Friday, September 18, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

TORONT and O — At his comfortable Toronto home, the star recruit of Canada’s most ambitious graduate public-health program is the perfect host: He pours tea and arranges chairs; his eldest children bring out plate after plate of food, and his youngest daughter entertains guests with living-room acrobatics.

Izzeldin Abuelaish, who made headlines around the world as a peacenik and vocal advocate of Israeli-Palestinian détente, starts teaching today at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. It’s a hopeful new beginning nine months after a blast ripped his world asunder on the other side of the globe.

The Israeli shell that hit Dr. Abuelaish’s apartment and killed three of his daughters was one of innumerable human tragedies in the midst of Gaza’s bloody conflict last January, which elicited a United Nations report this week slamming both Israel and Hamas for war crimes.

But this particular incident caused a media firestorm that crystallized the conflict internationally.

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