Database will allow Ontario to clamp down on over-prescribing doctors

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Toby Talbot/The Associated Press

Friday, August 12, 2011 – Globe and Mail

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Starting in November, the Ontario government will have the ability to collect information on who’s prescribing how many pills to whom, and where those prescriptions are getting filled.

Regulations attached to the province’s planned prescription database, which has been in the works for months, passed cabinet Wednesday. That means that this fall in theory – and this winter in practice, because that’s when the database will be fully functional – the province can start tracking prescriptions and, eventually, clamp down on what Health Minister Deb Matthews calls an urgent problem with over-prescribed narcotics.

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Watchdog says prison violence is on the rise; Toews says it’s decreased

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CHRIS WATTIE/REUTERS

Tuesday, August 9, 2011 – Globe and Mail
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Canada’s federal prisons are getting more crowded, more tense and more polarized between young and old inmates – and that’s contributing to an increase in violence and deaths behind bars, says Ottawa’s prison watchdog.

As new rules send more people to prison for longer periods of time, correctional investigator Howard Sapers argues, it’s putting a greater strain not only on Canada’s aging prison infrastructure but also on its inmates.

“The indicators that we look at in terms of getting a measure of institutional violence are all going in the same direction,” Mr. Sapers said. “And they’re all going up.”

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews argues that’s not so.

“I haven’t seen that statistic,” he said. “There isn’t as much prisoner-on-prisoner violence that used to exist eight or nine years ago, before we put in policies that restricted some of the movement of prisoners.”

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‘Support didn’t show up’: Toronto woman’s death comes as support services slashed

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The Shahdady family home in Scarborough, where Shaher Bano Shahdady lived in the basement with her husband, Abdul Malik Rustam, before moving out with the couple's two-year-old son. Barely a month later, friends gathered here to offer her parents their condolences on Ms. Shahdady's death.
(Photo by Anna Mehler Paperny, Globe and Mail)

Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2011 – Globe and Mail

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After the ceremony, family and friends crowded into the Shahdady family’s Scarborough house, prayed and struggled to talk about anything – anything but the 21-year-old daughter they had just buried in a Pickering cemetery; or her son, the two-year-old who’d spent more than 15 hours in the apartment with her body; or the husband her father had chosen, now charged with killing her.

Abdul Malik Rustam, who she’d sponsored to join her in Canada just months earlier, faces a first-degree murder charge. He appeared briefly by via video feed in a Scarborough courtroom Monday, speaking with counsel through an Urdu translator. He was clean-shaven but for a small moustache and wearing a loose-fitting orange jumpsuit. He’s to appear again Tuesday.

Shaher Bano Shahdady’s death – in the apartment she’d moved into, having left her husband just weeks earlier – rocked the city’s close-knit Balochi community, an ethnic group from Pakistan’s largest province.

But the problem isn’t that cases like this are shockingly rare. It’s that they aren’t.

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Companies vie for Chalk River reactor

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Photo courtesy of the National Research Council

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Thursday, Aug. 4, 2011 – Globe and Mail

Over more than half a century, the reactor in Chalk River, Ont., has produced a Nobel prize and boosted Canada’s stature as a nuclear innovator, acting as a magnet for budding researchers.

It’s also been the source of deep national embarrassment thanks to an unscheduled outage at the aging reactor in 2009 that led to a global shortage of medical isotopes.

Now it’s been effectively orphaned as Ottawa sells off the CANDU reactor arm of its parent company, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.

That divestiture is forcing the federal government to decide whether to continue running it and eventually replace the reactor, operate it until it is too old to repair any more and shut it down, bring in private-sector partners to help run and finance it, or some combination of these options.

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Hacktivism crackdown targets teen

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Suspected British computer hacker, Jake Davis, leaves City of Westminster Magistrates' Court after being released on bail, London August 1, 2011. Davis appeared in court on Monday charged with hacking offences, including hacking into the website of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).
(Photo by Stefan Wermuth/Reuters)

Tuesday, August 2, 2011 – Globe and Mail
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The latest alleged hacking mastermind, an 18-year-old arrested at home last week in Scotland’s Shetland Islands, was let out on bail Monday with conditions meant to keep him off the Internet and home at night.

Jake Davis is accused of keeping log-in information for 750,000 people, acting as spokesman for amorphous hacktivist groups and helping to mastermind audacious online attacks against such prominent figures as the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency and embattled media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

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Keepers of the grid ward off the helter-swelter

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Friday, July 22, 2011 – Globe and Mail

Squiggly neon lines zag between shifting digits and along X-Y axes, projected onto a triptych of imposing black wall panels. Somewhere in the foreground, a computer emits a faint “whoop-whoop.”

Operators sit or stand in front of banks of monitors. Each computer looks like the PC in your office cubicle, if your PC controlled electricity supplies for the homes and businesses of 13.2 million people.

This, in an undisclosed location just west of Toronto, is the multitasking brain behind the largest energy grid in the country, during the hottest week of the year.

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Canada’s youth crime plans bewilder international observers

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A group of boys play basketball at the St. Louis Juvenile Detention Center Tuesday, July 19, 2011. The juvenile rehabilitation program houses from 50 to 100 youth between the ages of 9 and 17.
(Photo by Whitney Curtis for the Globe and Mail)

Wednesday, July 20, 2011 – Globe and Mail
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If Canada follows through on plans to crack down on miscreant youth, it’ll be one of the few jurisdictions in the world heading in that direction.

And the tough-on-crime approach in the face of contrary evidence is bemusing international observers.

Judges, criminologists and policy-makers in the United States, Britain and Australia – countries whose systems, for the most part, closely resemble Canada’s – can’t figure out why this country is planning to shift toward a jail-intensive approach. Everyone else seems to be doing the opposite, not for ideological reasons, but because evidence shows it works.

“It’s somewhat ironic, actually,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project, which studies jail policy across the United States.

“After nearly four decades of the so-called ‘get tough’ movement in the U.S., which has meant sending more people to prisons [and] keeping them there for longer periods of time, there’s beginning to be a shift away from that.”

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Tory ‘tough on crime’ bill has youth advocates worried

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Frontenac Youth Diversion Program Executive Director Daren Dougall, in Kingston, Ont.
(Photo by Harrison Smith/The Globe and Mail)

Tuesday, July 19, 2011 – Globe and Mail
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The idea behind Canada’s current strategy to fight youth crime was deceptively simple: Put teens in jail if you have to, but only if you have to.

It was supposed to strike a balance between two competing anxieties: that young people were committing heinous crimes and not being punished appropriately; and that locking up impressionable teens created criminals who would spend the rest of their lives bouncing in and out of the penal system.

“There was considerable concern around whether the balance was quite right in terms of protection of the public and rehabilitation,” says Anne McLellan, the Liberal justice minister who brought in the Youth Criminal Justice Act in the late 1990s.

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The young convicts of Canada’s ‘Criminal University’

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“It’s like Criminal University,” says Oluwasegun Akinsanya. “All you do in jail is sit down and talk – what he did, what he did, what he did. You realize, ‘Hey, that’s an opportunity.’ You learn from their mistakes. You’ll come back and do a better version.”
(Photo by J.P. Moczulski for the Globe and Mail)

Monday, July 18, 2011 – Globe and Mail
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Canada incarcerates more convicted youth than almost any similarly industrialized country.

And new federal crime legislation is poised to drive those numbers higher, even though imprisoned teens are statistically less likely to get jobs after they’re released and, if anything, are more likely to reoffend.

Years after enacting laws that have been successful in reducing youth incarceration rates, Canada still sends five times more of its convicted teens into custody than England and Wales, according to data obtained from the British justice ministry and Statistics Canada’s justice arm.

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Ontario slow to act on prescription-drug reforms, doctors charge

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"I would characterize it as the most important drug safety problem we face today," says Dave Juurlink, a doctor at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and a member of the province's Committee to Evaluate Drugs. "I don't know what it is about this particular problem that has allowed it to escape the scrutiny that so many other drug-related problems have attracted."
Photo by Michelle Siu for the Globe and Mail

Wednesday, July 13, 2011 – Globe and Mail
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The Ontario government and the College of Physicians and Surgeons have nothing against four dozen recommendations resulting from an inquest into a pair of overdose deaths – but they have no intention of acting on them any time soon.

The suggestions from a five-member jury came out last week following more than a month of testimony into the 2008 deaths of Dustin King and Donna Bertrand. The two died within days of each other in Ms. Bertrand’s Brockville, Ont., apartment. Each had ingested fatal amounts of prescription drugs.

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