Anna Mehler Paperny – Global News
Toronto’s board of health became Ontario’s first governing body to endorse supervised injection sites this week, but the momentum may stop there: The province isn’t interested.
Leona Aglukkaq
‘This is about keeping people’s feet to the fire’: Report tackles prescription drug abuse
Rebecca Lindell and Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News
This isn’t the first slew of suggestions on how to tackle Canada’s “crisis” in prescription opioid misuse. But many hope it’ll be the last.
A report released Wednesday by the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse culminates a year-long mind-meld of people representing almost every group in the country with a stake in stopping painkillers from creating addicts, drug dealers and deaths.
Canada’s the world capital of potent opioids, and that makes its neighbour nervous
Click to compare Canada’s hydromorph contin consumption with the rest of the world.
Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News
Health Canada rattled nerves south of the border last fall when it approved generic versions of OxyContin.
United States drug czar Gil Kerlikowske issued an alert to law-enforcement agencies, warning that “the potential exists for diversion into the United States because the old formulations, which are easier to abuse, are unavailable in the United States,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
“This alert seeks to raise awareness of this change with law enforcement along the Northern Border so law enforcement and border officials can work jointly to prevent diversion.”
Fearing advocacy, Ottawa rejects HIV/AIDS funding proposals
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
August 7, 2012 – Globe and Mail
Health Canada has turned down funding for an HIV/AIDS charity for fear it might result in advocacy – an indication of a growing tendency within the Conservative government to steer clear of groups pushing causes out of step with its policies.
Greenhouse idea takes root in Far North
Katherine O’Neill
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
July 17, 2012 – Globe and Mail
There’s nothing quite like the humid, so-thick-you-can-taste-it air of a teeming greenhouse – especially when it’s 40 degrees below freezing and you’re plunged in darkness for months.
That’s the kind of unlikely oasis planners want to bring to Canada’s hardest-to-feed communities. They have got their work cut out for them.
How chronic drug shortages became Canada’s new normal
Karen Reeves, who was diagnosed with epilepsy 11 years ago, is photographed at her home in Waterloo, Ont. Thursday, March 29, 2012. Reeves has struggled to get epilepsy drugs and is now forced to travel to Florida every 3 months to fill her prescription.
Photo by Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY and KIM MACKRAEL
When the only drug that effectively stopped Karen Reeves’s seizures became unavailable in Canada, she didn’t find out until her pharmacist couldn’t fill her prescription – the medication wasn’t there. Replacement shipments never showed up.
Welcome to the new normal of prescription drug supplies.
In Nunavut, the problems are familiar – and so are the solutions
Tuesday, August 18, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
It took a photo of two boys sleeping on the pavement in Iqaluit to show Canada the face of a young population in crisis.
But the problems behind that crisis, and the steps needed to remedy them, were painstakingly laid out in a 92-page document released in 2006.
Three years later, little has changed. The problems the report outlines as urgent concerns are still prevalent. The steps it recommends to address them are in the early stages, if they exist at all.
Life on the mean streets of Iqaluit
Saturday, August 15, 2009
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY AND SARA MINOGUE
TORONTO and IQALUIT — RCMP had seen the boy before. Many times, in fact: Sometimes his parents would call the police and report that their son was missing; other times police would find the 10-year-old wandering the streets of Iqaluit at night, just to avoid going home.
They were used to bringing him back to his parents night after night, said Iqaluit RCMP Staff Sergeant Leigh Tomfohr.
“He just doesn’t like to stay at home. … He was just basically a runaway, if you want to call it that. They have a hard time containing him and keeping him at home.”
A photo of the boy, curled up asleep just a few feet from another 10-year-old, has sparked outrage in the Northern community, as well as a debate on just how extreme the region’s social problems are.
The search for a vision to match Arctic vastness
Saturday, August 1, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Aaju Peter laughs when she recalls the sight confronting her when she moved to Iqaluit in 1981: Houses. A landing strip. A few stores. A school.
Then she pauses. Almost 30 years later, not much has changed.
“We have more houses and more stores. But I don’t think we have very much of a longer-term plan.”
There are inukshuks in Paris and Inuktitut script on federal government websites – once again, Canada’s northern residents are at the forefront of Ottawa’s Arctic sovereignty campaign.
But Canada’s final frontier is also its most development-starved: Between the contested underwater continental shelf and the Radarsat-2 satellite lie dozens of largely isolated communities that lack the transportation, housing and communication infrastructure needed to back up Ottawa’s claims of an inhabited Canadian Arctic.
a business of misfits 