Ontario

Childbirth economics: What older moms and teenage pregnancy say about opportunity in Ontario

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Patrick Cain and Carmen Chai, Global News : Wednesday, February 20, 2013 1:57 PM

TORONTO — Jodi Aslin is 41 years old and seven months pregnant.

In Ontario, she’s no longer an anomaly.

Ms. Aslin was in no rush to start a family: She spent her 20s studying social work and teaching English in Korea, and met her husband at 34. A year later, they decided they wanted children.

It took almost five years and more than $20,000 in fertility treatments, but her daughter Jamie is now two years old. Ms. Aslin’s second child is due in April.

“We recognize that we’re in the older crowd, but we’re happy. I feel great.”

Full story and interactive here.

Whisked from Guantanamo Bay to Millhaven Institution, Omar Khadr tries to learn the ropes

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Janet Hamlin

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY AND COLIN FREEZE

October 1, 2012 – Globe and Mail

Eleven months after Canada pledged to bring him back from Guantanamo Bay, Omar Khadr’s fate is in the hands of prison officials as the convicted terrorist tries to learn the rules in a home he can’t remember.

The pre-dawn flight via American military aircraft on Saturday that brought the 26-year-old to Ontario from the U.S. naval base where he was imprisoned for nine years and 11 months came as a surprise to Mr. Khadr, his lawyers and his family, who learned of it from television news.

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The making of a murderer – and how to prevent it

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J.P. Moczulski

This is Joe’s story.

At age 18, he was convicted of second-degree murder, accused of stabbing another boy to death.

Joe’s name isn’t real – police changed it to protect his privacy. But his story is. Police in Prince Albert, Sask., use it to illustrate their strategy.

This timeline traces Joe’s run-ins with police and social services through an infancy marked by domestic violence, alcoholism and abuse, a violent childhood and a series of petty-crime charges.

Early intervention, police maintain, could have prevented the murder years before it happened. The crime-prevention program is working so well, Anna Mehler Paperny reports, Toronto is adopting the same one in a new pilot project

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Police and cities face off over pay

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Friday, July 6, 2012 – Globe and Mail

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

Financial showdowns between police and the cities paying them can be nasty. And they’re getting nastier: Across Canada, budgetary games of chicken are playing out between cash-strapped cities and police forces that argue they’re taking on more than they ever have – and need the cash to back it.

The mayor of Peterborough, Ont., has been locked out of two meetings of the police board, on which he sits, after a rare move by council to reject a funding request and slice the force’s budget on its own. Reports this week suggested the board may have asked Ontario’s Civilian Police Commission to remove the mayor entirely.

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After Elliot Lake mall collapse, heartbreak and hope

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Chris Young/Canadian Press

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 – Globe and Mail

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY AND STEPHEN SPENCER DAVIS

TORONTO and SUDBURY — Rescuers will try “drastic” measures to reach possible survivors in a collapsed mall, acting at the urging of the community and Ontario’s Premier after search-and-rescue operations were suspended over safety fears.

Crews who just hours earlier were pulled from the Algo Centre Mall in Elliot Lake, Ont. will have another go at the structure relying on machinery, said fire chief Paul Officer.

Officials believe there is one person dead and possibly at least one still alive in the wreckage. Reaching them could require methods that are “a little more drastic, that aren’t necessarily done in a rescue operation – or even a recovery operation,” Chief Officer told a news conference Monday evening. “And we still have to come up with that plan.”

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Ontario doctors still in the dark on drug database

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Remember back when Ontario rolled out an online narcotics-prescription database – one meant to track exactly who is prescribing what to whom? The idea is to prevent “double-doctoring” and ensuring that doctors, pharmacists and Health Ministry officials ensure that people who need drugs are getting them.

The database was in testing phase as of November, 2011 and was supposed to be operational early this year. But the people prescribing the drugs still can’t access it. That means they have no idea what other drugs a potential patient could be taking, or was taking. In some cases, it means patients can’t get the drugs they need.

Toronto doctor Irfan Dhalla said doctors still have no idea when they’re going to get in on this database – but they’d really, really like to.

Ontario crash shines light on Canada’s migrant workers

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Photo by John Lehmann/Globe and Mail

Wednesday, February 8, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY and DAKSHANA BASCARAMURTY

They pour coffee, care for children, pick berries and wrangle chickens – unglamorous, often low-wage jobs that are vital to Canada’s economy.

The umbrella term “temporary foreign worker” covers upward of a quarter of a million people coming to Canada from 80 countries every year. Many are recruited by private agencies that run the gamut from respected international organizations to tiny operations accused of charging exorbitant fees for the privilege of a short-term, minimum-wage job in Canada.

Monday’s horrific crash in southwestern Ontario, in which 10 migrant workers were killed when the van transporting them smashed into a truck and careened into a building by the side of the road, exposes a growing sector of Canada’s labour market that, despite its size, tends to go unnoticed.

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Ontario election 2011: For Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, it’s all about connecting

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Photo by Anna Mehler Paperny/The Globe and Mail

Saturday, September 24, 2011 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

Friday night in North Bay, Ont. The blonde behind the bar is talking up patrons on tax policy.

They aren’t sure who she is or why she’s here; 15 minutes ago, they’d never heard her name. But they are riveted and, for that matter, so is she: Her politely agitated handlers need to pry her away to scrum outside the pub.

“Can you get her to come back?” schoolteacher and pub-goer Val Spivey asks. “We want to ask about her education policy.”

This is what Andrea Horwath does.

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Politics not in the cards for Andrea Horwath’s son. But his mom? “She’d be stoked” to be premier

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Photo by Anna Mehler Paperny/Globe and Mail

Friday, September 23, 2011 – Globe and Mail

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

Hamilton — Julian Leonetti has a habit of acing his civics exams. But you could argue he has an unfair advantage.

Mr. Leonetti, 18, was raised immersed in a political milieu – tagging along to meetings and putting up signs for his mom, Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath.

He remembers going from day care to Ms. Horwath’s office in Hamilton city hall, where she was a councillor.

“I would hang with her secretaries and meet all the politicians. … It was actually a really, really, really good environment to grow up in,” he says.

Mind you, he wasn’t so sure about that at the time.

“When I was there, I was bored as hell. But when I look back on it, every other kid was sitting at home, watching Arthur on TV. Those kids weren’t learning what I was learning.”

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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

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

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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