Closing the mental health gap: expanding coverage as next step toward mental health parity
For decades, governments have seriously underfunded mental health, falling far short of the ideal of parity of mental health with physical health. With its 10-year $5-billion mental health transfer, the federal government should be congratulated for taking a significant bite out of the mental-health funding gap. The additional $500-million per year it will provide makes […]
What if we measured government success by health outcomes?
In Canada, a small proportion of adults disproportionately interact with our health care, criminal justice, and social welfare systems. The symptom? Poverty. Children in poverty live in more crowded, noisier, and lower-quality housing. They have fewer social supports and poorer family dynamics. Their neighbourhoods have more polluted air and water quality, more crime, and are […]
New breast cancer screening guidelines put women at risk
Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death from cancer in Canadian women. On any given day, 72 Canadian women are diagnosed with breast cancer and 14 Canadian women will die from it. Over the course of a lifetime, one in eight Canadian women will develop breast cancer and one in 31 will lose […]
Mental health: doing more of the same isn’t good enough
With the approach of Mental Health Week (May 6 to 12) and the 13th anniversary of the Senate of Canada report Out of the Shadows at Last, this is a good time to reflect on what has been achieved and what still needs to be addressed in the area of mental health. While much has […]
Budget misses the mark on addressing health needs
The Liberals’ budget delivered their “solutions” to the issues facing health care in Canada today. But did it hit its intended mark? Canada is facing a systemic health crisis. Canadians are living longer—a good thing, on its own—but increasingly with chronic diseases such as diabetes or dementia. This places a genuine burden on Canadian caregivers, […]
Canada’s Arctic needs investments in infrastructure, health, economic development, education
What if someone came into your home, took away your food, your livelihood, your kids, your land, lied to you, told you to move, abused you, assigned you a racially based identification number and commanded you to wear it at all times, eliminated your only means of transportation and hunting for food for your family […]
Vaccine hesitancy: individual choice, public threats
More Canadians contracted the measles by March 30 of this year than in all of 2018. Globally, incidence of measles infection jumped by 50 per cent last year. Europe, alone, experienced more than 83,000 cases and just south of the border, the United States saw a 500 per cent increase from 2017 levels. At the root […]
Health Policy Briefing
The world’s at a crossroads with malaria. Canada can help push it over the edge
April 25 is World Malaria Day. Little known by most Canadians, malaria threatens almost half the global population: more than three billion people. Hundreds of thousands die each year. New strains of multi-drug-resistant malaria are emerging and need to be destroyed quickly before they have a chance to spread and create a global catastrophe. Thankfully, the […]
‘We’re finding our way’: MP Gord Brown’s widow reflects on year that changed her whole life
The morning Gord Brown died, he woke up early to play his first hockey game in months, kissing his wife, Claudine Courtois, goodbye like he did each day before starting his work as a Conservative MP. Every single time their little Maltese dog, Hercules, would interrupt that loving routine with a protective rumble. That morning […]
