Family physician Danielle Martin, founder of Canadian Doctors for Medicare, offers three straightforward ideas to improve Canadian health care. Martin's Rx: (1) Bring down the cost of the 20  highest impact generic drugs, which are currently priced in Canada far above world levels; (2) Heed provincial medical society cautions about medical interventions of dubious value; and (3) Get serious about fighting poverty, with tax-administered low-income income assistance. Martin, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto's Department of Family and Community Medicine, and at U. of T.'s Institute of Health Policy, Management and Information, won praise in March for her effective response to hostile questions...

15 July, 2014

Two prominent columnists, one Canadian, one USian, have weighed in bravely on the moral depravity of prostitution. In Canada, it was the Globe and Mail's Peggy Wente: Many sassy young progressive commentators (including women) assume that prostitution is like marijuana – that the moral issues are as outdated as hoop skirts, and anyone who thinks otherwise is an uptight reactionary old prude. After all, women should have a right to do whatever they want with their own bodies, and what happens between two consenting adults is nobody else’s business. Prostitutes are no different from piano teachers, so get over it! They...

11 July, 2014

Have you noticed the befuddlement of North America's sports broadcasting establishment over the huge audiences tuning in to the World Cup? It began with CBC honchos scratching their heads over the vast outpouring of interest in...

07 July, 2014

A beautiful five-minute film about putter Cliff Denton, who puts together scissors at Ernest Wright & Sons of Sheffield, England, one of the last remaining hand manufacturer of scissors. The Putter was produced and directed by Shaun Bloodworth. H/T: Conor Friedersdorf...

05 July, 2014

A Contrarian reader responds to this, uh, lengthy post: Dear Contrarian, I can't help commenting on the beauty of "overly prolix": both redundant and triply ironic all at once. Redundant because...

05 July, 2014

The New Yorker celebrated July 4th by republishing a piece E.B. White wrote for the Notes and Comment section of the magazine's July 3, 1943, edition. White was responding to a letter from the Writers’ War Board  asking for a statement on “The Meaning of Democracy.” It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling...

05 July, 2014

Three newsworthy parables on the vicissitudes of writing: The missing period Canadian political scientists are fond of contrasting the United States of America's affinity for individualism with Canada's tolerance of collective virtues. But now comes an obscure (soon to be less so) professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, suggesting the whole rugged individualism thing might be the result of a typo. The  New York Times reports that Danielle Allen has discovered what she believes to be a misplaced punctuation mark in the official transcript of the Declaration of Independence, right in the critical passage that begins, "We hold these truths to be self-evident...

03 July, 2014

Joe Ramia, government-financed promoter of Halifax's controversy-plagued convention centre, has persuaded 300 business owners to endorse his campaign to bully project opponents into submission on threat of financial ruin. The business owners added their names to a full-page ad in Wednesday's Halifax Chronicle-Herald that tacitly endorses Ramia's lawsuit against the non-profit Heritage Trust and all of its volunteer board members. Groups like the Heritage Trust must focus on their own mandate and leave the business of economic development to those who step up to advance our city. The business leaders of this region encourage economic investment and development that will boost regional prosperity. It's time to be bold. Leave...

02 July, 2014

Kate Kierfer Lee, pictured at right, an editor at MailChimp, offers a sound editing tip, one I should follow more consistently. I read everything I publish out loud. Last week I read several chapters of [Nicely Said] aloud and made a bunch of tiny changes in the process. Here's what reading your work out loud can help you do: Catch errors. You can scan something a hundred times and still miss an error. But when you read out loud, you can't help but stumble over typos and missing words. Improve your flow. Reading out loud helps you write in a way that reflects your speech patterns and...

02 July, 2014

On Facebook this morning, Halifax Councillor Waye Mason posted a link to my critique of Joe Ramia's lawsuit against opponents of the Nova Center, provoking a wide range of reactions—not all critical of Ramia. I believe Ramia's intemperate action has done lasting damage to his public image. It gives him the appearance of a man so thoroughly cocooned among people who agree with him as to have lost all perspective of the many who do not. However, it's also clear many Haligonians are fed up with the arduous process of getting anything past HRM's stifling bureaucracy and excessive regulation, and with the Heritage Trust's opposition to virtually anything new that...

25 June, 2014
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