Health Advocacy Inc.:
Three years ago Sprout Pharmaceuticals hired a PR firm to help ensure that the US Food and Drug Administration approved its drug, flibanserin, to treat women with low libido. Described by critics [...]
Rising Abruptly
Gisèle Villeneuve’s works straddle languages, informed by her native Montreal and by Alberta, where she has lived for nearly 40 years. Her last novel, Visiting Elizabeth, was a hybrid [...]
Better Now: Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care For All Canadians
The good guys of Canadian healthcare are writing in full force. Dr. Danielle Martin’s engaging new book, Better Now, is one of several recent releases from leading Canadian intellectuals, [...]
Ritual Political Suicide
Why do so many politicians take a cleaver to their own political careers? It isn’t just that they make a blunder: a hand in the cookie jar when no one’s looking, or getting a little carried away [...]
Hunting Season
Very early this morning, headlights crept down rural roads across Alberta, turned in to the edges of fields and woodlands, and blinked out. Had you been there, you might have heard the muffled [...]
In Focus: Theatre Canmore
A new theatre company launched in Canmore this September with a lineup of shows created and performed by local artists. Theatre Canmore’s artistic director, Melanie DesRoches, says a lot of [...]
The Mapmakers
On January 24, 2017, I took a road trip. Driving from Calgary to Drumheller that day was like floating in a void. Heavy fog under a blank-canvas sky. Snow on the field stubble. Frost on the fence [...]
A Different Prescription
A country that prides itself on its universal healthcare system has a glaring coverage gap: pharmaceutical drugs. As doctors and academics in this field, we see the consequences. Take, for [...]
Assisted Dying
It was the summer of 2015, and Hanne Schafer—a 65-year-old Calgarian psychologist who loved opera and camping and her husband of nine years—decided it was time. Over the previous two years, [...]
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From Dismissed to Disposable
Dawn is breaking January 1, 2020, when I receive a phone call. The paramedic on the other end informs me that my brother, Olivier, has fallen and can’t get up. Administrators of the lodge where Olivier lives have told the paramedic that Olivier has schizophrenia, and the paramedic wants to ...
An Unwanted Voice
In August 2019 the government of Alberta invited me to join the 16-person board of governors at the Banff Centre for an initial three-year term. I had applied through normal channels, was vetted, and was grateful for the appointment to this volunteer role at a place I knew well and cared ...
Holy Healthcare
Just tell them we don’t have it here.” That’s what the nurse told me in Killam Hospital, an hour east of Camrose. I’d asked what would happen if a woman came into our ER asking for the morning-after pill. The nurse wasn’t being self-righteous, but simply explaining the policy.
As ...