Assorted content to end your week.- Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on a new Ontario study recommending a strong investment in child care to reduce the gender wage gap. – Allan Moscovitch, Nick Falvo and David Macdonald offer a useful primer on social suppo…
Continue readingTag: Insite
Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week.- Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on a new Ontario study recommending a strong investment in child care to reduce the gender wage gap. – Allan Moscovitch, Nick Falvo and David Macdonald offer a useful primer on social suppo…
Continue readingMontreal Simon: The Con Regime’s Never-ending War on Vulnerable Canadians
While Stephen Harper declares war on the Great Terrorist Menace, claiming only he can save our lives from those who would behead us in our beds.His foul Con regime continues to wage war on some of Canada's most vulnerable Canadians.Even if it could cost thousands of them their lives.For while this
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: A Small But Hard Won Victory Over Harper
It’s bittersweet at best. Health Canada has issued an exemption to Vancouver’s Insite, the city’s clean needle injection site. That’s not to say the battle is over. Despite the clear ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Harper regime has put Insite on a year-to-year exemption meaning the Vancouver
Continue readingMelissa Fong: DTES Local Area Plan- Speaker #5, on Amendments
We need to respect the experiential knowledge of DTES residents that understand how the plan violates their security. Not fundamentally opposed to Vision- but you have to realize reality. If you insist on the ideology of “social mix” you also have to set up the circumstances for dignity of all
Continue readingMelissa Fong: Downtown Eastside Local Area Plan- Summary
Like last time, I did some LiveTweeting of the evening- My strategy is to summarize the main point of all the voices; add in my OWN commentary (I can be […]
Continue readingMelissa Fong: The facts on PHS scandal & following reactions of critics, boards and Jenny Kwan
…The fact is that PHS provides really important harm reduction programming that needs to be defended. The scandal involves non-profit board members that are supposed to be working in the best interest of the DTES, not on #34KVacations. Townshend and Small (Jenny Kwan’s ex) are implicated with irresponsible spending on
Continue readingMelissa Fong: Financial reform: Taking responsibility as public servants and otherwise…
Facts: I don’t hate Vision Vancouver. I’m indifferent to the overall career of Gregor Robertson. I actually like Andrea Reimer, from what I know of her. (Confession: I really like […]
Continue readingThe Cracked Crystal Ball II: No, Yaakov Roth, The Supreme Court of Canada Is Not Overstepping Its Boundaries
I see the Harper PMO must have found another muppet to write opinion pieces for them. In the National Post, we find Yaakov Roth expounding on the “problems” he has with the way the Supreme Court of Canada has been ruling on such matters as safe injection sites and prostitution.
Continue readingknitnut.net: Seamy Underbelly, Part II
Visiting the Downtown Eastside (DTES) has churned up some contradictions for me, and resolving those contradictions requires re-thinking some questions I thought I already knew the answers to: 1) To what extent do people choose to live in the DTES, and to what extent are they stuck there? 2) Does
Continue readingknitnut.net: My visit to the seamy underbelly
At the harbour, outside my hotel So…I went to Vancouver for a whirlwind business trip. I arrived Wednesday afternoon and left Friday morning. I was working most of the time, but I did have two more-or-less free evenings, so I did what I could to cram Vancouver in. I hadn’t
Continue readingThe Equivocator: The 2012 “You Go Girl!” Awards. Presented by: The Equivocator
Context: I don’t like to think of this blog as existing in a vacuum. You may not be aware of it but I am also an avid user of the twitter and the facebook (my twitter feed is there on the right side of my blog btw.) On twitter (you can
Continue readingDavid Climenhaga's Alberta Diary: Today’s anniversary of a year of Tory rule in Ottawa: it just doesn’t get any better than this!
Contemplating the thought of three more years of Stephen Harper. Below: Mr. Harper himself. Tory times, as the old saying goes, are terrible times. So it should surprise no one that as we mark the first anniversary of Stephen Harper’s majority victory today, the country is increasingly polarized, students are
Continue readingknitnut.net: Safe injection sites: Treating people with addictions like they matter
Last October, the Supreme Court ruled that Insite, Vancouver’s safe injection site, could stay open despite the Harper Government’s objections. The arguments hinged on whether addiction was primarily a health issue or a crime issue. If it were a health matter it would fall under provincial jurisdiction; if it were
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Murtaza Hussain nicely sums up why we should be pushing for businesses and wealthy individuals to contribute their fair share through a progressive tax system rather than through self-aggrandizing charity: The private social safety net, provided by corporate donors as compensation for the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – The Star makes the case for Canada’s wealthiest citizens to pay their fair share: Apart from their hefty pay packets, the top-earning CEOs are sitting on $2 billion in stock options that are treated as dividend income, and taxed at half the value.
Continue readingArt Threat: Happy Birthday Nietzche & Foucault!
There’s only a little to say about this – Michel Foucault was born October 15, 1926, and by weird coincidence, Friedrich Nietzsche was born on the same day 82 years earlier- October 15, 1844. Big thinkers in the canon of Dead White Men. So what, you might be asking — and what does that have […]
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Lets just Call Bullshit Now, Shall We?
Mama Kay cites a study sponsored by …the Drug Prevention Network of Canada and Real Women of Canada……to challenge research in The Lancet which purported to demonstrate that the Insite Clinic in Vancouver saves lives. Th…
Continue readingQuebec May Open Safe Injection Sites A L’Insite And Compassion Club
It would be about time and why shouldn’t we? We are, after all, a province of progress or supposed to be. After all, we opened the first Compassion club, a place, highly supervised, where sick people with the prescription from a medical professional can obtain medicinal marijuana, albeit, on the fringes of the . . . → Read More: Quebec May Open Safe Injection Sites A L’Insite And Compassion Club
Continue readingLaw is Cool: Safe injection facilities and arbitrary government decisions
I often talk to friends or strangers about law. I remember a debate I had with someone once about the government. Can it make arbitrary decisions? I said yes, and he said, rather indignantly, no. His logic was that arbitrary means capricious with a tinge of tyranny. Doesn’t our democratic government respect the rule of […]
Continue reading