Archive for 2009 July

The Canadian Health Coalition is concerned about new threats to our universal public health care system.  They are concerned that the new head of the Canadian Medical Association, who owns private clinics himself, is promoting a mixed model of health care delivery.

I applaud the goals of the Canadian Health Coalition, which has just launched a website to address this new threat, and urge everyone to sign the pledge online, which I appear to have signed twice in my enthusiasm.     Read more »

Here’s today’s press release from the Green Party of Canada regarding the coup in Honduras:     Read more »

I’ve had a couple of people ask what Green Party policy was on disabilities.  One concern was that some of the policies towards greening the economy were fairly hostile to people who had a difficult time already dealing with life’s challenges.  This is something I’ve pledged to address on Shadow Cabinet.

In the meantime, I’m proud also to say that the Green Party has a very robust and human-scale policy towards people with disabilities centred on two policy points which I find incredibly important.     Read more »

The stresses we put on the planet are a product of individual demands on resources multiplied by the number of us there are.  Ecologists are well aware of this and used to discuss it when I was a child.  One of the reasons these concerns were dropped politically is because population control can be used as an excuse for a lot of nasty policy — racist immigration reforms, draconian meddling in personal fertility and tax structures that punish children who are in no way to blame for being alive.

Still, plenty of sensible voices lament silencing of the issue, which is serious.  And many of these have been unhappy about the Green Party’s refusal to address this issue.  I’ve heard this concern expressed at the door at least four times while canvassing – and I’ve been proud to say that at the last Green Party of Canada AGM, we adopted a sensible population policy that recognizes the problem, yet proposes to address it in ways that are non-intrusive and which enable rather than punish the most disadvantaged people on the planet.     Read more »

With the election of Barrack Obama in the United States, they have slightly improved their climate change policy, enough for Canada to beat them out for last place among the G8 countries in a joint evaluation by the World Wildlife Fund and the Insurance giant Allianz.     Read more »