Politicians have to stop creating impediments to access
By Nigel Rawson and John Adams Macdonald-Laurier Institute On April 14, 2022, Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos announced the federal government’s decision to cancel most of its plan for the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB) to regulate significantly lower prices for new medicines in Canada – a mess created five years ago by then Health…
Studying the history of law in Iran might help point the way to improving legal systems in the West
You might be tempted to think Jairan Gahan’s interest in the legal history of sex in Iran is purely academic. She is most fascinated by the early 20th century, following Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906, when the country was drafting its criminal code. How could that possibly be relevant to life in the modern state, especially…
All the social and justice indicators show that things have only worsened among Indigenous peoples
The March 9, 1988, police shooting of J.J. Harper on the streets of Winnipeg and the much earlier murder of Helen Betty Osborne in The Pas in 1971 led Manitoba Premier Howard Pawley’s government to commission the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry (AJI) on April 13, 1988. This occurred in the middle of the election campaign that…
Has Disney caught the wave of the future? Or will going woke harm The Mouse?
To be ‘woke’ is to have the approved left-leaning opinions about race, the ecology and all manner of social justice issues. Since 2018, the maxim “go woke, go broke” has declared that corporations that go out of their way to be ‘progressive’ suffer financially when consumers resist the message. Examples of the truth of the…
Since 2020 Alberta chiropractors have been required to wear masks. Now one of them has had enough
Since last September, experts have testified at a tribunal hearing for an Alberta chiropractor on how well masks do, or don’t, slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Unfortunately, the chiropractor’s college, YouTube and LinkedIn didn’t want you to know what was said because most of it contradicts what people have been told…
Vaccines can’t only go to the highest bidder. Industry must be made to do what’s best for the public good
Two years ago, Matt Colvin was the most hated man in America. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he had almost 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer and was charging up to $70 per bottle, delivered. Colvin had been making a living by following the supply-and-demand principle of economics. He would study market trends, buy…
It’s time Canadians stood up and opposed judicial interference
Two recent provincial court judgments concerning the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are deeply concerning. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been around them most of my political life and had the good fortune of having several legal minds in my Newfoundland cabinet to advise me regularly. And going to the Supreme Court of Canada…Time to end the government-sanctioned cartel
“Every other sport – like virtually every sort of business – is governed by the antitrust laws.” – Stuart Banner, author of The Baseball Trust: A History of Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption The fact that the Supreme Court of the United States gave Major League Baseball an antitrust exemption in 1922 was…
Attack on the Coastal GasLink site was far more violent than the Freedom Convoy
What Canada offers to its citizens isn’t glamorous or sexy, and it doesn’t inspire the beating of drums. It’s peace, order and good governance. These modest goals are accepted and expected by most Canadians. We may even have tended to take them for granted. But our peace and order have been threatened. For the past…
What's next? A tax on fat people?
Our patience is running thin as we plod through yet another wave of COVID-19. We’re starting to get annoyed at political and medical leaders, who we loved and trusted at the beginning of the pandemic – and only because they haven’t got us through it yet. Deep down, we know that everyone is doing the…