Reinventing Canada: Stephen Harper’s Conservative Revolution. The thin-haired, middle-aged man delivered a speech to the United Nations that undoubtedly left many in the international body fuming.
He criticized Libya, Iran, and North Korea by name: “Just as fascism and communism were the great struggles of previous generations,” he said, “terrorism is the great struggle of ours.” He cited Winston Churchill and defended Israel. And he criticized the UN on its own turf. “The greatest enemies of the United Nations are those who quietly undermine its principles and, even worse, by those who sit idly, watching its slow decline.”
George W. Since 2006, when Conservative Stephen Harper became Canada’s prime minister, America’s typically quiet and modest neighbor to the north has been much more assertive in pursuing its foreign policy. Consider for a moment some context. Canada’s new foreign policy can therefore be said to have begun with Harper’s very first address to Parliament as head of government, in April 2006. Photo Credit: Ted Buracas. Vancouver's Supervised Drug Injection Center: How Does It Work? Vancouver, Canada is the only city in North America that provides a legal facility for drug addicts to push heroin and cocaine and other types of substances into their veins.
It's called InSite, and it's both government-sanctioned and government-funded. Located in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside—often called Canada's poorest postal code—the supervised injection site opened as a 3-year experiment back in 2003 to curb the neighborhood's high levels of disease spread through shared needles and death from overdose. Now, after nearly a decade of academic research, political debate, public scrutiny and a Canadian Supreme Court ruling last September that stated InSite should remain open indefinitely, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and other cities across the nation are contemplating opening their own injection facilities. According to InSite's own records, between 2004 and 2010 they had 1418 overdoses without a single one resulting in death. No one has ever died there. It is. Not too often. “Nadir and Me” by Joseph Heath. Last summer, I had a Canadian moment.
It was at the doctor’s office in Toronto. In the waiting room, to be specific. It was a nondescript place, one that looked as if it hadn’t been renovated since the late ’70s. I had to wait while the receptionist checked in the man who arrived just before me. She was talking to him in great detail about her cellphone plan, and from the tenor of the conversation I sensed that he must work for Rogers. After I signed in, I found myself sitting in the waiting room just across from him. On Calls Why hospitals stillban cellphone use Ryan SnookIn 1984, when the first cellphones became available to the public, US Federal Communications Commission regulations allowed for some twenty-three simultaneous conversations per service area, because the phones emitted so much radio frequency energy.
My thoughts were interrupted by the woman next to me, who started fiddling with the television and asked the receptionist if she could change the channel.