Category Archives: Sprawl
Bad rural medicine
Tired of pushing a pencil, or maybe a broom, for a living? Why not trade it in for a stethoscope and try your hand as a family doctor? If you’re likely to work in rural areas – a priority with much of Canada’s medical establishment – the crushing barriers that most face getting into medical school don’t apply to you. Just the opposite.
No good reason not to open our doors
The tendency of Hollywood studios to deliver several films on the same theme at the same time is well known. But how odd to observe the same behaviour among publishers of monographs on Canadian public policy.
In the past two weeks, no fewer than three such publications have crossed my desk, all making essentially – no, exactly – the same point: Canada is admitting too many immigrants, of the wrong kind, with consequences too dreadful to contemplate.
The New Environmentalists
When the media interview "environmentalists" such as Elizabeth May (Sierra Club of Canada), Paul Muldoon (Canadian Environmental Law Association) or David Suzuki (David Suzuki Foundation), they invariably obtain quotes or sound bites that suggest the solution to almost any problem is regulation, more intrusive government, and larger budgets and staff for environment ministries. Continue reading
G8 seeks to cut remittance fees for migrant workers
The Group of Eight leaders joined hands Wednesday in helping lower remittance charges for migrant workers as part of their efforts to eradicate poverty, reports Kyodo (Japan). Remittances can play an increasing role in the economic development of poor countries because income earned by migrant workers enables their families back home to receive needed capital for education, housing and business start-ups, the G8 leaders said in an action plan on eradicating poverty issued after their second-day meeting on Sea Island, Georgia. Continue reading
Farm & Countryside Commentary
If you buy into the rhetoric that globalization is all there is, countryside does not matter much. If the technology treadmill to ever lower production costs is all there is, the countryside’s historical resources: food, lumber, energy and minerals do not matter much. If global capitalism is all there is, the countryside may be waiting a long time for some benefits to trickle down. If life – human beings included – is just so much DNA caught in a vast and remorseless evolution beyond our control, there is not much the countryside can do about its fate. Continue reading
Urban Renaissance Institute 