It’s time we put Housing First For most of his life, Murray Barr was an ordinary American until everything changed abruptly when his story of personal tragedy and period of homelessness created a media frenzy. It was in his article, “Million Dollar Murray,” that Malcolm Gladwell turned homelessness into a celebrity cause by illustrating […]
Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s proposals for tightening tax breaks associated with private companies is generating several kinds of response on social media and in mainstream media. The most evident is an impressive deluge of evidence-free rhetoric claiming that the proposals are an attack on everything from the middle class to maternity leave for female doctors […]
The Trudeau government is set on legalizing marijuana by the summer of next year. While they will enjoy the political payoff of appearing progressive on this matter, all of the associated problems and the logistics of legalizing pot will fall on the shoulders of the provincial governments. There are strong correlations between how a drug […]
A version of this commentary appeared in Maclean’s Magazine Among the most insistent critics of the recent proposals by Finance Minister Bill Morneau to tighten up the use of private companies to avoid taxes have been Canada’s doctors. Canadians generally do not begrudge doctors their above-average incomes. They spend many years training for their jobs, […]
This story began when I offered to represent the mother of a three-year-old with PKU, a rare genetic disorder, in a federal tax court. She had never even fought a parking ticket before she went against the federal government. We won. It turns out, evidence matters. But the story doesn’t end there. We went to […]
Federal finance minister, Bill Morneau recently released a long and nervously awaited discussion paper which was met with near apoplexy in some corners. The paper aimed at closing a number of loopholes where mainly rich taxpayers use private companies (Canadian controlled private corporations or CCPCs) to reduce their taxes compared to most Canadians whose incomes […]
Originally published in the Winnipeg Free Press on August 17, 2017 Canada has always liked to see itself as slightly better than the United States when it comes to racism. Certainly after this weekend’s violence in Virginia, in which Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis and white nationalists clashed with protesters over the removal of a statue of […]
I have to admit, I spent much of Saturday watching on repeat the video clip of federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna in a scrum after meeting with her provincial peers. No, it wasn’t because I was in awe of the Manitoba government’s plans for carbon tax (I’m not), but McKenna’s single-handed slicing and dicing of […]
Kickstarting the renewable energy economy comes first A version of this commentary appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, Vancouver Province and the Waterloo Region Record Pricing carbon is about much more than getting people to drive less. It is also about generating the money we need to accelerate the process of getting our economy off fossil […]
Women get sicker, but men die quicker. It’s an adage that no one seems to question. That there is a gender gap in life expectancy seems to be accepted without wondering why. Why is it that, according to Statistics Canada data, men’s average life expectancy is 4.7 years shorter than women’s? In Manitoba, the difference […]
