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Bringing about a higher level of transparency and accountability in provincial and federal governments to help protect taxpayers from abuse

Bringing about a higher level of transparency and accountability in provincial and federal governments to help protect taxpayers from abuse.

Ontario health minister resigns to lead work on national pharmacare plan

Tuesday’s federal budget will establish a national advisory group with former Ontario health minister Eric Hoskins at the helm that will work towards setting up a Canada-wide pharmacare plan, sources say.

Hoskins himself dropped a major clue about the no-longer-so-secret plan Monday when he abruptly resigned both his cabinet position and his seat in the provincial legislature, saying he was leaving “to continue building better health care for all Canadians” and that his “path and journey will become clearer in the days ahead.”

Read more City News

Canada’s phony debate about carbon taxes

In the Ontario PC leadership race, all four candidates hoping to replace Patrick Brown as leader oppose carbon taxes, a centrepiece of Brown’s Tory platform. The federal Conservative Party also opposes carbon taxes.

Some commentators see this as a betrayal of Conservative free-market instincts because (supposedly) our choice is between inefficient bureaucratic regulation and the enlightened Liberal approach of using price-signals to hit greenhouse gas targets. According to this reasoning, economically-literate Conservatives should prefer the latter.

Read more at Maclean’s

Canada’s ‘Filthy Five’ tax loopholes

Inequality is not inevitable. It’s the product of specific political and economic decisions made over decades, decisions that can be corrected.

One glaring cause of inequality is the structure of the tax system itself. In many cases, richer Canadians pay a lower rate of tax on financial instruments such as stock options than middle-class and working Canadians do on their earned income. This is both blatantly unfair and deprives the federal government of much-needed revenue that could be spent on valuable social programs.

Read moire at Toronto Star

Ontario law to require drug firms to reveal funds paid to doctors’ groups, patient advocates

Pharmaceutical companies will have to reveal in detail the payments they make to patient-advocacy groups and professional medical societies in Ontario as part of the province’s efforts to pull back the curtain on money in medicine.

The lack of transparency has meant that health charities and non-profits have had no mandatory obligation to reveal which companies are funding them and in what amounts.

Read more at The Globe and Mail

US Law Enforcement Officials Announce Largest Ever Elderly Fraud Case

U.S. law enforcement officials on Thursday announced what they labeled as the largest ever fraud enforcement action involving elderly Americans in U.S. history, charging more than 200 people and bringing civil actions against dozens more.

The defendants, many of them foreign nationals living outside the United States, are accused of robbing more than one million elderly Americans of more than $1 billion, the officials said.

Read more at VOA News

Surrey man convicted in 1986 B.C. terrorist shooting poses with Trudeau’s wife, cabinet minister in India

A Surrey businessman convicted in a 1986 terrorist shooting in B.C. posed with Sophie Gregoire Trudeau and a Canadian cabinet minister during the prime minister’s trip to India.

Jaspal Atwal, a one-time member of the now-banned International Sikh Youth Federation, had also been invited to a dinner with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the Canadian High Commission in Delhi on Thursday night.

Read more at Vancouver Sun

Ottawa psychiatrist suspended, ordered to take anger management

Dr. John Dimock later found the keys to his clinic on the floor of his car.

Dimock, 66, has been a practising psychiatrist for more than 35 years with offices in Ottawa and Farmville, Virginia. In a decision issued last month, the discipline committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario suspended his licence for four months due to professional misconduct, and ordered him to complete courses in ethics, workplace boundaries and anger management.

Read more at Ottawa Citizen

States introducing legislation to import Canadian drugs

The rising cost of prescription drugs is not a new story. But as continuing efforts to lower prices have had little effect, states are starting to take matters into their own hands.

The nonpartisan National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP) reports that currently “a total of 87 bills in 34 states of all political stripes seek to save money on prescription drugs.” Six of these 34 states want to set up state-based programs selling cheaper Canadian drugs to U.S. patients.

Read more at MultiBriefs: Exclusive

Following the money between patient groups and Big Pharma

Why would more than two dozen patient advocacy groups want to stop Health Canada from trying to lower prescription drug prices in Canada?

“It seems startling because you would think lower drug prices are in the interests of patients,” said Sharon Batt, a Dalhousie University researcher who studies the links between such groups and the pharmaceutical industry.

Read more at CBC News