If you’ve picked up the latest issue of This Magazine, you might have noticed Jenn Hardy’s article on Canada’s midwife shortage. (Jenn is a former This intern and now a Montreal-based freelance writer. She has written for us recently on sustainable agriculture, Montreal musician Vanessa Rodrigues, and investigated the environmental claims of the DivaCup.) You […] More »

It wasn’t until the early 1900s that it became “normal” to have a baby under the watch of an obstetrician in a hospital. But over the last few decades, childbirth has become an increasingly complicated, medicalized affair, with more inductions, surgeries, and drugs than ever before. The advancements have saved many otherwise dangerous deliveries, but […] More »

Infertile couples suffer in silence in a baby-crazed culture. Treatments are lightly regulated and cost a fortune. Why public funding could ease the burden and improve care It’s just another September day in Nova Scotia—sun shining, birds chirping, a late summer breeze playing in the treetops. Only one thing is different today for Shawna Young: […] More »

If you live in a major Canadian city, you may have seen Plan Canada’s “Because I am a Girl” ads plastered on buses and billboards. In the season of giving, the campaign attempts to sell the virtues of female empowerment. Ads state that girls around the world are three times more likely to be malnourished […] More »

This is not an operating room. It’s a solarium. The glass windows connect to a metal frame that connects to the concrete floor, the floor of this enclosed balcony three storeys up. The concrete is coated with sealant to keep it non-porous. The less porous a surface, the less chance bacteria will take root and […] More »

Canadians – a bunch of walking, talking BPA vessels? Apparently so. Statistics Canada recently released results from their first nationwide look into bisphenol A, and the results aren’t pretty. According to a Globe and Mail report on the stats, 91 per cent of Canadians tested show some sort of BPA exposure, and teenagers carry most of […] More »

We’ve talked a lot about what’s going wrong so far with the G20 and G8 meetings taking place in Ontario this year. And lord knows there are plenty of problems: aside from the lack of discussion surrounding women’s health we’re now chopping down trees in an urban jungle and searching around for supposedly stolen police […] More »

With just one overworked psychiatrist for the whole territory, the North Slave Correctional Centre has become a de facto psychiatric hospital. Stuck in legal limbo, dozens of prisoners wait—and then wait some more—for justice Inside Yellowknife’s courthouse, behind the plastic shield of the prisoner’s docket, Tommy is plucking his fingers: one, two, three, four, from […] More »

“This is about the complete failure of democracy,” Alan Young says, munching on his strawberry-jam toast at Sunnybrook Restaurant in Toronto. Young, a criminal lawyer, has been Canada’s forerunning pot reformist since he got a judge to declare that “marijuana is relatively harmless compared to the so-called hard drugs, and including tobacco and alcohol” during […] More »

Aside from the fact that single older women have enough stigma to deal with, the “cougar” trend has been a rampant part of pop culture for years now. And while, for some reason, the thought of an older woman dating a younger man draws giggles and raised eyebrows more often than not, up until this […] More »

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This certainly rings true in the world of health policy: there’s a lot of talk, and the idea of change or reform is nice to think about, regardless of whether it ever happens. Recently, it seems that absolutely nothing is changing at all. Because for […] More »