Unless you have been living under a fake rock beside a fake lake, chances are you’ve heard about this G8/G20 business in some way, shape, or form. The reasons why many people are protesting, however, may not be as clear. That’s probably because there isn’t any single issue uniting all protesters. And, despite what you […] More »

Today we’ve got a new entry in the Verbatim series, the transcripts we provide of our Listen to This podcast. (Just a reminder that you can catch new, original interviews every other Monday—you can subscribe with any podcast listening program by grabbing the podcast rss feed, or easily subscribing through iTunes.) In this interview, Nick […] 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 »

Pretty much every “women and children first!” joke has already been made relating to the upcoming G8/G20 conferences in Toronto and Muskoka, and the Prime Minister’s announcement that maternal and children’s health would be the core of the agenda. The Conservatives have been dancing around the issue of reproductive planning and what they actually consider […] More »

Update, Friday, March 19: It seems to me that it’s impossible to truly know where the government stands. One moment the foreign minister says birth control isn’t included in their G8 maternal health push. The next the prime minister’s backing up on that, saying discussion around birth control’s not out of the cards. *** There […] More »

In the Twitter-verse, news spreads fast, is debunked faster, and is retweeted before you can think of something better to say. Gordon Lightfoot can attest to this, I’m sure. So when a long story is slowly told through the 140-character limit, it tends to make people pay attention. That’s what happened when Angie Jackson decided […] More »

Atrazine, a controversial herbicide ubiquitous in Canadian cornfields has been found to chemically castrate male frogs, turning them into egg laying females. The Globe and Mail reported yesterday that when scientists at the University of California Berkley exposed male African clawed frogs to minute amounts of the toxin, just 2.5 parts per billion,the mutation occurred. Of […] More »

In all the hoopla following the New Orleans Saints’ momentous victory over the Indianapolis Colts in last week’s Super Bowl, an important piece of the biggest day in North American sports seemed to disappear all-too-quickly from the collective consciousness. With the pervasive and nauseating hyperbole around the significance of the Saints’ win in Hurricane Katrina’s […] More »

Year by which G8 countries pledged “universal access” for HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention, and care: 2010 Estimated number of people, globally, currently receiving that care: 4,000,000 Estimated number of people, globally, still waiting on that pledge: 5,000,000 * Percentage of Canada’s population that is Aboriginal: 4% Percentage of new Canadian HIV/AIDS patients who are Aboriginal: 10% […] More »

My doctor and I sat there, blankly staring at one another, wondering where we both went wrong. I was perched beside his desk, asking for a prescription refill for my birth control. “You don’t need to ask me,” he kept saying. “Just call ahead, ask for what you’d like and come pick it up at […] More »

If you combine my disability with Queerly Canadian writer Cate Simpson‘s sexual orientation, you may at least approximate the person who should be writing ThisAbility this week. Nevertheless, as a straight male, I’ve still been hearing rumblings of this problem among LGBT friends (and friends of friends) with disabilities for years, even though I don’t […] More »