Canada must deal with harmful drugs for seniors with national strategy: Study
VANCOUVER—A new study says Canada urgently needs a national strategy to ensure people over 65 are prescribed appropriate medications because the cost of dealing with harmful drugs has reached nearly $2 billion a year.
Professor Steve Morgan of the University of British Columbia says physiological changes associated with aging alter the effects of many medications, meaning older adults shouldn’t be taking them.
Professor Gloria Gutman, a founding director of the Gerontology Research Centre at Simon Fraser University, says some doctors wrongly prescribe anti-psychotic drugs because they wrongly assume seniors have dementia.
Morgan says federal Health Minister Jane Philpott’s mandate letter includes taking action on the problem of inappropriate prescribing for older Canadians and he’s hoping a strategy will soon be in the works.
Clark seeks to bring back BC aboriginal remains, sacred belongings
VICTORIA—Premier Christy Clark says centuries’ worth of human remains and belongings of cultural significance to British Columbia’s First Nations have found their way into museums and private collections around the world and it’s time they were returned.
The premier says she is writing to U.S. President Barack Obama to ask him to extend to B.C. the rights under the Native American Grave Protection Act that makes it law to return human remains.
First Nations Summit Grand Chief Ed John says that many of their treasures were wrongfully taken and in some cases stolen, including the sacred remains of their ancestors.
Vancouver filmmaker among RBC’s Top 25 immigrants of 2016
Vancouver filmmaker Leon Lee has been chosen as one of RBC’s Top 25 Canadian Immigrants of 2016.
Selected from among 630 applicants from across Canada, the Peabody Award-winning director was given the honour because his 2014 film, “Human Harvest,” “has saved Canadian lives by informing the public, organ patients, and the medical community about the illegal and dangerous organ trade in China,” according to the judges.
“His work also saves lives of innocent victims by urging the international community to demand an end to forced organ harvesting in China.”
Other winners include Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan; Queenie Choo, CEO of the Vancouver-based immigrant services group SUCCESS; and Igor Dobrovolskiy, co-founder and artistic director of the Atlantic Ballet Theatre of Canada.
The awards were presented June 21 at One King West Hotel in Toronto.
US city gets approval to draw water from Great Lakes
CHICAGO—After input from Ontario and Quebec, representatives of eight U.S. states have approved a Wisconsin city’s precedent-setting request to draw water from the Great Lakes.
The City of Waukesha had asked to divert water from Lake Michigan because its own aquifer is running low and the water is contaminated with high levels of naturally occurring, cancer-causing radium.
The approval means Waukesha becomes the first exception to a current regional agreement between the eight U.S. states, Ontario, and Quebec under which diversions of water away from the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River basin are banned.
Waukesha had argued that although it’s located outside the boundary of the Great Lakes basin, it is part of a county straddling that geographical line.
Calgary using goatherd in pilot project to destroy weeds
CALGARY—Calgary has introduced 106 goats to a city park in an experimental effort to wipe out noxious weeds, most notably the Canada thistle.
Three goatherders will monitor the herd 24 hours a day over the next three weeks as Calgary looks for a more environmentally friendly way to control weeds.
Chief goatherder Jeannette Hall says using the goats is an ideal solution because the weed seeds do not survive the goats’ digestive tracts.
Chris Manderson, the urban conservation lead for Calgary Parks, says the goats are a good alternative to herbicides and cost considerably less.
Once the test period is over, the city will decide whether to expand the program to other parks in the future.
Home affordability worsens as prices in Vancouver and Toronto rise: RBC
OTTAWA—The Royal Bank says housing affordability in Canada worsened in the first quarter as the cost of ownership in Vancouver and Toronto increased.
It says rises in ownership costs relative to income were modest in most other areas.
Royal Bank says the affordability of a single-detached home in Vancouver hit the worst recorded level for anywhere in Canada due to an “epic surge” in home prices.
The bank’s affordability measure for a single-detached home climbed 9.9 percentage points to 119.5 percent in Toronto and 1.2 percentage points to 71.7 percent in Toronto.
With files from The Canadian Press and Epoch Times
