Nepal Celebrates Constitution Day and Encourages All Canadian to Visit

 Nestled in the Himalayas and home to natural wonders like Mount Everest and Chitwan National Park, as well as the combined history of a multi-cultural Buddhist and Hindu country, Nepal is a land of imagination and mystery to those who have yet to visit. Nepal sits between giant countries, China

Democracy Deity and Death: A Discussion by Four Arabs

 Democracy Deity and Death is a book that gives perspective on politics, Islam and significant issues in the Middle East. Although the subject is not new, what makes the book stand out is its perspective storytelling. Author Qais Ghanem masterfully uses the narratives of four very different Arab characters to present

Reforming Healthcare Funding to Address the Needs of Our Aging Population

 Why we need a publicly funded insurance program for home care and long-term care By Réjean Hébert Funding home care and long-term care is fast becoming the main challenge of our outdated medicare system – a system developed in the mid-twentieth century for a young population that mostly required acute

Why We Need to Think Twice About Adopting an Australian Model of Pension Reform

 In a recent nation-wide commentary, authors Charles Lammam and Stephen Kirchner of the Fraser Institute urge the Province of Ontario to adopt an Australian model of pension provision instead of expanding the Canada Pension Plan as proposed in the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan. This creates an interesting debate as it

Can Wait Times for Hip Replacements in Canada be Shortened?

 Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.  I spent my life teaching actuarial science at a university. As a result, I calculated lots of numbers:  averages, expected values, variances. But, they were only numbers. What I didn’t see was the individual human story behind each calculation. But now that I am the

Five challenges for bending the health care cost curve in Canada

 By Greg Marchildon and Livio Di Matteo Why health reform remains a challenge Canadian economists received a pleasant surprise this year: expenditure growth on public healthcare in Canada finally appears to be slowing down. However, it is unclear if this slowdown is the result of explicit success in sustainably bending the cost-curve

Trouble in a fool’s paradise: The problems with our Canadian Forces

 By Dan Donovan and Jennifer O'Meara The HMCS Chicoutimi was only days out of port on its maiden voyage when disaster struck. An onboard fire would leave one sailor dead and an entire crew bobbing in the North Atlantic for days as they waited for a towline to take them back

An Interview with Gen Ray Henault: There’s No Life Like It

 In this three-part series on the state of Canada's military preparedness, Ottawa Life's top writers examine Canada's peacekeeping deployments around the world, capacity and equipment challenges, and pressing infrastructure replacement needs. We begin our series on national defense with the first of three interviews with Gen. Ray Henault, Chief of

Capital Notes: The numbers tell the whole story

 By John Robert Colombo This month's column is something different because it does not deal with quotations about Ottawa or questions about the National Capital Region. Instead, it offers a short discourse on numerology as it relates to Ottawa. Numerology is the study of the relationship between numbers and letters