Immaculate Reflections

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Nurses offered 1 per cent for giving 200 per cent

She is well into overtime hours again and doing three jobs instead of one because of a rapidly dwindling workforce. Much of her efforts go toward trying to help save the lives of unvaccinated patients dying from COVID-19. When she leaves for home, angry strangers with signs block and harass her with threats and obscenities. The revolting scenario of nurses and other health-care workers caught in the middle of a crazed political crusade by anti-vaxxers is playing out at hospitals and clinics across the country. Could there be a more morale-destroying running of the gauntlet at the end of an exhausting shift.

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Time for white feminists to process their privilege

An icon of Canada’s feminist community, she was known for giving it her all – her money, her time and her heart. June Callwood was director, actor, stagehand and promotor for some of the most unfashionable causes: people with AIDs, sexually and physically abused women, sex workers, the homeless and the poor. Nicknamed St. June, she helped found and guide 50 non profits during her life, and ardently fought for new models of support and treatment for those living on the margins.

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From Thomas to Kavanagh: Watching the sausages get made

The grinding and mixing of lies and omissions that go into fashioning a U.S. Supreme Court judge has once again become visible.

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Running against the herd

The fraught question amongst the enlightened double-vaccinated: Who are these (expletive) crazy people? Who can watch on-line videos of mobs of raging, ninety-nine percent white anti-vaxxers bearing conspiratorially-themed placards (Stop Medical Tyranny) without extreme bewilderment and frustration?

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Next stop, Gilead?

Just when post-Roe versus Wade generations of women began to think of themselves as sovereign beings, Margaret Atwood waved a red robe from her literary pedestal. Canadian women have not just been complacent about abortion rights, we’ve been smug. Even in the U.S., where increasing numbers of women are at imminent risk of losing one of their most fundamental freedoms, many are in denial.

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Zoom in for human cost of war: zoom out profiteers

Now wrenched to its merciless conclusion, the 20-year war in Afghanistan offers a telescopic picture of reality.

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