“Premier Doug Ford has quietly appointed an ally to an advisory post with an annual salary of $348,000.
The Ford cabinet named Dr. Rueben Devlin, a former president of the Ontario PC Party and the longtime CEO of Humber River Hospital, to chair a new body called the Premier’s Council on Improving Healthcare and Ending Hallway Medicine.
The appointment was not officially announced by the Ford government, although the decision was made a week ago during the first meeting of the new cabinet.
Devlin’s hiring was revealed Friday when the orders-in-council from that meeting were posted online. The cabinet order declares Devlin’s salary as $348,000 per year, plus expenses.
“He is going to be worth every penny and we are going to see that in the results,” said Lisa MacLeod, Ontario’s new minister of children, community and social services, during a news conference Friday.”
Source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/premier-doug-ford-rueben-devlin-health-care-adviser-1.4736696.
“On October 20, marijuana will no longer be an illegal drug in Canada—a move that could make it much easier to study how cannabis affects the body and the brain.
“Cannabis has risks and maybe benefits,” says M-J Milloy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use and the University of British Columbia who studies HIV patients’ illicit drug use. Under prohibition, however, “what we, as scientists, have not been able to do is try to figure out what those risks and benefits are in an open way,” he says. “The hope is that legalization of cannabis will take the shackles off scientific inquiry and will allow us to ask and answer the sort of questions we should have been asking twenty, thirty, forty years ago.”
Currently in Canada, to study the physiological effects of cannabis in humans, researchers have to apply for an exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, which has been difficult to get regardless of the political affiliation of government leaders, Milloy says. Funding hasn’t been easy to come by either, making cannabis research the “poor second cousin of alcohol studies,” notes sociologist Andrew Hathaway of the University of Guelph.”
Source: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/canada-could-come-to-the-fore-in-cannabis-research-64455.
“From the normally mild summer climes of Ireland, Scotland and Canada to the scorching Middle East, numerous locations in the Northern Hemisphere have witnessed their hottest weather ever recorded over the past week.
Large areas of heat pressure or heat domes scattered around the hemisphere led to the sweltering temperatures.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports the heat is to blame for at least 33 deaths in southern Quebec, mostly in and near Montreal, which endured record high temperatures.
In Northern Siberia, along the coast of the Arctic Ocean – where weather observations are scarce – model analyses showed temperatures soaring 40 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius) above normal on July 5, to over 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 Celsius).
“It is absolutely incredible and really one of the most intense heat events I’ve ever seen for so far north,” wrote meteorologist Nick Humphrey, who offers more detail on this extraordinary high-latitude hot spell on his blog.”
Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/all-time-heat-records-have-been-set-all-over-the-world-this-week-ireland-scotland-canada-middle-east-climate-change.
“SIDNEY, BC, July 5, 2018 /CNW/ – Seamounts are underwater mountains that are home to an abundance of marine species, from cold-water corals and sponges to Bocaccio and killer whales. These ecosystems are important to maintaining biodiversity in the ocean and contribute greatly to its health. Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Haida Nation, Oceana Canada and Ocean Networks Canada are working together to further ocean research and help protect seamounts in the Pacific Ocean.
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