Surgeries scheduled within weeks with price tags over $20K prompt concerns over 2-tiered health care It’s a contentious reality in a country with a universal medicare system: Canadians can pay to sidestep the queue for surgeries with long waiting lists, such as hip and knee replacements. Private clinics across Canada are advertising to prospective patients that within weeks they can get surgeries that typically take six months or more under provincial health plans. The price for a single hip or knee replacement runs in the range of $20,000 to $28,000,Read more

Plan involved restructuring, several rounds of layoffs and facility closures over 3 years Aurora Cannabis Inc. announced Thursday that it has completed a transformation plan delivering $340 million in annualized savings since February 2020, but said it still incurred a $67.2-million net loss in its most recent quarter. The plan involved an extensive restructuring and several rounds of layoffs and facility closures over the last three years as it contended with shifting COVID-19 measures and grappled with aligning supply and demand. The Edmonton company’s goal was to reach profitability basedRead more

Fewer than 30 per cent of Canadian doctors trained abroad are matched to residency positions The country’s health-care system is suffering from an acute shortage of doctors — even as hundreds of qualified Canadian physicians trained abroad are turned away each year because of a tangle of red-tape and bias, experts say. Canada is passing up a chance to add hundreds of these Canadian doctors to a strained system because, critics say, tight-fisted provincial governments have restricted the number of residency spots — and because the system explicitly privileges students who went to CanadianRead more

Verdict delivered in Supreme Court on Friday afternoon WARNING: This story contains distressing details. Krysta Grimes, a St. John’s substitute teacher accused of having sex with her underage student in 2018, has been acquitted. Justice Vikas Khaladkar dismissed the sexual exploitation charge against her in Supreme Court on Friday afternoon. Reading from his decision, Khaladkar said he couldn’t accept the complainant’s credibility because of a series of “serious, significant inconsistencies” in his testimony. Grimes leapt from the dock, hugging her lawyer, Rosellen Sullivan. She dodged a question from a reporter, surrounded by familyRead more

Tory had just begun 3rd term in office as Toronto’s mayor Toronto Mayor John Tory announced on Friday that he will step down from his office after admitting to a relationship with a former staffer. “During the pandemic I developed a relationship with an employee in my office in a way that did not meet the standards to which I hold myself as mayor and as a family man,” Tory said during a brief statement at city hall. Tory said the relationship ended by “mutual consent” earlier this year. TheRead more