Voyageur 59
Carney Heads to Arctic War Games in Norway - the First Canadian PM to Visit Since 1980.
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Carney Heads to Arctic War Games in Norway - First Canadian PM to Visit Since 1980
Mark Carney is heading to the Arctic Circle this weekend to watch NATO's Cold Response exercise in northern Norway, a massive biennial war game involving 25,000 troops from 14 countries. He'll be joined by Norwegian PM Jonas Gahr Store and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz - both of whom, incidentally, are backing the same German submarine maker competing for Canada's multibillion-dollar sub contract.
The trip will make Carney the first Canadian prime minister to visit Norway since 1980. After the exercises, he'll sit down with leaders from Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland for what the Norwegians are billing as a Nordic summit. The agenda is Arctic security, energy, and what Carney has been calling "middle power" cooperation - the idea that countries like Canada and the Nordics need to start working together more tightly now that the old alliances feel shakier.
Michael Byers at UBC said the trip will let Washington know that Arctic security is handled. Canada showing up for NATO in the High North, right after Carney's Davos speech (Voyageur 51) about middle powers stepping up, is the foreign policy version of walking the talk.
Read more: CBC News / Global News
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A photo from the old country:
Doctors Say Canada's ERs Are Killing People, but Nobody's Fixing It
A group of emergency medicine doctors published a warning in the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine this week that reads more like a distress signal than a medical paper. They're calling it a "hidden pandemic" - somewhere between 8,000 and 15,000 Canadians dying of preventable deaths every year because emergency departments are overwhelmed.
The pattern, as they see it, is grim and repetitive. A patient waits hours. They deteriorate - sometimes quietly, sometimes visibly. Then they die before getting assessed. A review happens. Regret is expressed. Nothing changes. In January, a 55-year-old woman died of cardiac arrest after 11 hours in a Winnipeg ER waiting to be admitted. A month before that, a 44-year-old father of three died in Edmonton after eight hours with chest pains.
Alberta doctors have put together a list of at least six potentially preventable deaths over a recent two-week period and are calling on the province to declare a state of emergency. ERs across Canada are routinely running at more than 100% capacity. Appalling, if accurate.
Read more: National Post / Healthing.ca