Photo Credit: Toronto Star

According to an Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News, the NDPs have overtaken the Liberals as the “anti-Ford” party. Thirty-five percent of the poll respondents say they would vote for Andrea Howarth’s party, up six points from last week’s polling. The Liberals would only garner 22 percent, down four percent from last week. Most tracking polls show that with nine weeks to go, the Ontario election is Doug Ford’s to lose. But this is the reason why support for the NDPs has surged in recent weeks. Many progressive voters, yours truly included, might have to vote strategically for the NDPs on June 7 in order to prevent a victory by Ford. This is particularly true in Toronto’s 416 region, the NDP has the stronger lead, with 38 percent of respondents saying they would vote orange. Another 34 percent say they would vote for PC, while 26 percent picked Liberal. As a press release from Ipsos reads, “With the rising belief that the NDP is the better option to stop Ford, the anti-Ford vote is coalescing behind the Howarth banner.”

Progressive voters like me would do whatever we can to stop Ontario from having our own version of Donald Trump as a leader. Last time when the NDP was in power in 1990, Ontario experienced the worst recession the province ever had. But with the Liberals’ policies now leaning from centrist to left, there are, in fact, not a lot of differences between the NDPs and the Liberals.

Here’s what Andrea Howarth’s party has pledged to do if they were elected:

• Drug and dental coverage for all Ontarians
• Thousands of hospital beds and an end to hallway medicine
• A hydro plan that cuts bills by 30% and puts Hydro One back into public hands
• A plan to take on student debt by converting new provincial student loans to grants, plus eliminating and refunding interest
• Tax the rich: the most profitable corporations; those who earn $220,000 or more; those who buy luxury vehicles; and those who speculate in the housing market.
• 65,000 new affordable homes, funding to repair social housing and legislation to curb above-guideline rent increases and ‘renovictions’
• Childcare that’s free for those who earn less than $40,000 and costs an average of $12 per day for all other families, plus 202,000 new not-for-profit, licensed childcare spaces
• 50% operating funding for municipal transit, which means immediate improvements to services and more affordable fares

At election times, senior citizens are the most important constituents because unlike the millennials, they vote. Out of the NDP election promises above, the top three will all appeal to seniors. Most politicians know that about 75 percent of Canadians over 65 are reliable voters. According to the Statistics Canada General Social Survey, they voted in the last federal, provincial and municipal elections. Among 25- to 44-year-olds, the proportion of reliable voters is closer to 45 percent. Targeting older voters is clearly an efficient way to campaign.

The Liberals are also betting big on seniors’ care, drug and dental coverage in their 2018 pre-election budget which covers billions in funding for seniors, including a $750 yearly benefit for those 75 and over who still live at home. The Healthy Home Program will cost $1 billion over three years. Another $650 million will go toward boosting the number of visits by caregivers to clients’ homes.

For seniors in long-term care facilities, the Liberals plan to spend $300 million over three years to hire a registered nurse in every site in Ontario and provide an average of four hours of personal daily care for each resident by 2022. The Liberals also plan to introduce a program to help cover costs of pharmaceutical drugs and dental care for Ontarians without workplace benefits, regardless of income or pre-existing OHIP coverage. Wynne already committed to expanding the existing OHIP program to cover prescription drug costs for seniors 65 and over, a promise with a $575 million price tag.

The Ontario Drug and Dental Program will reimburse 80 percent of eligible drugs and dental expenses, up to a maximum of $400 for a single person, $600 per couple or up to $700 for a family of four with two children, or $50 per child.

But the problem with this Liberal budget lies in the fact that the 2018 budget outlines a total of $20.3 billion in new spending over three years that will put the province back into deficit after finally balancing the books last year.

The PCs and the NDPs are no better. Doug Ford promised to cut gas prices by 10 cents a litre if his PC party wins next month’s election, saying he’d do so by cutting the provincial gas tax and scrapping the cap-and-trade system. But he was not clear on how he would replace the billions in revenue that would be lost by taking those actions. When asked how he would make up for the lost revenue, Ford only said, “We can’t afford not to do this.”

NDP leader Andrea Howarth, meanwhile, would not provide details of what families earning more than $40,000 would pay for child care under her plan for the province. The NDPs are proposing to fully subsidize public, licensed, not-for-profit child care for those earning less than $40,000. But The Globe and Mail correctly pointed out that the party has not given details on specific income brackets that may be established or said if there would be any caps. Howarth was asked several times for those details during the past week but would only say that it is a “sliding scale.”

Unfortunately, no matter how the incumbent Liberals are more experienced with governing and budgeting, this is a party that is most likely to suffer defeat after 15 years in power. No political party can be free from scandals and the Liberals have had too many of them for Ontarians to forget. So even though it’s a risk to vote for the NDPs, I hope their similarities with the Liberal policies to improve the livelihood of the mature population will win over the significant boomers’ and seniors’ votes and, at least, stop the PCs from being a majority party.

Photo Credit: Canadian Career College

The New York Times reported recently that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis, among the 10 occupations expected to grow the most through 2026, personal care and home-health aides will require the most new workers, with 1.2 million new positions between them. About 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day, and more than half will need long-term care, according to the Pew Research Center.

Home-care agencies and elderly-care facilities are apparently struggling to recruit. Last year, 26 percent of personal-care aides and home-health aides in the U.S. were foreign born, according to the Conference Board. In New York, 62 percent of home aides were foreign born. In California, Massachusetts and New Jersey, foreigners represented nearly half of them. That is why a recent bill introduced by the Republicans and supported by the White House to create a point system for admission based on factors including education, English skills and job offers in the U.S., which would cut the overall number of green cards awarded each year by half, worries employers who rely on immigrant labour. Senior-care agencies particularly are worried because many are dependent on Medicaid and Medicare and so cannot easily raise wages to make their jobs more attractive to native-born workers. According to a Washington think-tank, the Center for Global Development, the U.S. needs far more new low-skilled workers than high-skilled workers. Only three of the 10 occupations expected to grow in demand require university degrees, all of them digital or data-focused: software developers, statisticians and mathematicians.

In Ontario, Canada, to meet the increasing demand for home care, the role of personal support workers (PSWs) is shifting from providing primarily personal and supportive care to include care activities previously provided by regulated health professionals (RHPs). Findings from a recent review of home-care service user charts in Ontario, Canada, indicate that normally, PSWs provide personal and supportive care commensurate with their training. However, in approximately one quarter of care plans reviewed, PSWs also completed more complex-care activities transferred to them by RHPs. Service users receiving transferred care were older and had higher levels of cognitive and functional impairment. As the population ages in Ontario, the demand for PSWs performing more complex tasks is only going to increase substantially.

That is why the Liberal government in Ontario is creating a new provincial agency called Personal Support Services Ontario that could eventually serve hundreds of thousands of patients in the province. CBC News reported that this move would mean PSWs will become provincial employees. It also has the potential to take a significant portion of the $2.5 billion in annual publicly-funded home care away from the for-profit and not-for-profit agencies currently providing it. The government says creating the agency would give home-care clients more choice in selecting a PSW and more control in determining their care schedule. As with other new government policies, there are supporters and naysayers.

The plan is laid out in a Ministry of Health document dated October 2017 which says  Personal Support Services Ontario will be created soon to deliver home care in the spring. It also says the new provincial agency will directly recruit, screen and employ PSWs. Some 729,000 people received provincially-funded home care services in 2015-16. Nearly all of that care was delivered by nurses and PSWs employed by outside agencies, both for-profit and not-for-profit. The document says that the new provincial agency would initially provide PSWs to clients who need a high volume of home care –  at least 14 hours per week.

We all know that in 2015, the auditor general criticized the regional agencies that coordinated home-care services, the Community Care Access Centres (CCACs). Critics also questioned how much of the CCAC budget went into administration instead of home care and found that nurses employed directly by the CCACs were paid more than those employed by agencies. This all prompted the government to eventually dismantle the CCACs effective as of April last year.

While the creation of Personal Support Services Ontario seems to be a good idea, more time and work should be dedicated to providing better training to the PSWs and improving the efficiency of home-care delivery. We do not need a new provincial agency to reinvent the wheel and recreating a similar bureaucracy to the CCACs while thousands of seniors continue to be on the waiting list for the services of PSWs. With the upcoming provincial leadership elections, it would be interesting to see how the Wynne government would tackle this important new policy.

I have more than once advocated the support of a national pharmacare program for Canada on this blog. It, therefore, gave me hope when the Trudeau Government recently plucked Ontario’s Health Minister, Eric Hoskins, to chair a special Federal Commission to look into the introduction of a national pharmacare program for the nation. Yesterday, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne said that her budget will include a blueprint to expand Ontario’s pharmacare program, known as OHIP-plus, which currently covers people up to the age of 25. She said she will move forward without the federal government for now and beginning August 1, 2019, seniors will no longer have to pay a deductible or co-payment for more than 4,400 prescription drugs.

Skeptics immediately said that both the Federal and Ontario Liberal Governments made these promises to win votes in the upcoming elections. For the highly unpopular Kathleen Wynne, in particular, this is obviously a campaign promise to woo the votes of the boomer and senior populations. She says the program will cost $575 million a year when it is fully operational in 2020-21. Drugs covered in the program include medications for cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes and asthma. Campaign promises can be broken but this latest announcement has won my vote.

Health care ranks highly among voter concerns in national polls, so it did not surprise me when Finance Minister Bill Morneau introduced the feasibility study of a national pharmacare program when he unveiled the Federal budget last month. The budget announced the creation of an advisory council, headed by Dr. Eric Hoskins, that would investigate whether public health-insurance plans could be expanded to cover prescription drugs. A national pharmacare plan had been previously proposed by the New Democratic Party (NDP).

The appointment of Dr. Hoskins, in itself, is already a step in the right direction. Dr. Hoskins, while in office as Ontario’s Health Minister, has always been a strong advocate for a national pharmacare program. In his new role, he will study the options, their costs, explain the trade-offs and determine which is the most feasible. Currently, about 26 million Canadians have private drug benefits, largely through employers. There are 102 public drug insurance programs, but that still leaves 700,000 people with no drug coverage, and an estimated 3.6 million with inadequate coverage, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

A national pharmacare plan could save anywhere from $4 billion to $11 billion on the $28.5-billion prescription drug bill (from 2015). These savings could come from joint buying, more strictly regulating drug prices, more aggressive use of generics, and limiting the list of drugs that are covered. The Globe and Mail reported that while a single, national plan would theoretically save money on drug purchases, it would also mean a large-scale shifting of costs from the private sector to the public sector. The single biggest obstacle to pharmacare is the unwillingness of federal, provincial and territorial governments to absorb those costs and then increase taxes to pay the bill.

National pharmacare means insuring that every Canadian has access to necessary prescription drugs regardless of ability to pay. This philosophy has very few detractors, but there are many technical, financial and political impediments. But the appointment of Dr. Hoskins to chair the advisory council suggested the government’s seriousness about this initiative. It is well known that Dr. Hoskins, a physician himself, is a long-time proponent of an ambitious national pharmacare program. He has publicly backed that the best way of doing pharmacare is to throw out the system we currently have. The basic idea is that medically necessary drugs would be covered under the Canada Health Act and provided by provincial health plans for everybody, including those who now have private insurance. The federal government’s bulk-buying power would drive down prices for these new plans. People who felt the public coverage was inadequate could buy supplementary insurance on the private market, just like they can under medicare.

Skeptics and the Opposition are already criticizing the Trudeau government for paying lip service. But given Dr. Hoskins’s credentials and track record, and the timing of the Federal elections next year, it will only work to the Liberals’ advantage to devise a fiscally-responsible national pharmacare plan that would work.

Judging from the latest national polls, the Federal Government seems to be on the right track. A new Nanos Research poll that surveyed 1,000 Canadian adults by phone and online between March 7 and March 12, after the Liberals tabled their third federal budget on February 27, indicated that Canadians support the idea of public health insurance that covers prescription drugs. But they don’t like running deficits nor do they want new taxes to pay for the programs. But Canadians cannot have their cake and eat it too! How will the national pharmacare program be paid for otherwise? The NDPs have not come up with a good idea for financing this program either. So we should let Dr. Hoskins do his job and come up with a sensible plan. In Canada, we have had public hospital insurance since 1957, and public insurance for physicians since 1966. It is about time that we see another large-scale national health initiative on the horizon.

Ever since the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal broke, new similar accusations have been emerging everyday around powerful men in entertainment, politics, journalism and the corporate world. Whether it’s on Twitter at  #MeToo, or at tell-all press conferences, a lot of successful, powerful men were caught and shamed.

In the U.S., however, where every person seems to be either a Democrat or Republican, the discussion has gone awry – Republicans would immediately condemn Democrat offenders such as Senator Al Franken while Democrats were relentless with Alabama’s former state judge and Senate candidate Roy Moore. So, even the sexual harassment discussions have become a part of partisan politics. But people are missing a very important point – there should only be one standard for sexual harassment: the behaviour is just plainly wrong and it doesn’t matter which political party does the predator belong to!

So when columnist Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times said that she spent all weekend feeling guilty that she had called for Senator Al Franken’s resignation because she considered him an “otherwise decent man,” my reaction was why? Why would anybody and any woman have a different standard for a politician who’s an ally when he, like all the other accused sexual predators of the opposition party, made equally deplorable mistakes? No sexual predator or harasser can, in any way, be considered as decent and he should rightly be asked to resign. In fact, calling for the resignation of Al Franken is as important as barring Roy Moore from being admitted into the Senate.

We all tend to defend men we like. I used to adore Kevin Spacey because of his acting skills and Shakespearean knowledge. But his behaviour towards young men in the last three decades should really put him in a different light among his fans. Defenders of the various offenders started to put predatory behaviours into different categories – Weinstein’s sadistic serial predation is not comparable to Louis C.K.’s exhibitionism; the groping Franken has been accused of is not in the same moral universe as Moore’s alleged sexual abuse of minors.Unfortunately, there really is no difference and we should not judge them according to the severity of their offences. They were all wrong, plain and simple.

I further disagree with Kate Harding who made this case in The Washington Post last week. She wrote that Democratic sexual offenders may be flawed, but they are the men who “regularly vote to protect women’s rights and freedoms.” But if feminists are asking  for the pardon of sexual predators so that those men could remain in the pool of people who could keep on protecting women’s rights, they are simply enabling these men to continue to be hypocrites.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times was never my favourite journalist, but she does have a point when she said that the Democrats and the world should never have forgiven Bill Clinton for his sexual misdeeds when he was President. She asked in her article last Sunday, “The Hillary Effect“: “Would feminists and liberals make the same Faustian bargain they made in 1998: protect Bill on his regressive behavior toward women because the Clintons have progressive policies toward women?” She went on to say that both the left and the right rushed in to twist the sex scandals for their own ideological ends. Unfortunately, the stench of hypocrisy still overpowers the perfume of justice after all these years.

In fact, without any proof, I would venture to say that one of the reasons why Hillary Clinton failed to get as many women’s votes in the elections last year was because of Bill Clinton’s constant lies about never having had sexual relationships with women from Monica Lewinsky to Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey; and Hillary’s efforts to stand by her man and discredit the women accusers. Hillary’s latest book “What Happened” blamed a lot of people in addition to herself for why she lost the Presidential campaign. But what she did not mention in the book was that her unwavering love for her husband had made her a hypocritical defender of women’s rights. Many women voters, therefore, did not trust her.

Most of the men accused of sexual harassment, so far, have been predominantly baby boomers. I don’t buy the argument that boomer men do not understand the proper behaviour towards women because they are of an older generation. Nor do I agree with Canada’s former interim Leader of the Opposition, Rona Ambrose’s recommendation that all judges should be given a sexual sensitivity training. The proposed JUST Act, which would ensure that any judge who presided over a sexual assault case would receive proper training in the law and also in rape mythology, stereotypes and bias, might eventually be passed as law in the Senate. But I believe that if judges, like former Calgary judge Robin Camp, did not know that the derogatory comments he made to a complainant  (“Why couldn’t you just keep your knees together?”) while questioning her during a sexual assault trial last year were wrong, then he should not be reinstated no matter how much subsequent sensitivity training he has received. It is also important for boomer parents to get this right before they can educate their sons and grandsons on how to respect women and their rights.

All in all, we should be pleased that we’re having a moment of awakening on sexual harassment, and it is possible that this will turn out to have been a turning point. However, when it comes to the standard for upholding women’s rights against sexual harassment, it is important to bear in mind that there should only be one, same standard for all men, no matter what their political affiliations, religions, races or age demographics are.

Photo Credit: Ottawa Citizen

2016 was full of bad news, so let’s hope the new year is going to bring more good tidings, particularly for us boomers! Based on some of the developments last year, here are my anticipated top 10 good news for the new year:

1. Canada Continues to Be The Shining Light Of the World: Canada graced the October 29 cover and feature story of The Economist magazine last year. The publication said that our nation is uniquely fortunate in many ways – but its liberalism and tolerance hold lessons for other Western countries and went on to explain why Canada is still at ease with openness. Under Justin Trudeau’s leadership, we might not be perfect, but Canada will continue to be a champion of immigration, open trade and the fight against climate change. For 2017, I have to quote retired Global TV journalist, Tom Clark, as he said farewell to his career on December 31, “For all of our troubles, all of our scandals and disagreements, we should try to keep things in perspective. In global terms, our problems are small. Our country works better than most, perhaps better than any other. We should always aim higher. But let’s remember how blessed we really are.”
2. Canada officially kicked off our 150th Anniversary of the Confederation on December 31: In addition to a special commemorative 150th Anniversary coin series produced by the Royal Canadian Mint, there will be numerous special celebratory events and festivities in local communities and urban centres across the country throughout the year. Under the umbrella theme of “Diversity, Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, the Environment and Youth,” the Department of Canadian Heritage has budgeted $180 million for a variety of initiatives across the country and $20 million for special events such as the New Year’s Eve party on Parliament Hill.. According to a recent government-commissioned poll, nearly nine in 10 respondents expressed a lot of pride in being Canadian, and they felt strongly attached to their country. Nearly the same number said they would visit a national park in 2017 or attend a Canada 150 event. But, as of last summer, few had heard much about what the government was doing to celebrate. Looks like the government has a lot of marketing and promotion work to do on upcoming celebrations.
3. From brain drain to brain gain for Canada in a Trump presidency: Canada’s tech firms are hoping Donald Trump will help keep Canadian graduates from skipping town for Silicon Valley and perhaps lure some of the talented expats who have gone south for work. According to CTV News, Canadian companies large and small have quietly bemoaned the exodus of talent for decades, and agencies like Communitech and the City of Toronto have been trying to woo them back. That’s why billboards have been placed on well-travelled Route 101 in Silicon Valley promoting “GoNorthCanada.ca,” a website extolling the values of tech jobs in Ontario. Communitech said that the site has seen spikes since Trump’s victory. “People are reaching out and letting us know they are ready to come home,” said Communitech’s vice-president Heather Galt. With the growth of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry and the important research role that Canada has been playing, the nation can further benefit from a brain gain. Last year, Google has announced that it is investing $4.5 million in the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, the latest sign of Google’s growing interest in AI. As part of the deal, Google will open an AI research group in Montreal. The company believes the city has the potential to become a “super-cluster” of machine learning knowledge. Some large companies have also recently moved their AI divisions to Toronto, including Thomson Reuters and General Motors, with the intention of hiring hundreds of data scientists. According to The Globe and Mail, many of Canada’s largest companies have also stated a desire to hire thousands more data scientists in the coming years. Demand for talent already outstrips supply, and the gap will only grow. Now is the opportune time for Canadian AI companies to spread their recruitment net wider to include the U.S. so that we can benefit from a larger pool of AI research talents.
4. The Paris climate change agreement was signed by 194 countries and ratified by 121 members, including the U.S. and China, by the end of last year: In spite of what Donald Trump said, it would not be easy for him to repeal this accord. With the enforcement of this agreement, nearly 200 governments will become obliged to meet emissions-cutting pledges made before the deal. The agreement would also commit the countries to aspire to keep temperatures below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The agreement went into effect on November 4, 2016, which means that 2017 will see a lot of countries starting to move in the direction of reducing greenhouse gases. In Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau and most of the premiers (except for Saskatchewan and Manitoba) signed a historic pan-Canadian framework last month to fight climate change and meet the country’s 2030 emissions reduction targets.
5. Self-Driving cars from science fiction to science fact: after the first series of successful pilot-tests of self-driving vehicles in both the U.S. and Canada last year, these autonomous cars will hit the street in larger numbers in 2017. Last month, Alphabet, the owners of Google, spun off the research and development of self-driving technology into a separate company with the name of Waymo. The company has partnered with Chrysler to develop self-driving Pacific Hybrid minivans. Test units will hit the road over the next several months. According to technology news website Dice.com, expect Uber and Tesla to speed up with making their autonomous-driving offerings as advanced as possible in 2017. This development will drastically improve the quality of lives for aging populations across North America.
6. On the health front, 2017 will be a breakthrough year for the fight against Ebola. An Ebola vaccine developed by Canadian researchers and considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be the first effective treatment against the virus has already started a new phase of clinical trials. The vaccine’s safety and effectiveness were tested on volunteers infected with HIV, starting in Ottawa and Montreal last November, and followed by trials in the new year in Senegal and Burkina Faso. According to the principal investigator Cecile Tremblay, “It is particularly important to study the effectiveness of this Ebola vaccine in vulnerable populations, such as those living with HIV. These populations can often be most at-risk during outbreaks, because of their compromised immune systems.” The Ebola vaccine, originally developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada, provided blanket protection in a field trial in Guinea in 2015. Health Minister Jane Philpott said that the next phase of clinical trials in 2017 is an important milestone in the development of the world’s first proven, effective vaccine against the Ebola virus.
7. A revolutionary blood test that can detect cancer can become part of an annual physical in five years. Liquid biopsies, as the blood tests are known, can give physicians a telltale sign of the presence of the disease in almost all types of cancer mutations. For cancer patients undergoing treatment, liquid biopsies could spare them some of the painful, expensive and risky tissue tumor biopsies and reduce reliance on CT scans, which must be limited because of the danger posed by overexposure to radiation. Medical experts say that the liquid biopsy has come a long way in the past year and a half. According to CNBC, doctors and medical researchers are excited by the prospect that liquid biopsies would be a way to help people already fighting the disease. The new year will bring even more research and development in cancer centres across the U.S. on how a non-invasive blood test could be appropriate in many cases to identify the DNA mutation driving cancer forward.
8. New eye drops can dissolve cataracts with no need for surgery. We’ve all read about a new study that used eye drops to shrink cataracts in dogs may have made an important step in overcoming them. According to Professor Kang Zhang, from the University of California San Diego, whose research team developed the eye drops, this new drug could play an important role in the prevention of cataracts in those showing early signs. Although at this stage eye drops have the potential to overcome a number of limitations of surgery, they won’t be able to replace it yet. According to Dr. Manuel Datiles, a senior investigator and attending ophthalmologist at the U.S. National Eye Institute in the National Institutes of Health, eye drops will become key in treating cataracts, as surgery will not be able to cope with the growing needs of the world’s aging population. The new year will also bring more research and development to investigate whether there can be more medical breakthroughs in this area.
9. On the arts and culture front, we could not have asked for a better year than 2017 when Canadian musicians took the Grammy nominations by storm and two Canuck male lead actors were nominated for the Golden Globe Awards. After a year of Canadian dominance on the international music scene, Drake, Justin Bieber and The Weeknd were nominated for many categories in the 2017 Grammy Awards. Drake leads with a whopping eight nominations while Bieber fares well with four. Other Canucks on the list include R&B singer Tory Lanez, Vancouver-formed and now Brooklyn-based duo Bob Moses, jazz musician and composer Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Toronto-based record producer Nineteen85, and the renowned classical music conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin in the Best Opera Recording category. We all look forward to awards night on February 12 when we will see how much hardware these artists will bring home! On the big screen, two Canucks will go head-to-head in the best actor category for a musical or comedy. Ryan Gosling, from London, Ontario, was nominated for his lead role in La La Land while Vancouver-native Ryan Reynolds is also up for his comedic performance in Deadpool. (Gosling eventually took home the Golden Globe and will, almost for sure, be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar!)
10. Canada tops The New York Times‘s 52 Places To Go in 2017. On January 4, The New York Times put Canada number one on its annual list of places to go in the new year. According to the publication, Canada has it all – from cosmopolitan cities to barely explored natural wonders and everything in between. It also mentioned that all of the country’s more than 200 national parks and historic sites are offering free admission through our 150th Anniversary year, “from the turquoise lakes and mountain peaks of Banff in Alberta to the rolling dunes and red sandstone cliffs of Prince Edward Island along the Atlantic Coast to the newest reserve, the glacial-rounded Mealy Mountains in Labrador.” Looks like Tourism Canada did a better job in marketing our country as a travel destination to our neighbours down south than to fellow Canadians!

With all these good news, let’s move forward into the future with more positive thinking and cast away all the bad news of 2016. A new year is always a new beginning with new hope!