This retiree’s $22.75 Canada Pension Plan shock

The decision to start taking the Canada Pension Plan at 60, or to wait until as late as 70, is one that requires some thought.

Starting early gives you the satisfaction of enjoying a benefit that you’ve paid into all your working life. Waiting gives you a much bigger payment.

But as the case of two Nova Scotia retirees Winston and Sheila Billard shows, even the best laid plans can go astray.

Despite distraction from neocon flameouts, Redford Tory bumbling dominates Alberta's news

Even word that Tom Flanagan, the Icarus of Canada's neoconservative movement, had flown too close to the sun and was coming down to earth in flames was not enough to save Alberta's crisis-prone Progressive Conservative government from more pain!

One would have thought Premier Alison Redford would have been cheered when the principal architect of the Opposition Wildrose Party's brush with victory last April appeared at a seminar to defend users of child pornography and thereby assured his own political and professional demise.

For the record, accusing women of being 'career feminists' is sexist

I’m a socialist. Let’s just start with that, OK? I’m anti-capitalist and I’m feminist and I’m living in a capitalist, patriarchal world. I am working class and I will likely always be. I hope to be able to survive and live comfortably some day, while also doing ethical, feminist work. But God forbid I become successful, lest I join the ranks of the much-maligned ‘career feminists’!

Now, I haven’t read Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s soon-to-be published book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, so I’m doing what several others have already done, which is to write about a book I have not (and will probably never) read. What I’m most interested in, though, is not the content of the book, but the backlash against Sandberg and, more generally, this attack on successful women and on women who may profit or make a living from doing feminist work. The so-called ‘career feminists’.

John Baird's presence at AIPAC confirms Harper government's uncritical support of Israel

John Baird, Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs is confirmed to deliver a keynote address at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual policy meeting taking place March 3 – 5, 2013 in Washington, D.C.

His presence there further cements the Harper government's uncritical support of Israel in face of its deteriorating record of massive human rights violations in Occupied Palestine. "Canada stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel," said Mr. Baird in November 2012. His invitation to address AIPAC reflects that this government's position has not altered in face of Israel's widening breaches of international and humanitarian law against the people and land of Palestine.

Ontario government cutting billions from health funding, says health-care group

Overcrowded hospitals. More bed closures. Increased privatization. Longer wait times.

And if the last provincial budget was any indication, things aren’t likely to get better any time soon in Ontario.

“We’re calling it the austerity budget,” said Nathalie Sheppard, campaign organizer for the Ontario Health Coalition (OHC).

“For the next four years, they’re going to be cutting $3 billion from the health-care system in Ontario.”

Canada’s inaction on environment hurts its reputation: former PM

OTTAWA – Ongoing inaction on the environment is Canada’s Achilles heel on the international stage, as other countries reassess the importance of tackling climate change, according to former prime minister Kim Campbell.

“Canada kind of dragged its heels on climate change as long as the (former president George W.) Bush administration wasn’t doing much,” she said in an interview on the Global News program The West Block with Tom Clark. “The Obama administration is moving in a different direction and in the last state of the union address the president really started tackling this.”

UN Right-To-Food Envoy Criticizes Harper Government On Scrapping Census, Effect Of EU Trade Talks

OTTAWA - The United Nations right-to-food envoy says the Harper government's controversial decisions to scrap the long-form census and negotiate a free trade deal with Europe will make it more difficult to fight poverty in Canada.

Those are among the many cutting observations made by Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations' special rapporteur on the right to food, who will release his report Monday in Geneva at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council.

Eric Holder: Voting Rights Act Can't Be Called Unnecessary Yet

With the Supreme Court having heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act last week, the Obama administration weighed in again Sunday with another impassioned defense of the 1965 law.

"For our nation's Department of Justice, the fair and vigorous enforcement of this and other vital protections -- and their defense against all Constitutional challenges -- constitutes a top priority," read Attorney General Eric Holder's prepared remarks for a speech he was set to give at the Edmund Pettus Bridge Crossing Jubilee. "Let me be clear: although our nation has indeed changed, although the South is far different now, and although progress has indeed been made, we are not yet at the point where the most vital part of the Voting Rights Act can be deemed unnecessary. The struggle for voting rights for all Americans must continue -- and it will."

Tory ministers plot Human Rights Act repeal

Senior Tory cabinet ministers have raised the prospect of pulling Britain out of the European convention on human rights, despite a pledge by David Cameron that the party will not lurch to the right in the wake of its drubbing in the Eastleigh byelection.

Chris Grayling, the justice secretary, claimed that a future Conservative majority government would scrap the Human Rights Act, which enshrines the ECHR in domestic law. Theresa May, the home secretary, has reportedly been working on the plans for the Tories' next manifesto.

43,000 strip-searches carried out on children as young as 12

Contraband was discovered in just eight searches in 1,000 in young offender institutions in one year - with no drugs or knives found.

A promise to end routine strip-searching of children in custody is being flouted, according to data revealing there were more than 43,000 recorded incidences involving children as young as 12 over a 21-month period – but in only 275 searches were illicit items found.