David Eby claims to be heartbroken. Well, cry me a river, buddy, because that was the most tone-deaf reign and election campaign I’ve seen in a long time. And now look at what’s happened. Who were the man’s political advisors? Whoever they are, it will be best for any future political hopeful to avoid them like the plague. They remind me of a particular phase of “Young Liberals” in BC, when boys who knew nothing about anything were pulling stupid stunts with a kind of Watergate-lite feel to them. Ugh. As for Eby, he has been a crushing disappointment for people like me for a while now. But to then run a campaign that alienates your traditional voter base in order to court voters who are never going to choose the NDP – wow. Ivory towers, emperors without clothes, closed-loop cabals of young advisors with political science degrees and zero world experience – such things have come to my mind routinely throughout these past four years as I wondered what the hell Eby was thinking. I don’t k...
Pretty sure I’ve seen a few sci-fi movies whose plots aren’t so different from the real-life Grifols blood plasma shocker that has been making the news recently. The story in a nutshell: A Spanish pharmaceutical multinational sets up shop in Canada to buy people’s blood plasma to sell into the global market. Even though death from plasma donation is reportedly very rare, two people then die. Health Canada reacts, Grifols shuts down its many Canadian collection centres, and the unsettling details about giant corporations paying people to sell their body fluids are suddenly the talk of the town. Grifols arrived in Canada in 2022, signing a 15-year agreement with Canadian Blood Services for commercial plasma extraction in Ontario even though CBS itself has a strict policy against paying people for their blood or plasma. (Things that make you go hmm….) A year later, Grifols bought up a chain of private plasma-collection facilities in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, New Brunswick an...