For full summary of discussion see: http://www.wednesday-night.com/Wed1212page2.asplf-century has seen a number of changing trends in North American society with an unforeseeable increase in both parents in the workforce with, until recently, unanalysed effect on adolescent children. There have been recent statistical studies on the backgrounds of children in contact with the child protection system and the duration of their contact with the system but, until recently, no analysis of the composition of this group of youths, nor on the relationship between their background and their contact with the system, and most important, no analysis of what interventions work/do not work in what cases and why. It may come as a surprise to some that Québec has the best family services in the country, but many of Québec's excellent practices have not yet been exported to the rest of the country. The McGill Centre for Research on Children & Families, http://www.mcgill.ca/socialwork/r whom social policy has not been effective, and what can be done. Healthcare Although on the surface, it may be difficult to establish a relationship, a somewhat related issue is the health care system in Canada and the difficulty in obtaining medical care in rural regions, and especially in the far north. Long delays and access to treatment are currently on the minds of all Canadians, with various, relatively simple overall solutions proposed to alleviate the complex problem presented. Fresh in the minds of Quebeckers is the disastrous attempt by our Minister of Health to direct new graduates into the remote regions of the province. However, a greater challenge is the low level of recruitment of aboriginals into medical schools (and most of them are young women) and with those that do come south to study, reluctance to return home on graduation. Current hypotheses suggest that historical poverty among aboriginals has led to the situation where role models that might lead to a change in the situation do not exist. As for the national healthcare system, many solutions have been proposed, including a two-tiered system, a radical change in the rules governing the unionization of healthcare workers, privatization within a publicly funded system or public funding of out-of-province or out-of-country health care when travel or access is impossible or at an unacceptable level. Some suggest that the Conservative Party has a useful role to play in developing a coherent, efficient and attractive (to the voters) public healthcare policy alternative to what is offered today by the Liberals. Experts from abroad, looking at the Canadian system from an historically unbiased point of view, have suggested that it is not the role of an individual political party to set out inclusive policy, but rather that the political parties should agree on certain principles: medicine for all, that it is state funded (somehow) and that it may have mixed approaches. That should be the end of federal intervention and the how-to should be moved along to think tanks, provincial authorities and leave politics out. It is not grand, sweeping measures that will provide a solution but rather, successive changes arising from the results of multiple small pilot studies aimed at addressing each of the many la[censored]ae in our overall, basically good, health care system. Stem cell research Fifty U.S. Republican congressmen broke party ranks to support legislation that would increase access to embryos for stem-cell research, in defiance of the president's threat to veto the bill. President Bush says he will veto the legislation (his first veto) if it reaches his desk. However, in one of several signs that the Legislative branch is becoming restive, the chief sponsor of the bill has challenged President Bush, saying there are enough votes in the Senate to override the presidential veto. While Bush professes to believe that this is a personal moral issue, if it is killed, there would be little effect on stem cell research as the bill deals only with direct federally funded stem cell research. In Canada a federal law was passed following the turbulent debates of the Committee on Reproductive Technologies, restricting research into the use of embryonic stem cells for therapeutic purposes, thus use in Canada of the results of the discovery in Korea would be illegal. However, it should also be noted that in April of this year, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler announced $5.3 million in annual funding for the Stem Cell Network which will support a number of national projects, including an effort led by Dr. Jacques Galipeau of the Montreal-based Jewish General Hospital to study the use of adult stem cells as repair material to help patients with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. http://www.wednesday-night.com/STEMCELL-Notes.htm