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Included in the statement released by Canada and the EU to mark the end of the legal review was the announcement that the investor-state arbitration model long entrenched in Canada’s international agreements has been replaced by a system that more closely resembles an international court. The new court-like system includes independent judges, an appeals process and, generally, more transparency and predictability. There can be little doubt that this is a significant improvement over the previous arbitration process.

Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland, after referring to CETA as a gold-plated trade agreement, stated that with these changes, “Our dispute resolution process is brought up in this agreement to the 21st century democratic standards that Canadians demand.” This view begs two questions. First, why have a new international court that can override domestic courts that already meet the democratic expectations of Canadians? Second, does the rest of the agreement also reflect 21st century democratic needs and standards?

The investment chapter and its international court will still give foreign investors special rights and remedies to challenge government actions that they see as unfavourable to them. This gives one economic stakeholder a significant legal advantage over all other actors and stakeholders in the economy. It will allow this one class of economic actor to circumvent domestic courts by going directly to an international court whose role is to apply international law to protect their investor rights.

The justification for this is that these mechanisms will attract new investors to new places. However, this fails to stand up to empirical evidence developed over the past 10 to 15 years that shows these types of special rights for investors have no impact on investment flows. In short, there is no payoff for governments that put their countries at risk of exposure to international dispute settlement processes that circumvent domestic courts.

So do the other provisions of CETA reflect 21st century goals and standards? In both the TPP and CETA, it is the chapters that don’t directly relate to trade that make the agreements ‘comprehensive.’ It is these rules that are becoming increasingly broad and ever more favourable to large economic actors.

Let’s take the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) rules, for example, which go farther to favour European drug manufacturers over Canadian manufacturers, and Canada’s health care system, than any previous IPR agreement. There is also the chapter on “Domestic Regulation” that goes farther in limiting government rights to review and regulate new investments in every sector of the economy than any previous treaty has gone. The CETA also features a long list of limitations on government’s ability to maximize the value that Canadians derive from foreign investment, including such future projects as Ontario’s ring of fire for mining.

These non-trade chapters will contribute to the ongoing growth of legal and economic inequality of average citizens and small and medium-size businesses compared to the large economic actors. These chapters simply replicate and deepen provisions from 10, 15 and 20 years ago, or more, with no new assessment of their impacts in today’s world, on climate change responses, or on the needs of sustainable development.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015 provide a framework to realign the goals of trade and economic agreements for the future rather than just replicate the measures of the past, measures that continue to work against sustainable development needs. With the growing concerns over TPP, the inconsistent approaches between TPP and CETA on key democratic principles, and the obvious need to prioritize climate responses over trade policy, it is time for Canada to lead in re-evaluating what type of trade agreements are needed for this century.

Canada now has a unique opportunity to step back, reflect, and then return to lead global trade-law into a sustainable development era.

Howard Mann is the senior international law adviser with the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

Freedom for our bodies, our land and our territories.”

Approximately, 100,000 people in New Brunswick, almost one in seven, live below the poverty line. Almost one third of single-parent households in New Brunswick are poor, according to 2011 statistics. Following the most recent economic crisis, governments have been implementing austerity budgets and New Brunswick is no exception. New Brunswickers are still struggling for pay equity, access to reproductive health care and child care.

Elsipogtog women made international headlines when they put their bodies on the line to defend their territories against shale gas. Maya women in Guatemala are demanding justice in Canadian courts for rape and murder committed by a Canadian mine’s security guards. Rape is a weapon used in wars around the world.

More of us are demanding action be taken for our missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and making the links to capitalism, colonization and destruction of the land.

This global feminist movement brings together diverse groups, including women’s groups, unions, anti-poverty groups, Indigenous activists, international solidarity groups and many others. Since the first March in 2000, activists have organized local, national and global marches, hundreds of workshops and actions and lobbying of governments and international organizations.

Speakers:

The 4th International World March of Women was launched on March 8, International Women’s Day, and will conclude October 17, 2015, International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

And while estimates put the cost to Canadian tax coffers at $6-$7.8 billion per year, the effect on developing countries is far greater, said Haroon Akram-Lodhi an economist and professor of international development at Trent University. "The amount of capital flight from sub-Saharan Africa is absolutely huge and it's all going into these tax havens," said Akram-Lodhi, one of the signatories of the letter. "This is reducing the ability to fight poverty on a global scale." The letter, made public on the eve of this week's global anti-corruption summit in London, calls on world leaders to act against financial secrecy both in tax havens and at home. "To lift the veil of secrecy surrounding tax havens we need new global agreements on issues such as public country-by-country reporting, including for tax havens. Governments must also put their own houses in order by ensuring that all the territories, for which they are responsible, make publicly available information about the real 'beneficial' owners of company and trusts." On Monday, Transparency International Canada issued a parallel call for the Canadian government to make its own corporate registry more transparent.

There is a pressing need for the Government of Canada to take concrete steps to address the ability of some Canadians to shield themselves, and their financial activities, from Canadian authorities," said Peter Dent, president of Transparency International Canada. "That some can rig the system to hide their wealth, whether amassed legally or not, is not merely unjust. It also masks corruption and harms global development by siphoning off revenues that could be directed to education, health care and infrastructure," Dent said in a statement. While the growing movement to crack down on tax havens has been spearheaded by the richest countries through the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the negative effects of depleted government revenues hit the poorest countries the hardest. Uganda, an East African country which has often been described as a "donor darling," remains stuck in a cycle of poverty largely due to its inability to provide state services, said Akram-Lodhi.

They don't collect enough tax (because) multinational corporations evade their fair share," he said. While the U.K. government collects 25 per cent of its GDP in tax revenue, Uganda is only able to get 11 per cent, according to World Bank statistics. Instead of having to wait longer for a new subway, low tax revenue has far graver consequences in the developing world, he said. "Tax avoidance in Canada doesn't lead to people going hungry. Tax avoidance in sub-Saharan Africa leads to people dying of hunger. It's that clear," said Akram-Lodhi. "It's criminality that ruins people's lives." Another signatory of the letter, Peter Dietsch, a professor of philosophy and economics at the Université de Montréal, said the Panama Papers have "opened a window of opportunity for action." Describing the underlying conflict over tax havens as being between people who have capital and those who don't, Dietsch said anti-tax haven forces are growing.

"There's now a growing coalition of individuals without capital who pay their taxes and small and medium enterprises who don't have resources to move their assets abroad." Canadian signatories A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, professor of international development studies, Trent University. Peter Dietsch, professor of philosophy, Université de Montréal Hashmat Khan, professor of economics, Carleton University Kiari Liman-Tinguiri, president of IEDAS Inc., Ottawa Patricia E. Perkins, professor, faculty of Environmental Studies, York University Toby Sanger, senior economist, CUPE

The committee is one of the most well-respected human rights bodies in the world, comprised of independent and eminent international law experts from every continent. My experiences in Geneva affirmed my impression that the committee approaches the Herculean task of ensuring compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights with professionalism and rigour. After reviewing thousands of pages of documentation, listening to hours of testimony from NGOs and the Canadian government, and grilling government representatives with insightful questions, on Thursday, the committee issued its final verdict.

The concluding observations for Canada are breathtaking in their scope, covering issues related to national security, Aboriginal Peoples' rights, prisoners' rights, and even freedom of expression and association for human rights defenders.

The document is a sobering reminder of how much Canada has changed in the 10 years since our last review and we should be outraged that, in such a short time, our international reputation has been so tarnished. We have gone from being a global leader in the protection of human rights - the gold standard, even - to a country that repeatedly ignores UN recommendations, engages in suppression of dissent, and enables cruel treatment of migrants. At seven pages in length, the UN's assessment of Canada is necessary pre-election reading for anyone wishing to chart the changes wrought to our society in the past nine years of Conservative government rule.

Of particular interest to me, of course, were the concluding observations and recommendations related to Canada's treatment of non-citizens, people like Hassan. The committee expressed grave concerns around laws that allow for the mandatory detention of asylum-seekers who arrive by boat, recent cuts to the interim federal health program for asylum-seekers, and indefinite detention of migrants.

The committee recommended that Canada ensure that there is proper oversight over CBSA, place time limits on immigration detention, and ensure there are viable alternatives to detention. It also recommended that those held in provincial jails be granted access to treatment centres for mental health issues.

These recommendations are an important vindication of the rights of non-citizens, thousands of whom are detained in maximum-security jails every year, including vulnerable migrants such as asylum-seekers, torture survivors and those with serious mental health issues, people like Hassan.

However, the UN's strong recommendations will quickly become cold comfort for Hassan's family if Canada does nothing to implement them. Despite the death of at least 11 immigration detainees held in CBSA custody since 2000, Canada has done nothing to end arbitrary detention and cruel treatment of non-citizens held without charge. Now that the UN has made recommendations to end rights violations against immigration detainees, we must press all the major political parties to commit to implementing the recommendations if elected. Renu J. Mandhane is executive director of the international human rights program at the University of Toronto's faculty of law.

Since the crisis, all the hospitals involved have stopped outsourcing gemcitabine and cyclophosphamide mixtures and brought it in-house, mixing their own medications.

Their trust would be further hit. Within two weeks, the Star reported that health-care companies are allowed to mix drugs for hospitals without federal or provincial oversight, prompting top health officials — Ontario health minister Deb Matthews and federal health minister Leona Aglukkaq — to scramble to close that regulatory grey area.

This week Jake Thiessen, the founding director of the University of Waterloo school of pharmacy, submitted a final report of his investigation into the issue. There has been no formal indication when it will be made public. Hospital administrators say they have been told it will be two to three weeks before they or the public see this report.

The Ontario College of Pharmacists has passed legislation that allows it to inspect any premises where a pharmacist works — not just licensed pharmacies.

All of the changes taken together would have seen Marchese Hospital Solutions still able to supply drugs as it did but subject to inspection by the college.

The federal government has new rules defining who can be a drug producer, adding that any facility supervised by a licensed pharmacist can do the job. The province has said that hospitals can only purchase drugs from accredited suppliers.

There is very little clinical evidence to indicate what might happen to a cancer patient who receives an underdose of chemotherapy.

At the same time, many of the more recent advances in chemotherapy have been in drugs that alleviate side effects like nausea.

In an oncology pharmacy, strange is not good. And on March 20, one week before Marley’s last cyclophosphamide treatment, Craig Woudsma, a 28-year-old pharmacy assistant, and a colleague at the Peterborough Regional Health Centre, had a bad feeling.

In this case, it was a shipment of new gemcitabine chemotherapy bags that required refrigeration, according to the label. Previous batches, from a different supplier, had not.

Woudsma noticed more differences. The bags from Marchese only had a total volume and concentration on the label — 4 grams of gemcitabine in 100 mL of saline — instead of the specific concentration, the amount of drug per single mL of saline, as the old bags indicated.

The new bag’s label did not contain enough information for him to accurately mix the patient’s dose. He needed to know the specific concentration.

When preparing the solution, staff at Marchese Hospital Solutions, in Mississauga, Ont., dissolved the medication into a pre-filled 100 mL bag of saline. These bags typically contain between 3 to 20 per cent more solution than 100 mL,

“I told the pharmacist in the area. And then it kind of went above me at that point ... They came to me saying, this is kind of a big deal; teleconferencing with the minister of health, that kind of stuff,” said recently, sitting on the front steps of his red-brick, semi-detached home in the village of Millbrook, Ont. “It’s kind of a foreign concept, to think that what we do, in our corner of the hospital, is going to get that kind of exposure.”

This means that the bag Woudsma was holding contained 4 grams of gemcitabine in more than 100 mL of solution. The concentration of the medication wasn’t what the label would have made him think. It was weaker than advertised.

People have asked Woudsma why he was able to catch a problem that went undetected at other hospitals for more than a year. Simple, he says. He had something to compare it to.

The company’s pharmacy workers did not remove the known overfill when mixing the medication because they thought each bag was going to a single patient

referred to in the industry as overfill, included to account for possible evaporation.

The hospital had switched that very day to a new supplier — Marchese Hospital Solutions. A bag of the old supply from Baxter CIVA was still on site.

Medbuy, a group purchasing company for hospitals, starting in 2008, had a contract with Baxter Central Intravenous Admixtures to provide drug-mixing services. The two drugs in question, cyclophosphamide and gemcitabine, were outsourced because they come in powder form and are tricky to mix. It takes about four hours to reconstitute them in liquid, and in that time they must be shaken every 20 minutes.

As that contract was about to expire, Medbuy issued a request for proposals for drug-mixing services: Baxter CIVA, which wanted its contract renewed, Quebec-based Gentes & Bolduc and Marchese all stepped forward.

The details of the new arrangement remain known only to Medbuy. It was founded in 1989 to get better deals for hospitals buying products like scalpels, bed pans and even some medications in bulk. The company’s 28 member hospital organizations in Ontario, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island spent a combined $626-million on contract purchases in 2012.

Marita Zaffiro, president of Marchese, testified at Queen’s Park that the Medbuy contract did not indicate the hospitals wanted the labels on these drugs to cite a specific concentration. The reason she included it that way in the RFP was simply to show what could be done.

Sobel ran the calculations in his office. For a single patient to require a 4,000 mg dose of cyclophosphamide, on a common breast cancer treatment regime, that patient would need to be about 7 feet tall and weigh 2,200 lbs.

“The chance of 1,200 patients getting 4,000 mg exactly — it’s just impossible.”

Four Marchese pharmacists who played a role in the new contract work revealed to the Queen's Park committee in June that they had either limited or no background in oncology.

Marchese Hospital Solutions began as Marchese Pharmacy, a Hamilton-area community drugstore that expanded beginning in 1998 when Zaffiro became president. In 1999 the company obtained a contract to supply the Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant Community Care Access Centres, business they did until the contract expired in 2011, shortly before it was awarded the Medbuy contract.

It lost the CCAC contract in 2011, shortly before the Medbuy deal, and shed employees. Fifty-seven were either laid off or left the company during this troubled time, according to internal newsletters. But then things started looking up.

Zaffiro attempted to get accreditation for the site, according to her Queen’s Park testimony, approaching both the Ontario College of Pharmacists and Health Canada, neither of which took steps to regulate the fledgling business because each thought the other had jurisdiction.

Medbuy, Marchese and Jake Thiessen have maintained that cost was not a factor in the error. Marchese’s bid on the request for proposal came in at about a quarter of the cost of previous supplier Baxter Corporation. Bags from Marchese cost from $5.60 to $6.60; Baxter charged $21 to $34.

CEO David Musyj thinks about what went wrong. The problems, he says, go far beyond Marchese and Medbuy. “All of us are culpable,” he says. “We could have done some things internally that could have prevented this. We could have weighed the bags when they came in.”

Meanwhile, a third UNAIDS report published jointly with the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals that international government financing for HIV and AIDS is at a standstill. It has flatlined at approximately $8.6 billion (U.S.) per year from donor governments (together, the most affected countries are contributing in excess of $10 billion) and, even more troubling, there are signs that some governments - such as Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Sweden and the European Commission - may be starting to pull back. Not a trend that bodes well. It risks sending the HIV and AIDS epidemic directly to scenario No. 2.

The world is at a crossroads. The most important message in the deluge of information tabled in recent weeks is that we have arrived at a moment of choice, and that the next five years will be absolutely crucial. Now, in 2015, what governments do as a matter of political will and human decision will shape the future of AIDS. This was not at all the case in 2005, or even 2010, when the crisis was enormous, the need was overwhelming, but there was no guarantee of success. In 30 years we've lost 39 million men, women and children to AIDS globally. Communities have rallied, African governments have joined the struggle, and the international community is now making a concerted effort to make significantly more drugs for HIV and AIDS available.

The moment has arrived. We will either chart a course to bring about the end of AIDS in Africa, or, for the lack of adequate funding, watch as the epidemic regains its stranglehold. The UNAIDS-Lancet Commission has produced a cogent and compelling analysis of what that path must look like. Yes, there's no doubt that funding must increase. But the commission's report also makes it very clear that in addition, there must be a critical shift in how this money is being used.

For instance, donors have to expand their horizons beyond the technical matters of drug delivery, and start paying more attention to what it takes for people to avoid infection in the first place - and to actually stay on the medication. More support has to go to efforts at the grassroots level to help people bring their own communities back to life and to health. Above all, it's time to powerfully respond to the fact that gender inequality is at the heart of the epidemic. African women and girls are by far the most affected population.

And while the global death rate from AIDS has gone down over the past 10 years, it has increased by 50 per cent for adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa, where girls are up to five times more likely to be infected than boys their own age. In many of its recent comments, UNAIDS has understandably - or at least predictably - been stressing an optimistic view and the opportunity that lies before us. But we shouldn't be distracted by the easy comfort offered up by public relations messaging. Make no mistake, the end of the HIV and AIDS epidemic is not set to arrive on its own speed. Everything will depend on the decisions made in the next five years about the level and allocation of funding for the HIV and AIDS response. For the first time in the history of the HIV and AIDS epidemic, fate is truly and utterly in our own hands. Millions of lives are at stake. Let that truth drive us forward.

Ilana Landsberg-Lewis is executive director at the Stephen Lewis Foundation. Lee Waldorf is policy director at the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

An HIV-infected woman holds her antiretroviral drugs at her home in New Delhi. New HIV infections have dropped • by 35 per cent since 2000, but the world needs to dramatically step up investment and access to treatment, UNAIDS says. • Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images file photo

Limits to war are not an abstract concept. The Geneva Conventions establish the rules of war and entitle humanitarian actors such as MSF to provide impartial lifesaving medical care to patients affected by conflict, whether they are civilians or combatants who are wounded and sick. In international humanitarian law, all parties to the conflict must distinguish between civilian and military structures. To merely chalk up civilian deaths as "collateral damage" is not only dehumanizing, it violates the rules of war. The destruction of the hospital in Kunduz was a flagrant assault on our front-line health workers and patients. But it was not the first. MSF has seen medical care under fire with disturbing frequency in recent years, as warring parties have targeted health facilities with audacity, malice and impunity.

In 2015 alone, our staff and facilities in Sudan, Central African Republic and Syria have been brazenly targeted. Members of our teams have been threatened, attacked and kidnapped - and our organization is far from the only one to have been affected. Medical caregivers around the world have given their lives while working to save others, even as respect for the rules of war has faltered and failed to protect them. Attacks on health-care providers must stop, whether they are carried out by belligerents in Syria, by Sudanese war planes or by the U.S. military and its coalition allies. That is why MSF is calling for an independent investigation into the events of last weekend. We are seeking to have the International Humanitarian FactFinding Commission investigate the Kunduz attacks. Canada and other state parties to the IHFFC can request the commission to activate an inquiry to establish the truth and reassert the protected status of hospitals and civilians in conflict.

The tragic, violent deaths in Kunduz can't simply be explained away as a "mistake." We insist those responsible for the attack be held accountable for their actions - and that caregivers and their patients receive the protection they are guaranteed under international humanitarian law. This has been an exceedingly difficult week. MSF had to pull out of Kunduz, leaving tens of thousands of people and the whole of northeastern Afghanistan without any lifesaving medical surgery facility. Our doctors and caregivers are not martyrs, we are protected humanitarian actors and our patients and health structures are protected by law from military attack. The future of humanitarian action everywhere depends on it.

Canada is in or close to the top 25% of OECD countries on many measures of quality of care.