Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2017 finds that wait times for medically necessary treatment hit a new record in 2017 at 21.2 weeks—the longest ever recorded. The study, an annual survey of physicians from across Canada, finds Ontario again recorded the shortest wait time at 15.4 weeks—nearly four months—and New Brunswick recorded the longest wait time at 41.7 weeks.

Towards a Better Understanding of Income Inequality in Canada is a new book that finds the problem of inequality isn’t nearly as bad in Canada as people are sometimes led to believe. Canadians are more able, thanks to opportunities of mobility, to get out of a low-income situation, middle-class incomes are not stagnating and most people can and do build-up wealth over the course of their lives.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are this year tied as the most economically-free nations in the Arab world, according to Economic Freedom of the Arab World: 2017 Annual Report, co-published by the Fraser Institute, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty and the International Research Foundation. This report compares and ranks 22 Arab nations in five areas of economic freedom: size of government, including expenditures, taxes and enterprises; commercial and economic law and security of property rights; access to sound money; freedom to trade internationally; and regulation of credit, labour and business.