It's beginning to feel a lot like summer.

And with the Victoria Day long weekend upon us many Canadians have turned their thoughts to adventure and warmer climates.

Even though there's a lot of excitement about upcoming fun in the sun trips, travellers have three top worries while away: the weather, losing something important and requiring medical attention.

According to a study by BMO Insurance, 83 per cent of Canadians are planning on taking a vacation this summer however, only half actually purchase travel insurance.

While some would argue that Canada has gone to great lengths to unite families in the past, those day are gone, it seems. 

The federal government is making it harder for Canadian families to bring their parents and grandparents from abroad. Those seeking to bring older family members to settle in Canada will need to have higher incomes and agree to financially support their extended families for much longer.

The new rules will increase the minimum income requirement for sponsoring a parent or grandparent by 30%, double the sponsorship undertaking period from ten to twenty years, and reduce the maximum age of a dependent to 18. 

They'll also have to agree to cover any welfare or health-care costs not covered by medicare for parents or grandparents for 20 years, instead of the current 10-year committment.

Sometimes, all it takes is one life-changing experience to land someone on the streets: a job loss, the death of a loved one, divorce, or some natural disaster.

That's the underlying message of Spent, an online point-and-click game game in which players are asked to make tough decisions while earning minimum wages, like those often found in retailing or fast food. 

The game was created by ad agency McKinney for pro bono client Urban Ministries of Durham to highlight the challenges and tradeoffs faced by low-income earners trying to break out of the poverty cycle.

The dilemmas in the game are based on real-life experiences of people served by UMD, which maintains a homeless shelter and outreach program for the disenfranchised.

Although not a popular move in certain quarters and viewed as nothing short of a betrayal in others, Canada still accepts more immigrants per capita than any other developed country.

But can we afford to continue this longstanding practice? Not really, maintains Herbert Grubel, a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute. At least not the way we've been doing it up to now.

Immigrants who've arrived over the past two decades make significantly less money, pay fewer taxes, use more government services and impose a fiscal burden on taxpayers of something like $6,000 a year per recent arrival, he estimates.

Increasing their number further will only lead to higher infrastucture costs for schools and hospitals and a lower standard of living for native-born Canadians. 

That's why we have to make it much tougher to get in, he argues.

Parents all over the country have been packing their kids' lunchboxes this week, largely because Canada is the only G8 country without a national school meal program.

While there are stacks of local initiatives and provinces do provide some funding to subsidize meals and regulate the stuff pouring out of kitches and vending machines, the majority of families are on their own when it comes to school nutrition.

And that doesn't seem to be working out too well. There are more obese children than there ever were, prompting critics to call for a more coordinate effort to combat the problem.

But are subsidized meals the solution? Well, some people certainly think so.

Workers are significantly more likely to rate themselves as physically healthy (53%) than financially healthy (31%), according to The Principal Financial Well-Being Index, which surveys employees at growing businesses with 10 to 1,000 workers. 

But that’s not to say they wouldn’t like to see it otherwise – 84% of workers view physical health as an investment in their financial future. Living healthy means living longer though, which comes with its own financial demands.

Which is why their employers should help where they can, suggests The Conference Board of Canada. Its latest report, Making the Business Case for Investments in Workplace Health and Wellness, provides organizations of all sizes with advice and tools to measure the return from health and wellness programs.

Investments in fitness, smoking cessation or weight loss programs can lead to higher productivity, as well as reduce benefit costs, absenteeism, and presenteeism (circumstances in which an employee is physically at work but not fully productive), the report suggests.

Canadian insurance companies have introduced a plan to spread out the expense of high-priced drug treatments, a move they say will protect workers from the risk of losing employer-sponsored coverage due to cost.

A growing tide of high-priced specialty medicines for arthritis, cancer and other diseases is putting pressure on workplace drug plans, likely producing limits on what they cover, higher premiums and even their disappearance altogether if costs get completely out of hand.

The industry is developing a pooled system of coverage that will allow insurers to exclude the cost of certain high-cost drugs when setting premiums charged to employers. It's these open-ended committments that scare employers, prompting many to rethink the coverage they offer to their employees.

In a recent survey, one-third of companies polled admitted they would drop their drug coverage if premiums jumped by 25 per cent or more, for instance.

When was the last time you had a checkup? A year ago? Two?

With the cost of medical bills rising all the time, some of us may need to rethink that annual physical exam, say health-care critics.

Those annual checkups are too often a formality that siphons time and money from the healthcare system without offering definitive improvements for patients in return, they maintain.

This may be particularly when you consider that the screening tests that routinely accompany them may not be of great use, and can lead to unneeded procedures.

For instance, another new report has labelled the PSA blood test, which is generally not covered by OHIP and other provincial plans, as a marginal prostate cancer screening tool.

Some 6 million people in Canada are smokers, and many of them wish they weren't. About two thirds of smokers say they'd like to quit and have tried at least once to break the habit.

For the few who go cold turkey, the costs of quitting may be minimal. Others can spend hundreds of dollars on gum, patches, inhalers, nicotine replacement systems and hypnosis.

Although costs vary, quitting generally costs about $150 a month, according to Dr. Michael Fiore, director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention. One-on-one counseling may add to the tab.

Some provinces now have subsidies for some people to cover smoking cessation programs.

Others, like B.C, pick up the tab for prescription meds. Often though, you're on your own although a friend of mine's insurance covered much of the cost of her smoking-cessation regimen.