Posts Tagged ‘featured’
Bow Down Canadians, Corporations Are King
Jan. 30, 2012
What kind of society beggars those of its citizens who worked all their lives and now want to retire in dignity while privileging the rich and super-rich by slashing their income taxes and allowing them to transfer wealth to their children untouched? … Since the mid-1980s, and accelerating with the signing of the Canada-U.S. “free trade” deal, the guiding principle of neo-liberalism seems to have been “Ask not what your economy can do for you, ask what you can do for your economy.” … The economy is now defined as the narrow interests of global corporations.
Tags: budget, economy, featured, globalization, ideology, privatization, standard of living, tax
Posted in Employment Debates | No Comments »
The premiers want more health-care study? Seriously?
Jan. 24, 2012
We don’t need more studies or committees. Every royal commission, provincial inquiry, independent analysis for the past five decades has come to the same basic conclusions about what we need to do reform medicare: * Control spending by limiting medicare coverage to essential treatments that work; * Modernize primary care by moving away from solo physician practices to interdisciplinary teams; * Create some kind of universal prescription drug plan; * Shift money from institutional care to home care … [and] … invest it in palliative care.
Tags: budget, economy, featured, Health, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
Why medicare needs Ottawa
Jan. 16, 2012
Writing cheques and walking away from the duty to improve medicare is not only a retrograde step that endangers health care and the economy, it also reveals a vision of an increasingly shrivelled and parochial federation, where governments look inward and the whole becomes a pastiche of increasingly isolated parts. Here are seven reasons why a strong federal presence in health care is vital to Canada:
Tags: budget, featured, Health, ideology, mental Health, standard of living
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
Dalton McGuinty can’t play Captain Canada to rescue medicare
Jan 14 2012
Flaherty’s diktat has sucked the air out of the premiers’ conferences because there is little left to fight about — except amongst themselves. A split has emerged between western premiers who deemed Ottawa’s offer reasonable and those who denounced it as wretched… Victoria can serve as a clearing house for “best practices” and interprovincial brainwaves on innovation, but it won’t provide any panaceas… McGuinty needs to get out in front of the funding challenges in his own backyard: highly paid doctors, a poorly integrated health care system, modest community care and meagre home-care programs.
Tags: budget, featured, Health, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
Federal health role is about more than money
Jan. 10, 2012
… known long-term funding and is more than provinces could have reasonably expected from the 2014 first ministers’ meeting. The principle behind the federal generosity is clear. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is taking Ottawa out of the health-care debate and ending the national discussion of health and health-care system issues that began with the original federal funding in the 1966 Medical Care Act and continued up to the 2004 wait times accord. But is this a good thing for Canada?… There are at least seven areas that require national policy leadership and federal attention:
Tags: budget, featured, Health, ideology, privatization, rights, standard of living
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
Keynes Was Right
Dec. 29, 2011
… the real test of Keynesian economics hasn’t come from the half-hearted efforts of the U.S. federal government to boost the economy, which were largely offset by cuts at the state and local levels. It has, instead, come from European nations like Greece and Ireland that had to impose savage fiscal austerity as a condition for receiving emergency loans — and have suffered Depression-level economic slumps… 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem — a depressed economy and mass unemployment — worse.
Tags: budget, economy, featured, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Employment Policy Context | No Comments »
The high cost of poverty
Jan 02 2012
In 2009, the first year of (Ontario’s poverty reduction) strategy, the minimum wage jumped up and, most importantly, the Ontario Child Benefit was increased by hundreds of dollars helping to raise low-income families out of poverty The government has also started a process to reform social assistance… But (it) is still a long way off its goal to lift 90,000 children out of poverty… it’s troubling that the third progress report on Ontario’s poverty reduction strategy spends most of its 26 pages rehashing earlier successes and is light on new measures.
Tags: budget, featured, ideology, poverty, youth
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
There’s no way out but a new politics of fairness
Jan. 01, 2012
… this is an epochal restructuring of the global economy, the first downturn in which the developing world is gaining power, wealth and jobs at the expense of the developed… The age is crying out for a different kind of politics, one that rallies people around the idea of fighting the great fear together… Recessions at first divide, but as they persist and deepen, even the rich discover that their own prosperity will be threatened… A politics of fairness is also a politics of growth. Fair societies are more dynamic and more innovative.
Tags: economy, featured, globalization, participation, standard of living, tax
Posted in Equality Debates | No Comments »
So-called tax breaks don’t shrink governments, they swell deficits
Dec. 25, 2011
According to the theory, tax cuts don’t just spur private investment, they actually starve governments of the food they need to grow. The result is that swelling deficits quickly force governments to tighten their belts and become smaller… A thought-provoking study by Texas A&M economists Joseph Ura and Erica Socker concluded that “starving the beast” does exactly the opposite of the theory. And it’s at the root of the fiscal mess in the U.S. Tax cuts actually increase demand for government services…
Tags: budget, featured, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Governance Policy Context | No Comments »
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