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You can talk about efficiency, but you can’t hide the axe
Friday, May 11th, 2012
May. 11, 2012
The line is that budget cuts of $4-billion will not affect service to Canadians, but rather can be absorbed by (the following words are in the budget): rationalizing, consolidating, integrating, streamlining, refocusing, reconfiguring, modernizing, realigning and everywhere seeking efficiencies… Doubtless, efficiencies can be found and should be pursued. But there are not $4-billion of them to be found. Only if governments stop doing things can such sums be saved, which is what is happening…
Tags: budget, ideology, participation, standard of living
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
In the provinces, restraint without the hard edge
Sunday, April 29th, 2012
Apr. 28, 2012
The post-recession hangover of deficits and higher debt means provinces, like Ottawa, have entered a period of spending restraint. Politics is about management these days, not vision or grand schemes or social advancement. It’s about trying to operate in leaner times… So there’s little to suggest that the agenda that seems to drive the national Conservative Party has much appeal at the provincial level… If a difference exists, it would be that the federal Conservatives really want to cut, whereas provinces feel they have no choice.
Tags: budget, ideology
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
It still comes down to fixing the reserves
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
Mar. 14, 2012
Systems and structures are fine and necessary, as is proper funding. But… results from formal education have more to do with parental attitudes, cultural assumptions about the importance of education and community norms than anything else. Which means that aboriginal education can’t be divorced from its core contextual problem – the reserves themselves that the panel correctly notes display socio-economic and health inequities, poverty, suicides, youth incarceration and abuse, high teen pregnancy rates, lower life expectancy and chronic disease.
Tags: budget, Indigenous, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Education Delivery System, Equality Delivery System | No Comments »
Ottawa’s health-care dollars should come with strings attached
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
Mar. 07, 2012
Stephen Harper, it is said, has a compartmentalized view of federalism. Let Ottawa do what Ottawa should do; let the provinces do what they should do. Let each stay out of the other’s hair… Conservative or Liberal, every federal government since Diefenbaker has placed some conditions (or tried to) on federal transfers for health care. Federal governments wanted political profile, of course, for Ottawa’s money, but they also sensed that the public viewed health care as something “Canadian” that transcended provincial boundaries.
Tags: budget, Health, mental Health
Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »
Exploiting Canada’s resources can be a fool’s game
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
Feb. 22, 2012
Canada has one of the worst productivity records in the industrialized world. Upon productivity improvements household incomes depend, not burgeoning household debt. When you ask why median household incomes stagnated for a long time in Canada, and why the lowest-income Canadians have gotten poorer, one reason (among many) is low productivity… If nothing changes, taxes will certainly have to rise on them just to deal with aging alone, unless those who remain in the work force are more productive… Without better productivity, forget real income growth.
Tags: economy, globalization, privatization, standard of living
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
Can Ottawa spark innovation? It hasn’t yet
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
Feb. 01, 2012
the federal government has… more than 100 programs, institutes and regional development agencies to support business. That figure doesn’t include an array of tax incentives, the largest of which is the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax credit. All together, these business programs cost $6.44-billion in the fiscal year 2010-2011… Whether government programs are at the heart of the problem is doubtful, given that the R&D tax credits have been among the most generous in the world… Canada has industries that just don’t do much research and development…
Tags: economy, standard of living, tax
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
The politics of Harper’s medicare decision
Saturday, January 21st, 2012
Jan. 20, 2012
When Stephen Harper was campaigning for the first time, he proposed a Patient Wait Times Guarantee linked to federal money. Now, however, Mr. Harper is going to give money to the provinces (they got federal tax points for health care a long time ago, a transfer they never mention) without any strings, conditions or demands. It’ll be the first time since medicare began that a federal government has handed money over carte blanche. Broadly speaking, two reasons explain his decision – one theoretical, one political.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, mental Health
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
Ottawa’s offer and the provinces’ health challenge
Thursday, December 22nd, 2011
Dec. 21, 2011
When people rightly ask: Why didn’t all that federal money indexed at 6 per cent bring about more change?, part of the answer lies right there. Federal transfers indexed at 6 per cent don’t provide any new resources for a system with 7-per-cent yearly spending increases… The biggest challenge all governments will face is to bring health-care spending down to the growth in the economy, something none of them have done. That challenge will be even tougher because the Canadian economy will not grow as fast in the next decade as it did in the past one, and the population is aging.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
Even with a majority, the bullying goes on
Saturday, December 17th, 2011
Dec. 16, 2011
If anything, the Harper government is more bullying, scornful of dissent, intent on controlling every utterance, contemptuous of the media and determined to carry on political war at all times and by all means… In the Commons, the government is using closure repeatedly. Faced with an adverse decision from the Federal Court against its legislation to end the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly, the government waved the ruling aside and said it would proceed… Information is as tightly controlled as ever. Everything runs through the central information machine in the Prime Minister’s Office.
Tags: participation, rights
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
For Kashechewan, read Attawapiskat
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
Dec. 07, 2011
We are engaged in national intellectual escapism if we think these communities will escape from their debilitating cycles of problems without something more than a subsistence economy. Without one, dependence will prevail. With dependence comes lack of self-esteem, social pathologies and family troubles… A policy problem does exist with the lower per-student funding level for native education. But if such a cadre could be developed, why would highly educated (in a formal sense) young people stay in places like Attawapiskat when few jobs beckon, except for the band council or maybe a school or health clinic?
Tags: budget, economy, featured, Indigenous, standard of living, youth
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
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