Filmmaker Vac Verikaitis offers unique perspective on poverty
Sunday, October 28th, 2012
October 27, 2012
Usually, he said, media come down to the mean streets, talk to the homeless person and drive cheerfully away. “I know exactly the internal struggles and mindset, because at the heart of poverty it’s not just about social injustice. More importantly, it’s about social exclusion… It is hope’s absence that’s “the greatest fallout of living in poverty,”
Tags: Health, homelessness, ideology, mental Health, poverty
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
Ryerson hosts international conference on Mad Studies
Saturday, May 19th, 2012
May 19 2012
Through their medical faculties, universities conferred “power and legitimacy to enforce imposed practices ranging from lobotomy, ECT insulin-coma shock, excessive drug treatments, discriminatory labels. “Now that some of us are in these elite positions within academia, it is essential to ensure we use this power and privilege to organize, to promote, research, write and engage the public about a topic that has too often in our history been interpreted through the views of medical-model academics.”
Tags: disabilities, Health, ideology, mental Health, participation, standard of living
Posted in Education Debates | No Comments »
Union leader Sharleen Stewart is bent on making health care a top provincial election issue
Saturday, June 25th, 2011
Jun 24 2011
The SEIU plans to mount “the biggest ground campaign” ever seen in Canada. It intends to keep the focus on health care. And it intends to defeat candidates who threaten it. “Our candidate is health care,” Stewart said. “So when we go knocking on doors we’re going to talk to them about health care.” More than half of SEIU’s members work in health care — in hospitals, nursing homes and retirement homes, or providing in-home care and community services. These workers are predominantly female and often among the lowest paid in the system.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, privatization, rights, women
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
The ideal (and extremely rare) Queen’s Park family
Friday, November 26th, 2010
Nov 26 2010
… as the Vanier Institute of the Family said in its recent report Families Count, “History teaches us that family has never been one thing to all people.” The report said there are now more unmarried than married people in Canada, couples without children now outnumber those with children, and nearly one in five Canadian children lives in a lone-parent household… The idea that “Ontario families” have a common interest on any given issue is as naive as the proposition that there’s a “black community,” or “gay community,” or “faith community” of uniform view.
Tags: ideology
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Mental health ‘crisis has arrived’ say MPPs
Saturday, August 28th, 2010
Aug 27 2010
Twenty-one pages.
That’s all it took to describe unspeakable human pain, a problem deeper and wider than even seasoned MPPs imagined, and to make 23 recommendations that could go a long way to improving and saving lives… the report bluntly stated the obvious. Ontarians wait too long for treatment, don’t get the right treatment, don’t get enough treatment and frequently suffer in silence. Seriously ill people are often turned away from emergency departments, or released from hospital with no treatment plan or before their condition has stabilized…
Tags: disabilities, mental Health
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
Poverty absent from premiers’ agenda
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
Aug 04 2010
Rothman, director of social reform at Family Service Toronto and national co-ordinator of Campaign 2000, wants the premiers to commit themselves to eradicating poverty. … for the most part, she says, the disadvantaged have not benefitted from the stimulation programs of the last two years. “We think it’s very important to send a strong message across the land that poverty prevention and eradication is the business of all governments… Are the premiers up the challenge? Rothman was asked. “We’ll see.”
Tags: poverty, standard of living
Posted in Social Security Debates | No Comments »
Abilities Centre a crowning achievement for Christine Elliott
Friday, May 21st, 2010
May 21 2010
For Elliott, it’s been a 10-year journey that began even before she and husband Jim Flaherty, the federal finance minister, came to fully know of the special needs of one of their own three sons. What she did know, from her volunteer work with the Grandview Children’s Centre and Durham Mental Health Services, was that parents with adult children with special needs, “were really desperate about what was going to happen to their children when they were gone.”
Tags: participation, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
Pharma wars take on American tone
Friday, May 14th, 2010
May 14 2010
How odd it is that the pharmacies apparently don’t have money to hire pharmacy students as interns this summer, but have the coin to underwrite a Bash-the-Government Bus Tour of Ontario for a posse of them. Word is that independent pharmacies kicked in – $1,000 to $2,000 apiece, depending on who’s telling the story – to fund a war-chest that amounts to about $5 million… …who, on reflection, would prefer a system of government that makes policy by the temper tantrums of the well-bankrolled rather than the deliberations of the duly elected.
Tags: Health, pharmaceutical
Posted in Health Debates | 1 Comment »
Straight talk from Dalton McGuinty draws Tim Hudak’s ire
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
May 12 2010
Politics in the immediate future, Friedman wrote Sunday, will be not about giving things to voters but about taking them away. Governments will have to figure out how to raise some taxes to increase revenues, while cutting others to stimulate growth, he said. They’ll have to cut some services to save money, while investing in new infrastructure to increase economic capacity. Politicians, Friedman wrote, are going to have to get “a lot smarter and more honest.”
Tags: economy, ideology
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
Province’s silence on mental health leaves advocates fearing for the future
Monday, April 12th, 2010
Apr 12 2010
…one of the most productive and non-partisan exercises currently underway at Queen’s Park is the select committee on mental health and addictions. Last month, the committee issued an interim report that… gave voice to people it said “are so often ignored and stigmatized.”… It was told of the link between mental health and addictions and suicide – the 10th leading cause of death in the province. It learned about depression, anxiety and other mood disorders, about autism spectrum disorders, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, perinatal mood disorders, schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis. All of which fill the courts, the jails, the streets and the graveyards.
Tags: mental Health
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
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