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Biden breaks taboo on taxing wealthy, showing Trudeau how to do it
Thursday, March 23rd, 2023
… their wealth is largely held in corporate stock and, unless they sell stock and trigger a capital gain, no income tax applies. The wealthy are a formidable interest group who play an enormous — although largely hidden — role in shaping the political agenda. Still, they’d have more trouble keeping a wealth tax off the agenda if our progressive politicians embraced the idea with the same gusto as the broad Canadian public.
Tags: budget, economy, featured, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
Private foundations sit on billions of dollars while charities struggle
Thursday, February 9th, 2023
We don’t need more tax breaks for charitable giving — Canada already has among the world’s most generous charitable tax breaks, and we are overflowing with charitable funds. It’s just that we can’t get at them. What’s needed is a major overhaul of Canada’s two-tier charity sector where private foundations controlled by wealthy families sit on mountains of idle cash while thousands of working charities are starved for funds as they struggle to deliver services to Canadians.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Inclusion Policy Context | No Comments »
Premier Doug Ford should explain why he underfunds public health care
Thursday, January 26th, 2023
If Ontario just spent the average of what the other provinces have spent on health care per capita over the past five years, we’d be spending an additional $7.2 billion this year — more than enough to properly pay our beleaguered nurses, lure thousands more nurses to Ontario and bring back into use countless hospital operating rooms all over the province idled by years of budget cuts.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, participation
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
Ontario’s health-care system isn’t candy store to be plundered
Thursday, August 25th, 2022
With our health-care system reeling, Ford is charging ahead with further privatization — Ontario health care is already 40 per cent private — and selling this as a way to save the system through “innovation.” … The system’s problems have been thoroughly studied by countless commissions and the solutions do not involve privatization… Ontario has lots of unused hospital operating rooms, idled after years of cutbacks.
Tags: budget, economy, featured, Health, ideology, privatization
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
Long banned in Ontario, private hospitals could soon reappear
Thursday, March 10th, 2022
… with the chaos created by COVID as a cover, the Ford government seems poised to allow a considerable expansion of private health care in the province… a dramatic development, allowing hospitals — the centrepieces of our health-care system — to be governed by corporate boards that prioritize profits, as in the U.S… private hospitals would undermine medicare by enabling well-to-do patients to gain faster access to treatment.
Tags: budget, economy, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, mental Health, privatization
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
After decades of delay, national child-care plan proves an ambitious social agenda is possible
Thursday, January 13th, 2022
… now that it’s clear a national child-care system is politically viable, it will be up to the Trudeau government to ensure that the one it’s started to build is strong — and public. The success of Scandinavian-style child care stems from the fact that it is a truly public system — like our school system — with no place for private profit-making, which leads to cutting corners on staff and resources.
Tags: budget, child care, economy, ideology, privatization
Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »
Taming inflation can be worse than inflation
Friday, December 17th, 2021
While Canadian inflation is running at 4.7 per cent, Canadian wages are also rising. For some of the most disadvantaged workers (new hires), average wages are growing at the impressive rate of 10 per cent a year — putting them well ahead of inflation… And this booming labour market may get better yet, as contracts expire and new ones are negotiated at a time when workers are wielding more power than they have in decades.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
Trudeau should join Biden in rejecting suffocating ‘trickle-down’ economics
Thursday, May 6th, 2021
Trudeau has shown some spine against the deficit hawks, but he has been timid about joining Biden’s campaign to tax the wealthy… Too bad. We could sure use the money to pay for needed programs. Besides, when nations co-operate, corporations have a hard time playing us off against each other in pushing for ever-lower taxes… if other countries follow the U.S. in policing their corporations this way “it’s the end of tax havens.”
Tags: budget, economy, featured, globalization, ideology, tax
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
If you don’t have $20 million, relax. A wealth tax won’t touch you
Tuesday, April 13th, 2021
Canada’s wealthiest 87 families had wealth of $259 billion in 2016; our top 44 billionaires increased their wealth by more than $50 billion during the pandemic… 79 per cent of Canadians favour a wealth tax… In fact, a wealth tax would be the simplest, fairest and most effective way to collect billions of extra dollars of revenue a year, and to limit the power and political influence of the billionaire class… Here are some of the facile arguments being trotted out against a wealth tax.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, participation, standard of living, tax
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
Throwing money at Big Pharma won’t guarantee vaccine supply
Thursday, April 8th, 2021
Now we’re poised to give Sanofi hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the hope of ensuring a future vaccine supply… If we really want a biotech company we can rely on and that doesn’t hold a gun to our head, we should spend our money creating an enterprise that we actually own and control – a little secret learned by Cuba and, decades earlier, by the brilliant Canadians who created Connaught.
Tags: budget, economy, globalization, Health, ideology, pharmaceutical, privatization
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
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