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Why medicare needs Ottawa
Monday, January 16th, 2012
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 »
Supreme piece of judicial statecraft
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011
Sep 27 2011
Thirty years ago, on Sept. 28, 1981, a Supreme Court opinion set out rules for amending the Constitution. This turned out to be the most politically significant opinion the court has delivered in its existence. It led to the nation’s most defining political developments since Confederation. This opinion established that Canada’s constitutional order contained rules that governed how Canada could make constitutional changes.
Tags: ideology, rights
Posted in Governance History | No Comments »
Bringing coherence to our fragmented EI system
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
Jan. 21, 2011
Canada’s broken federal-provincial relations victimize the unemployed. A lack of co-ordination between those making decisions about the federal EI program and provincial social assistance programs creates gaps that are unjustifiable from a labour-market-efficiency and social-justice perspective. A coherent system would be run by one order of government. Other countries have one system. Canada has two parallel systems that are barely on speaking terms.
Tags: economy, standard of living
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
Information must be Canada’s bedrock
Saturday, August 21st, 2010
Aug. 11, 2010
Let’s consider the gap in our knowledge that might have existed if the last long-form census in 2006 had been voluntary. How would we have known with unimpeachable certainty that the top 20 per cent of Canadian families earned 10 times more that the bottom 20 per cent? That for every dollar earned by a native-born Canadian, a recent immigrant male earned just 63 cents and female 56 cents? That 20 per cent fewer farmers worked at home on a family farm, or that the numbers of commuters rose by more than 9 per cent?
Tags: ideology, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Governance Debates | 1 Comment »
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