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Less crime, more policing: This disconnect must be fixed
Wednesday, June 10th, 2020
The bottom line is that we spent decades constructing police forces that are expensive, over-militarized and not best suited to the tasks they face in the third decade of the 21st century. In too many situations, they are making things worse, not better. Reformers have been calling for change for a long time, and public pressure may now finally give the politicians the courage to start fixing the problem.
Tags: budget, crime prevention, featured, ideology, Indigenous, multiculturalism
Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »
Burden of the crisis must be shared fairly
Thursday, May 14th, 2020
The new LEEFF (for Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility) program is… designed to provide loans to big companies that are having trouble getting credit from private lenders… it comes with what the government calls “strict conditions.” … to maintain jobs and investment; uphold existing labour contracts and pension obligations; abide by federal goals on the environment and sustainability; and limit executive compensation, dividend payouts, and share buy-back schemes.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, participation, privatization
Posted in Equality Policy Context | No Comments »
Child care is essential to our economic recovery
Tuesday, May 12th, 2020
Even before the pandemic there wasn’t enough regulated child care, and in most communities it was far from affordable. This is the time to change that. Government funding for child care provides direct jobs for women, who have suffered higher job loses and reduced hours in the pandemic, and it enables other women to rejoin the workforce… How Ottawa and the provinces move forward will be evidence of whether governments have learned from this crisis…
Tags: child care, economy, ideology, jurisdiction, participation, women
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
Canada bans military-style firearms, but what about handguns?
Sunday, May 3rd, 2020
Trudeau rightly sees that “you don’t need an AR-15 to bring down a deer.” Well, you don’t use a handgun to shoot one either. Nor does a farmer need a handgun to kill pests. But every year handguns are used in hundreds of shooting incidents in communities across the country… Banning a range of military-style firearms is an important first step for Canada. But our biggest gun problem remains handguns and without banning those Trudeau’s Liberals aren’t doing enough to truly limit gun violence and death in this country.
Tags: crime prevention, ideology, jurisdiction, rights
Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »
Break the cycle of neglect and panic in public health
Saturday, April 25th, 2020
As far back as 2006, in the wake of SARS, Ottawa set out a pandemic preparedness plan that should have made this country as ready as any for a threat like COVID-19… Ottawa, it turns out, has been cutting funding for management of its stocks of personal protective equipment like medical masks and gowns, known as the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile… But at a time when pandemics seemed like distant threats, no one cared much about stocks of PPE gathering dust in warehouses.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, standard of living
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
Let’s have dignity in life as well as death
Saturday, April 18th, 2020
Working together we can push governments and businesses to build a more inclusive economy that offers full-time jobs with decent wages and benefits. We can repair the frayed social safety net. This crisis has already demonstrated that governments — provincial and federal — can quickly alter policies and programs to better suit the needs of Canadians when they are highly motivated to do so.
Tags: economy, ideology, Indigenous, participation, poverty, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
Ontario must stop the spread of COVID-19 in long-term-care homes
Tuesday, April 14th, 2020
Personal support workers, who provide the bulk of the daily care in long-term-care homes, are badly underpaid and overworked on normal days, let alone in the midst of a pandemic. And the way the system has been allowed to operate means these workers are often held to part-time hours, forcing them to cobble together jobs at multiple homes just to make a living. Ontario cannot afford to let this go on any longer.
Posted in Child & Family Delivery System | No Comments »
Canada will need a new industrial policy for a new world
Tuesday, April 7th, 2020
The pandemic is like an x-ray that reveals flaws in our social and economic body that we can no longer ignore… The drive to outsource everything possible in the name of the cheapest possible product has left far too many stranded in precarious, poorly paid work… The gaping holes in the social safety net laid bare by the pandemic make clear that we’ll end up paying one way or the other, either in higher prices needed to provide decent wages, or in expensive social benefits.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, participation, standard of living
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
There’s less than meets the eye in Ontario’s COVID-19 plan
Wednesday, March 25th, 2020
Hospitals… are getting $935 million under this plan, which isn’t far off what they said they needed just to maintain the existing level of care before the coronavirus… there’s no plan for direct cash payments to help those who have lost work or been forced to isolate because of COVID-19…. plenty of other provinces are jumping in to enhance the Trudeau government’s stimulus package with their own measures, believing it is a necessary provincial role… The Ford government, by contrast, seems keen to leave the heavy lifting to Ottawa.
Tags: budget, economy, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, poverty, tax
Posted in Governance Policy Context | No Comments »
Coronavirus shows it’s time to mend the safety net
Friday, March 20th, 2020
Having now accepted that better job protections and income supports are necessary in this crisis, how can we go back to pretending they’re not needed all the time? … This should be a learning experience that guides better policies for the long-term — not simply one-offs that will disappear when the crisis passes.
Tags: budget, economy, featured, ideology, poverty
Posted in Social Security Debates | No Comments »
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