Archive for the ‘Child & Family Debates’ Category
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Doctors decry crackdown on drugs
Friday, April 8th, 2011
Feb 7, 2011
The principle target of the 564 signatories – which includes doctors, nurses, social workers and law professors – is a provision that would impose minimum prison sentences of at least six months for a variety of drug offences, including operating small-scale marijuana grow operations… minimum sentences will serve only to fill up prison cells at great expense, while doing little to protect the public.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, Health, ideology
Posted in Child & Family Debates | 1 Comment »
Invest in police, not prisons
Monday, April 4th, 2011
Apr. 4, 2011
… the money needed to fund an expansion of the force remains locked behind bars, a prisoner of the government’s nonsensical jail-building crusade. How can a Prime Minister who is so philosophically committed to freedom be so fascinated with incarceration? Why does he worship the discredited American approach of locking offenders away instead of trying to reduce people’s proclivity to offend by investing more in social work, treatment for mental illness and drug addiction, as well as good, solid policing?
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Probing the pledge: The Tories’ flawed tax break for families
Friday, April 1st, 2011
Mar. 28, 2011
… there are better ways to achieve similar social policy objectives… investments in child care or parental leave, and tax measures that benefit people at the lowest income levels… if the goal is to lower Canadians’ tax burden, just cut income-tax rates for everyone or remove the lowest income earners from the tax rolls.
Tags: ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
‘Tax break’ conceals low benefit
Friday, April 1st, 2011
March 29, 2011
While it’s true that tax splitting will be a nice benefit for families with stay-at-home moms or dads, it won’t do much for families that have the greatest need for help with the cost of child-rearing. Most of these are left out because they’re either single-parent families or ones in which both parents find it necessary to work… So a family that’s working twice as hard to keep its head above water gets little or nothing.
Tags: budget, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
A good start for our kids will keep them out of jails
Thursday, March 24th, 2011
March 22, 2011
They need proper nutrition and educational supports, better access to subsidized childcare as well as geared-to- income housing. Their caregivers need better training to create new employment opportunities. Help the parent, help the child. For everything Canada has to brag about on the world stage, at home we are failing our children, and they deserve better. More police and more guns on our streets, or harsher sentences for criminals, will never prevent crime. Until we are ready and financially committed to addressing the root causes society’s ills, they will continue to make victims of us all.
Tags: child care, crime prevention, housing, ideology, standard of living
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Need help? Don’t look to Ottawa
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
Mar 15 2011
They call her Diane the Dinosaur. They remember every judgmental remark the human resources minister has made about the poor, the unemployed and parents desperate for child care. But community workers still harboured a slim hope that Diane Finley would show some humanity in her response to the poverty reduction plan produced by Parliament’s all-party committee on human resources. She quickly snuffed that out, rejecting all 58 of its recommendations… it was another setback in the increasingly forlorn battle against hunger, homelessness and deprivation.
Tags: homelessness, ideology, poverty
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Prisons should be repair shops, not garbage dumps
Monday, March 14th, 2011
Mar 12, 2011
Prison should not be a place of languishing; its purpose should be punishment, reparable stigmatization other than for extreme offenders, and largely regimented time to be spent in activity sensibly designed to make the returning prisoner less likely to reoffend. This would include therapy, skills training and reorientation. It should be authoritarian enough to incite non-return, but not so heavy-handed that it over-penalizes and breaks the will of inmates to resume life with a promising likelihood of success.
Tags: corrections, ideology, Indigenous, mental Health, poverty, rights
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
The Conservative crime agenda sells, until the bill arrives
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
Feb. 28, 2011
… even if the public would like tougher sentences, there appears to be no wish to pay a tab in the billions each year (in combined federal and provincial costs). The federal corrections budget alone is set to rise by $861-million, or 36 per cent, by 2012-13 over 2009-10. The provincial costs will probably rise by at least that much, because of federal sentencing changes. Ottawa’s position is either that Canadians want a get-tough approach at any cost, or that they aren’t entitled to know what the cost will be.
Tags: budget, corrections, crime prevention, ideology, tax
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Begging for Care: Keeping seniors healthy and at home
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011
Feb 23 2011
A woman exhausted from providing round-the-clock care for her mother-in-law, who suffers from dementia, begs for the help of a personal support worker. She qualifies for just three hours a week. The province has increased funding to Ontario’s Community Care Access Centres… But what of seniors who wind up in a hospital bed because the medical and personal support they needed to keep them healthy at home was not available? … the only hope of taming the growth in Ontario’s health care budget… is to keep seniors healthy at home for as long as possible.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, poverty, standard of living
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Spaces must be affordable
Monday, February 21st, 2011
Feb 21 2011
…some Toronto neighbourhoods have no child-care spaces available at all; others have spaces that no one can afford. There are 17,000 kids waiting for the chance to get one of the city’s 24,000 child-care subsidies… The last time Toronto comprehensively addressed the problem was in 1997 when an expert panel recommended that “quality, regulated child care should be available to all parents who need it.”… But ultimately, the property tax base will never stretch to cover the expansion in affordable service that is so desperately needed. Queen’s Park and Ottawa must come to the table for that.
Tags: budget, child care, ideology, participation, standard of living, women
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
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