Archive for the ‘Child & Family Debates’ Category
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Native children also have the right to parents
Monday, December 13th, 2010
December 11, 2010
Native children are languishing in state care in unthinkable numbers… Canada remains so traumatized by the “sixties scoop,” the widespread adoption of native children into white homes, that it allows the native children of today to grow up without a permanent home of their own… Striving to avoid the wrongs of the past, we have inflicted new wrongs, of temporariness and a lack of nurturing, on the most vulnerable children. Unless we insist on the right of these children to permanent parents, future premiers may find themselves apologizing again, for lives ruined by yet another public policy failure.
Tags: child care, Indigenous, multiculturalism, rights
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Child support too low a priority
Saturday, December 11th, 2010
Dec 11 2010
Ontario’s Auditor General Jim McCarter has found that the Family Responsibility Office works actively on less than one-quarter of its total cases each year. Even if a person is lucky enough to have her case make it to the top of the pile, there is no guarantee she will get timely help. The office waits four months after a case goes into arrears before it even starts enforcement action. Remarkably, more than 80 per cent of the calls to the FRO call centre never get answered.
Tags: child care, poverty, standard of living, women, youth
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Full-day kindergarten popularity outstrips plans to pay for it
Monday, December 6th, 2010
Dec. 06, 2010
It will be years before voters will know whether full-day kindergarten delivers on its promise of higher graduation rates and improved academic outcomes.. Teachers have been generally supportive of the program but are already raising concerns about space, with the tightest classroom squeezes yet to come. Enthusiastic parents have driven up enrolment figures, creating new financial pressures. And Ontario residents aren’t the only ones watching – other provinces are moving in the same direction.
Tags: budget, child care, ideology, participation, standard of living
Posted in Child & Family Debates | 1 Comment »
Governor General urges Ontario to act on adoption and infertility
Friday, December 3rd, 2010
Dec 02 2010
In 2008, the McGuinty Liberals asked Johnston to head the Expert Panel on Infertility and Adoption, as part of an election promise. The panel’s August 2009 report “Raising Expectations” recommended Ontario become the best jurisdiction in the world in which to have a family, the Governor General said. To do that, the report called for an overhaul of the province’s adoption bureaucracy, which currently allows thousands of Crown wards to languish in foster care while several thousand families wait years to adopt.
Tags: child care, youth
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Getting It Right from the Start: An Argument for Early Childhood Care
Sunday, November 28th, 2010
November 24, 2010
Government support of early childhood education and care programs for poor and vulnerable children is a worthwhile investment argues a new paper released by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies. Ian Munro says the evidence is clear that high-quality child care delivers long term sustained value for low income families and for society at large.
Tags: child care, economy, participation, standard of living
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Canada leads in happiness research
Sunday, November 28th, 2010
Saturday, Nov. 27, 2010
… if you just make everyone wealthier, especially among the wealthy countries and wealthy people, people are going to have higher standards of living but not necessarily feel better about life. Everyone’s deriving their happiness in part relative to material standards set by others. Measuring progress solely by growth in GDP is an outmoded idea because we have better ways to measure our social objectives. Q What are the things that actually make Canadians happy? Social factors… explain a good fraction.
Tags: participation, standard of living
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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
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Number of seniors living in poverty soars nearly 25%
Thursday, November 25th, 2010
Nov. 25, 2010
The number of seniors living in poverty spiked at the beginning of the financial meltdown, reversing a decades-long trend and threatening one of Canada’s most important social policy successes. The number of seniors living below the low-income cutoff, Statistics Canada’s basic measure of poverty, jumped nearly 25 per cent between 2007 and 2008, to 250,000 from 204,000, according to figures released on Wednesday by Campaign 2000… Economists say women make up as much as 80 per cent of the increase in seniors poverty.
Tags: pensions, poverty, standard of living, women
Posted in Child & Family Debates | 1 Comment »
PM needs a lesson on crime
Saturday, November 20th, 2010
Nov 20 2010
… our Prime Minister has contempt for the very process involved in the gathering of accurate statistics. He lacks sophistication about psychological illness as a significant contributor to individuals getting in trouble with the law, and seems uninterested in the causes of recidivism… / Given that longer sentences and more prisons have been demonstrated around the world to not only not deter crime but to be correlated with higher crime rates, and given that Harper is clearly not stupid, one can only conclude that he wants more crime.
Tags: budget, corrections, crime prevention, rights
Posted in Child & Family Debates | 1 Comment »
Blame Tory policies for rising crime rate
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
November 17, 2010
The fundamental factor behind most crime and criminal behaviour is poverty. The Tories have done a fantastic job of creating and spreading that around. Under their irresponsible fiscal and social leadership, the gap between rich and poor exploded and continues to grow. Yet services remain underfunded… Government priorities remain upside down. Children are left to languish while services are chopped to fund unsustainable, irresponsible tax cuts to profitable corporations… Are the Tories tough on crime? Absolutely not! They are only tough on the criminals their policies created.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, ideology
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