Archive for the ‘Equality’ Category

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Social spending gap to favour seniors: election analysis

Friday, October 16th, 2015

… the four major parties have all promised a significantly higher amount of new investment dollars by 2019/20 to Canadians over 65-years-old compared to their younger counterparts… the Conservatives will do 18 cents per person under 45 for every dollar they put into a retiree, the NDP will do 27 cents, the Liberals will be 28 cents, and the Greens will do 34 cents… “There’s lots of challenges with having to delay family planning or home ownership, the possibility of that is much less…

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Let’s throw off the yoke of patriarchy

Thursday, October 15th, 2015

Pay inequity is discriminatory – period. We don’t need a fancy show committee of experts to tell us this. More study is nothing more than a stalling tactic for society and governments to confront the real core equity problem in society – patriarchy… The question is why should we underwrite injustice in a supposedly democratic society? … Patriarchy has become so ingrained in our social culture and psyche that it has become normalized and virtually invisible – even when it is blindingly obvious

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Providing safe drinking water on reserves is simple. Just do it

Wednesday, October 14th, 2015

Drinking water on reserves is a federal jurisdiction. Ottawa provides 80 per cent of the funding… in July there were 133 Health Canada drinking water advisories in 126 First Nations communities… One-quarter have been ongoing for more than 10 years. [Some] have been boiling water since the 1990s… Every Canadian needs clean drinking water. It’s not a complicated position, morally or technically. The money is there and the problems are fixable. No more excuses.

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We need action, not just talk, to close wage gap between men and women

Friday, October 9th, 2015

Women earned 31.5 per cent less than men in Ontario in 2011… It’s not much better than when the Pay Equity Act was passed in 1987 when the gap was 38 per cent… in 2005, the Royal Bank estimated that if Canadian women had the same labour market opportunities as men, personal incomes would be $168 billion higher each year. The gap can’t be blamed on a lack of women’s participation in the work force, as nearly half of it is female. Nor can it be attributed to a lack of education. Or a lack of women in high-skill jobs.

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Let’s focus on the real barbaric practices

Tuesday, October 6th, 2015

It’s barbaric that almost half of the population of Nunavut cannot access healthy food… that federal cuts have led to defunding of crucial services for women, such as rape crisis centres, shelters and reproductive health services… that more than 1,200 indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing… The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was not created for some at the expense of others. We are all deserving of the rights that are enshrined therein, and we all have a responsibility toward each other.

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How the deck got stacked against young Canadians

Tuesday, October 6th, 2015

Ottawa contributes to a federal/provincial spending pattern that invests more than $33,000 per person over 65 compared to less than $12,000 per person under 45. This calculation includes the PM’s universal child care benefit, and income-splitting for one in three families with kids… it’s time all parties commit Ottawa to reporting how spending breaks down by age, and whether we are leaving at least as much as we inherited.

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How a modest tax change can help low-income families and lower inequality

Friday, October 2nd, 2015

A modest change to the tax system that converts existing non-refundable tax credits to credits that are refundable constitutes an effective step toward improved income security for Canada’s poorest families in the fashion of a guaranteed annual income. The new benefits would be almost entirely realized by families below or near Statistics Canada’s Low-Income Cut-off and so the poorest families would benefit the most… improv[ing] the fairness of tax filing while addressing Canadian income inequality.

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The Inequality Debate: We must build prosperity for all

Friday, October 2nd, 2015

We in the developed world are all healthier, richer, freer and even, with a few notable exceptions, taller than our early 19th-century ancestors. There were two keys to our success then — and they will be the keys to our success now. The first is a fundamentally positive attitude to technological progress, even as we are realistic about its side-effects… The second is to understand the essential role of government in harnessing technological change so that it serves us all.

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Do Canadian voters even know where their self-interest lies?

Thursday, October 1st, 2015

… support for policies that benefit the select few reflect a simple misunderstanding… That 87 per cent of the public have nothing to gain from income splitting and 95 per cent have nothing to gain from higher TFSA limits does not mean they have nothing to lose. The unavoidable consequence of such policies is that the overwhelming majority of Canadians will be losers in the form of future public-service cuts or tax increases.

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The Inequality Debate: We can do something about it

Tuesday, September 29th, 2015

The first step is to restore the welfare state. Since 1980 there has been an unwinding of redistributive policies in OECD countries, with adverse distributional consequences… It’s one of the reasons income inequality in Canada is greater than in France, Germany or Japan. To change this involves raising taxes… based on a return to progressive income taxation… But reducing inequality is not just a matter of taxes and spending… [It’s also] the market distribution of income: what people receive in wages, interest and other forms of capital income.

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