Archive for the ‘Governance Debates’ Category

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Ford government appeals to Canada’s top court to keep premier’s mandate letters secret

Wednesday, March 30th, 2022

Mandate letters traditionally lay out the marching orders a premier has for each of his or her ministers after taking office — and have been routinely released by governments across the country. Ford’s government, however, has been fighting to keep his mandate letters from the public since shortly after the premier took office in June 2018… It’s unclear how many tax dollars and government resources have been spent trying to deny the public access to the mandate letters.

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The ‘care economy’ is growing the government, whether conservatives like it or not

Wednesday, March 30th, 2022

The government isn’t just getting bigger. It’s getting bigger specifically in the areas where costs are most likely to grow over the long-term… National child care, having been implemented, stands a fair chance of being permanent now. And COVID-19 has spurred even penny-pinching provinces like Ontario to commit to substantial health-care capacity expansions. 

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Look out Conservatives — big government is back, and Canadians like it

Wednesday, March 30th, 2022

Sean Speer, former economic adviser to Stephen Harper, wrote in The Hub in February, “We’ve gone from every major political party supportive of balanced budgets as recently as 10 years ago to today’s new multi-partisan consensus in favour of larger and longer deficits. Something obviously changed.”… historians may point to the moment last week when Canada’s social-safety net was significantly, and quite possibly, permanently expanded.

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New evidence that hospital pressured to axe doctor who criticized Ford government on pandemic

Tuesday, March 29th, 2022

It’s been more than a year since Dr. Brooks Fallis was suddenly fired in January as interim head of critical care at William Osler Health System, in the hardest-hit part of Ontario. Fallis was respected and admired by peers and employers. He was also a passionate, incisive critic of the government’s pandemic response. One was given more weight by his bosses than the other.

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Run and hide! Lock your doors! The coalition government is coming for your democracy

Friday, March 25th, 2022

The true democratic disorder is when a party receives around 40 per cent of votes but gets 60 per cent of seats in Parliament, and then imposes their will on the country as if they’d received a true mandate. That’s delusional, yet it’s become our political normal. The last time a majority of seats accompanied a majority of votes was in 1984… Coalitions are by their nature improvisational and creative, so they don’t follow rule books. They’re also pretty inevitable now, since elections increasingly return minority governments.

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces deal with NDP to support Liberals until 2025

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2022

The deal, known as confidence-and-supply agreement, would see the NDP support the minority Liberals in upcoming confidence votes, like federal budgets, in exchange for NDP-friendly measures… both parties identified shared policy objectives, including tackling climate change, advancing reconciliation, and delivering a “fairer tax system” for the middle class… Dental care, according to sources in both parties, is the big measure that Canadians will feel almost immediately.

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There’s a fix to disinformation: Make social media algorithms transparent

Thursday, March 17th, 2022

In the period of newspaper and broadcast dominance, anyone could find out what news their neighbours were consuming just by opening the paper or turning on the TV. In the social media era, many of those interactions are dark. The solution is algorithmic transparency. But this is easier said than done, because the algorithms are the special sauce in the platforms… So far, lawmakers have listened politely, but not acted. 

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Hard lessons from the siege of Ottawa

Monday, February 28th, 2022

… there is… no guarantee that the undeniable presence in Canada of disinformation-fuelled rage won’t grow. Civil society must resolve to push back against the ugly forces that caused the chaos and criminality in our national capital… It will require long overdue regulation of social media companies making obscene profits while failing to take responsibility for campaigns of hate and racism on their platforms.

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Sadness rules the day as Ottawa protest comes to an end

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2022

It was heartbreaking to see so many, ill-informed and hurting, fight for a cause they believe they are defending… Perhaps it was because they were repeatedly lied to… threats of violence… hate on display… so little consideration for the residents of downtown Ottawa… It was sad the residents of Ottawa felt the police couldn’t be trusted to enforce the law… It was sad that Ontario stood on the sidelines of the crisis for so long…

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Solutions exist for Canada’s alt-right radicalization

Sunday, February 20th, 2022

Canadians promote respect for the rule of law, but the protests have documented the truth: the law treats Canadians differently based on their skin colour. RCMP are quickly militarized to push Indigenous people off their land when they blockaded pipelines, but police have not removed white protesters with the same vigour. The hypocrisy of the last three weeks erodes trust in all our institutions.

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