Archive for the ‘Governance Policy Context’ Category
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Drummond Report: Higher hydro bills, more user fees urged in sweeping report
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
Feb. 15, 2012
Ontarians could face higher hydro bills, bigger school classes, fewer hospitals, more expensive tuition and user fees to protect the future of provincial public services… “Reform must be pervasive and speedy. The government will need to implement all the reforms we recommend … to restrain the growth of program spending enough to achieve balance by 2017-18,”
Tags: budget, economy, Health, ideology, standard of living, tax
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Canada’s Charter of Rights: a global model
Saturday, February 11th, 2012
Feb. 10, 2012
As Canada was founded on compromise and dialogue, so are those qualities woven into its rights charter. And so it offers a structure for working through the competing interests found in any sophisticated, multicultural nation… The structure for balancing opposed interests is found in three key sections. Section 1 sets out that rights are not absolute; governments may limit them, as long as they have evidence to justify those limits… Section 15, the equality-rights section, is open-ended, and new groups, such as gays and lesbians, have been brought under its umbrella by the Supreme Court…
Tags: disabilities, featured, multiculturalism, rights, standard of living, women, youth
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Census Canada 2011 infographic: How the new population stats break down by province and city
Friday, February 10th, 2012
Feb 9, 2012
There are now 33.5 million people living in Canada, and our population is growing faster than that of any other G8 nation, results of the 2011 census released on Wednesday show. Click through the tabs to see figures for the population overall and breakdowns for the provinces, territories and urban centres.
Tags: economy, immigration
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Stephen Harper’s census and his vision for Canada
Sunday, February 5th, 2012
Feb. 05, 2012
Harper said Canada’s aging population threatens our cherished social programs. He thrust obscure stats such as the old-age-dependency ratio to centre stage, promised to overhaul our immigration system and strongly hinted at raising the age of eligibility for old-age security. These are transformative changes… Atlantic Canada is aging and Ontario’s share of immigration is tumbling. A failure to deal with either of those could have major economic consequences… his vision demanded that every province be treated the same. The danger of that philosophy is it could make them more different than ever.
Tags: economy, ideology, immigration, standard of living
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Pension reform raises questions about effect in provinces
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
Feb. 02, 2012
Several provinces require citizens to prove they receive the federal Guaranteed Income Supplement for low-income seniors to qualify for their own programs aimed at helping poor seniors… If Ottawa raises the current eligibility age of 65 for Old Age Security and the GIS… it would impact these other programs… The GIS is a top-up program tied to Old Age Security… [which] can only be claimed by seniors with incomes under $16,368… “The interaction with provincial programs will exacerbate the impact on low-income seniors”
Tags: budget, ideology, pensions, poverty, standard of living, tax
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$100-billion in expenditures that no one notices
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
Jan. 23, 2012
Tax expenditures serve a public policy purpose without the need of an army of bureaucrats in administration. They can be implemented virtually overnight, and can be easily tweaked. [but]… they are very difficult to take away. Canada is a leader in the use of tax expenditures in the sense that our uptake is more than 50 per cent above the OECD average… In the past five years the value of tax expenditures has risen 2.3 per cent, far less than the increase in the size of government… [however] Tax expenditures represent a major claim on the federal treasury and their economic and social benefits need to be put to the test.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, standard of living, tax
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Tax breaks the same as spending
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
Jan. 14, 2012
… the main appeal of loopholes to politicians isn’t what they do for culture, the economy or fairness but for re-election prospects… Loopholes amount to nearly 60% of net revenue. If all this were counted as the spending it really is, instead of dishonestly entered as a frugal, small-government reduction in revenue, federal budgets would top $350 billion, a quarter over their on-paper $280 billion. And if it didn’t exist, personal income tax rates could be slashed by a third. (The 67 corporate ones worth about $26 billion, against just over $30 billion in net revenue, are even worse.)
Tags: budget, ideology, tax
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So-called tax breaks don’t shrink governments, they swell deficits
Monday, December 26th, 2011
Dec. 25, 2011
According to the theory, tax cuts don’t just spur private investment, they actually starve governments of the food they need to grow. The result is that swelling deficits quickly force governments to tighten their belts and become smaller… A thought-provoking study by Texas A&M economists Joseph Ura and Erica Socker concluded that “starving the beast” does exactly the opposite of the theory. And it’s at the root of the fiscal mess in the U.S. Tax cuts actually increase demand for government services…
Tags: budget, featured, ideology, standard of living, tax
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Canada’s First Nation policies cause friction: U.S. diplomatic cable
Monday, December 5th, 2011
Dec. 4, 2011
“Lack of a standard model for resolving comprehensive land claims, self-government agreements, and the absence of a clear legal definition of what constitutes an ‘aboriginal right’ have resulted in complex multi-year negotiations, a significant claims backlog, and friction between aboriginal communities and the federal and provincial governments,” the cable says… dated Aug. 21, 2009.
Tags: Health, Indigenous, poverty, rights, standard of living
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How to revive Canada’s dream of social democracy
Sunday, November 27th, 2011
Nov 26 2011
Conservatives commonly claim that opinion has shifted to the right, that people want less government. The evidence is rather that they have lost faith in the capacity of our political system to deliver the kind of government most Canadians want. That is reflected both in the low turnout at elections and the recent strength, among those who did go to the polls, of the party that had long gathered little more than a protest vote. There will be no reforming government, however, until either the NDP or a revitalized Liberal party has developed, and taken to the electorate, a realistic agenda for social democracy.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, standard of living, tax
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