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How do we control physician costs?
Sunday, April 1st, 2012
Mar. 20, 2012
In its last deal, the OMA did well, squeezing 12.5 per cent in pay increases out of the government over four years – 3, 2, 2 and 4.5 per cent annually from 2008 to 2012… Very few doctors get a set salary that can be frozen… About 70 per cent of Ontario doctors now receive some level of alternative funding but, over all, 70 per cent of their earnings come from fee-for-service billings. In the recent report of the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services, Don Drummond said this equation should be flipped so that doctors receive 30 per cent of their pay via fee-for-service. Otherwise, it’s virtually impossible to control costs.
Tags: budget, Health
Posted in Health Delivery System | 1 Comment »
Ontario hospital-funding changes to favour growing communities
Sunday, April 1st, 2012
Mar. 18, 2012
The Ontario government is doing away with the global hospital budgets that for decades have allocated funding evenly across the board… Health Based Allocation Model, or HBAM for short, will divert more money to hospitals in regions where the population is growing and aging and where health-care costs are often higher. Hospitals will also be in line for additional money, based on how effectively they treat patients… The pay packets of hospital executives are now linked to their progress in meeting quality-of-care targets…
Tags: budget, Health
Posted in Health Delivery System | 2 Comments »
People, not prisons
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
March 14, 2012
Investing in people, not prisons, would be a good start in addressing the problems that so often contribute to society’s ills… Inmates return to Canadian streets without counselling, without rehabilitation, without mental health care, without addiction treatment and without the supports necessary to be successfully reintegrated into communities. Interest in rehabilitation has been lost in favour of punishment. This crime legislation will make us less safe as a country. Instead of prisons, use the money to lift people out of poverty, improve health care, addictions and mental health care, end child poverty and homelessness…
Tags: budget, crime prevention, ideology, poverty, standard of living
Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »
North America is out of touch with ‘Ideas Economy’
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
March 14, 2012
Every increase in value added in Canada will come from the Ideas Economy, and if you’re going to have an educational system that’s suited to that and prepares people, you have to train original thinkers, people who are willing to challenge authority, not follow hierarchy or teach to the test. Memorization, harmonization, standardization; these make an easier job for educational bureaucrats and teachers, but what we need to do is teach our children, and teach ourselves throughout our careers, to keep re-learning how to learn.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, participation, standard of living, youth
Posted in Education Debates | No Comments »
How about ‘Buy Canadian’ for resource projects?
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
Mar. 14, 2012
We need a national strategy to maximize Canadian content in Canadian resource developments. Canada, for example, could impose a “Buy Canadian” requirement on future mining projects, similar in spirit to the Buy American rules… If we limit our national economic ambitions to digging stuff out of the ground, all we’ll ultimately have left is a big hole in the ground. But if we’re thoughtful and pro-active about leveraging our resource wealth into all-round economic and industrial development, we’ll have much more to show after the resources are gone.
Tags: economy, globalization, standard of living
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
It still comes down to fixing the reserves
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
Mar. 14, 2012
Systems and structures are fine and necessary, as is proper funding. But… results from formal education have more to do with parental attitudes, cultural assumptions about the importance of education and community norms than anything else. Which means that aboriginal education can’t be divorced from its core contextual problem – the reserves themselves that the panel correctly notes display socio-economic and health inequities, poverty, suicides, youth incarceration and abuse, high teen pregnancy rates, lower life expectancy and chronic disease.
Tags: budget, Indigenous, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Education Delivery System, Equality Delivery System | No Comments »
Self-reflective Tories drop hints on budget, evironment and social policy
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
Mar. 11, 2012
Human Resources Minister Diane Finley… suggested the government is looking at creating “social impact bonds,” which are contracts between government and private investors to fund social programs. Payment from the government is tied to program outcomes. “Essentially the social impact bond has the effect of moving risk from the current state of affairs where government – and taxpayers – pay up front without a real way of guaranteeing performance, to the social group itself who will be ‘paid for results,”
Tags: budget, ideology, tax
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
A simple way to tax the rich
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
March 9, 2012
While income earned from stock options is deemed to be ordinary income under our tax laws, a special deduction was created in 1984 (paragraph 110(1)(d)) which allows individuals to deduct 50 per cent of the income derived from exercising stock options. That is, only half of the employment benefit from stock options is subject to tax… The purpose of paragraph 110(1)(d) was to encourage more widespread use of employee stock option plans… there is no evidence the deduction achieved its stated goals… the entire deduction should either be eliminated… or a holding period should be attached to the exercised shares in order to qualify for the deduction.
Tags: budget, ideology, tax
Posted in Equality Policy Context | 2 Comments »
Ottawa’s health-care dollars should come with strings attached
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
Mar. 07, 2012
Stephen Harper, it is said, has a compartmentalized view of federalism. Let Ottawa do what Ottawa should do; let the provinces do what they should do. Let each stay out of the other’s hair… Conservative or Liberal, every federal government since Diefenbaker has placed some conditions (or tried to) on federal transfers for health care. Federal governments wanted political profile, of course, for Ottawa’s money, but they also sensed that the public viewed health care as something “Canadian” that transcended provincial boundaries.
Tags: budget, Health, mental Health
Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »
Toews’s ‘child pornographers’ gaffe aside, Bill C-30 has real dangers
Saturday, March 24th, 2012
Feb. 23, 2011
the new bill, C-30, doesn’t invite police to monitor your every online move without a warrant. It does, however, require Internet companies – loosely defined – to cough up your name, Internet protocol address and a few other identifiers if the police ask for them, even without a warrant… “Investigations are going to change in character, to what we call fishing expeditions,” said Tamir Israel, a lawyer at the University of Ottawa’s privacy-minded Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic… What’s more, there is no guarantee that details uncovered in the course of this work will stay tucked away in police notebooks.
Tags: crime prevention, ideology, rights
Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »
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