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Make the rich pay? Not in Canada
Monday, August 27th, 2012
17 August 2012
Canada remains remarkably generous towards its well-paid senior executives, public and private. They may make costly mistakes with taxpayers’ money, squander the life savings of their investors, but they still walk away with huge bonuses… Leaving aside instances of fraud, or incompetence, there is an underlying problem with executive compensation in Canada: salaries, bonuses, and severance packages are increasingly unrelated to performance, to economic reality, to the pressures faced by ordinary Canadians.
Tags: economy, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Equality Delivery System | 1 Comment »
Canadian multiculturalism ‘under stress’
Monday, August 27th, 2012
17 August 2012
The task force report entitled International Education, a Key Driver of Canada’s Economic Prosperity, was lauded on all sides for proposing a series of concrete solutions to looming labour market shortages… “the expenditure resulting from international students in 2010 was $8-billion, which translates to 86,570 jobs and $455-million in government tax revenue.”… the eighth largest jobs generator in Canada… One of the report’s key recommendations is to pursue international scholarships
Posted in Education Policy Context | 1 Comment »
Canada Health Transfer should ensure disabled persons’ needs addressed
Saturday, August 25th, 2012
13 August 2012
Time for Transformative Change, the Senate committee’s final report, embraced the recommendations of the national disability alliance by stating “that the federal, provincial and territorial governments ensure accountability measures be built into the Canada Health Transfer agreement to address the needs of disabled persons.” It is my hope that all Parliamentarians… explicitly embrace this recommendation as a principle that underpins a renewed Health Accord
Tags: budget, disabilities, Health, ideology, mental Health, poverty, rights, standard of living
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
Mass media in crisis, so is journalism
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012
6 August 2012
“Instead of using technology to bridge the communications gap between voters in their communities and the media, the media have used it to turn their backs on the public, forging closer links with the people reporters cover rather than with the people who used to read, watch, and listen to their reporting.”… there is a “gulf” between Canadians, on one side, and politicians and the media, on the other. “The media have come to identify more closely with politicians than with the public,” Mr. Waddell writes.
Tags: ideology, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion Debates | 1 Comment »
Private health care by stealth:
Friday, August 10th, 2012
30 July 2012
… there has never been any good evidence to suggest that user fees would do anything more than shift costs away from healthier and wealthier taxpayers to sicker and poorer users. In fact, there is no evidence at all that user fees reduce the unnecessary uses of health services. It is just as likely that “legitimate” users may delay seeking appropriate care until their conditions become more acute, more complicated and more expensive—on the public dime.
Tags: budget, ideology, mental Health, standard of living
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
Canada needs a new Health Accord to liberate health-care talent
Friday, August 10th, 2012
30 July 2012
The era of the omniscient independent practitioner is over… The practical question is whether the provinces will be able to clear the scope of practice gridlock entirely on their own, through multilateral consensus… If the public interest is to be served, there must be an honest broker to support and at times discipline the development of options, identify barriers to constructive change, invest in and sustain effort, and nudge the parties into a progressive consensus. That honest broker can only be the federal government…
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, mental Health, standard of living
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
It’s time Canada realized its promise on partnership with indigenous peoples
Friday, August 10th, 2012
30 July 2012
While one can invoke arguments of morality and charity to justify ensuring that indigenous youth receive an education of as high a quality as that received by non-Indigenous youth, promoting parity in this generation will be based solely on economic benefits… As much attention needs to be focused on Indigenous labour as is given to immigrant labour. It also makes no sense to have so many hundreds of thousands of people maintained in an increasingly expensive multigenerational state of dependency that is so destructive to health and well-being.
Tags: economy, ideology, Indigenous, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
Cuts to Statistics Canada a costly error, say experts
Friday, August 10th, 2012
23 July 2012
These reductions have been masked under the compelling veil of “efficiency.” In reality, the cuts promise considerable future costs because they compromise the tools used to understand the state. This, in turn, has a high probability of leading to decisions that are no longer based on evidence, and therefore are likely to be ineffective uses of public money… We have now halted the collection and analysis of our most informative longitudinal information on our labour force, on the workplace, on health and health care, and on child well-being.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Governance Policy Context | 1 Comment »
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