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A smarter War on Drugs
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
Jun. 3, 2011
… shockingly, a Conservative Canadian government, which purports to understand capitalism, proposes to re-introduce legislation that would impose mandatory minimum sentences for small-scale marijuana growers. This ridiculous policy seems designed to keep the trade in the hands of criminal lowlifes, who police can then pursue and hopefully catch and prosecute -if there’s room in a courtroom and a judge is free some time in the next seven years, that is.
Tags: budget, crime prevention, ideology
Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »
The Chopping Block: Canadians deserve more
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
Jun 2, 2011
… the government plans to find $7-billion in efficiencies, including $1-billion in 2012-13, $2-billion in 2013-14 and $4-billion in 2014-15… they amount to a mere 2% in savings from the $352.5-billion in departmental spending planned from 2012-13 to 2014-15. The Conservatives also promised an extra $4.6-billion in new spending during the election, which wipes out most of the savings. With a significant deficit and no credible plan to balance the budget, this is not the time for marginal belt-tightening. Canada needs real and substantial spending reductions…
Tags: budget, economy, ideology
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
The end of poverty: What globalization did that AID could not
Monday, May 30th, 2011
May 28, 2011
… we have just lived through the most dramatic decrease in global poverty in history. And the transformation has almost nothing to do with debt relief or higher aid flows. According to the Brookings report, Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015, we are living in a period of rapid global poverty reduction that is driven by high, sustained economic growth across the developing world.
Tags: economy, globalization, standard of living
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
Better life through higher income
Friday, May 27th, 2011
May 25, 2011
… a slick presentation can overcome even the dodgiest substance and if you go towww.betterlifeindex.org, you find a really slick presentation. Click on “My Better Life Index” and you’re met with 34 daisies, one for each OECD country. Each daisy has 11 petals, indicating the country’s performance on a scale of one to 10 on 11 different measures of well-being (income, health, employment, work-life balance, and so on). You can ask for a ranking on each of the petals, in which case, as if blown by a summer breeze, the daisies dance around to reconfigure themselves in order by that variable.
Tags: economy, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
One in four Canadians have depended on social services: poll
Wednesday, May 25th, 2011
May 25, 2011
Regardless of their personal feelings on why homeless people end up in that situation, an overwhelming majority of Canadians — 93% — believe nobody in the country should be homeless and housing access should be a fundamental right, according to 86% of the poll respondents. Almost all those polled said the homeless population “deserve a sense of dignity.”… Mental illness was also an area of focus in the survey, with it being cited as a suspected contributing cause of homelessness by 40 per cent of the respondents.
Tags: disabilities, homelessness, housing, mental Health, poverty
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
Canada among most peaceful nations in the world: report
Wednesday, May 25th, 2011
May 25, 2011
The Institute for Economics and Peace… says in its 2011 Global Peace Index that Canada is the eighth most peaceful country in the world in which to live… holding Canada from climbing higher on the index was an increase in the likelihood of violent protests, a reflection of the demonstrations in Toronto during last year’s G20 meetings…The index uses 23 quantitative and qualitative measures, such as military spending as a percentage of GDP, level of violent crime, likelihood of violent demonstrations, deaths from conflict and relations with neighbouring countries…
Tags: crime prevention, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Governance Policy Context | No Comments »
Crime and punishment: Inside the Tories’ plan to overhaul the justice system
Monday, May 23rd, 2011
May 21, 2011
The Conservative government’s omnibus crime legislation, due ‘‘within 100 days,’’ will mark a watershed moment in Canadian legal history… The bill is sweeping in scale and scope: It is expected to usher new mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes.. It will expand police powers online without court orders, reintroduce controversial aspects of the Anti-Terrorism Act that expired in 2007, end house arrest for serious crimes, and impact young offenders and their privacy.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, ideology
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Why Ottawa is so big
Friday, May 20th, 2011
May 19, 2011
Since the 1960s, there has been a consistent erosion of the division of powers that has not only seen an unprecedented growth in the size of the federal government, but a fuzzification of where the jurisdictional boundaries lie. The growth of federal responsibility for health care is a good example of this… one has to question whether the objective of having a national minimum standard of universal access to health care means that the federal government requires a massive bureaucracy to do it.
Tags: budget, ideology, rights
Posted in Governance Delivery System | No Comments »
Saying goodbye to ‘Indian’ affairs
Friday, May 20th, 2011
May 20, 2011
The federal government’s move to change the name of the Department of Indian Affairs to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs is a good idea. The new name is more accurate, more modern and more inclusive… So the old name — Indian Affairs — overlooked 47% of aboriginal Canadians. It was also outdated to the point of being racist.
Tags: ideology, Indigenous, rights, standard of living
Posted in Equality Debates | No Comments »
Study highlights long mental-health wait lists
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
May 16, 2011
Patients with the most urgent needs do seem to get the speediest care, however that seems to mean inordinately long queues for others. The average wait for a child rated as low priority – who, for instance, is avoiding group activities because of anxiety – is 109 days. For a high-priority patient who might have been suspended from school for serious aggressive behaviour, the wait is 29 days.
Tags: disabilities, mental Health, youth
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
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