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Dust-up over daycare
Sunday, February 6th, 2011
Feb. 5, 2011
While 33% of respondents would give a high priority to child care for working parents, 32% would give a high priority to financial support for stay-at-home parents. And so, rather than shove a massive Liberal coast-to-coast daycare program down Canadian taxpayers’ throats, wouldn’t it be better to provide any new funding to the parents themselves — as the Tories argue — and let them make up their own mind? … instead of finding ways to push more babies out of the nest, politicians should look at ways to support all parents’ choices…
Tags: budget, child care, ideology, participation, women
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Make some noise for the RDSP
Friday, February 4th, 2011
Feb. 3, 2011
The Registered Disability Savings Plan is a relatively new national tax-deferred, long-term savings plan for families who want to help ensure the financial security of relatives with disabilities and for individuals with disabilities who want to build up retirement savings for themselves. Think of it as an RESP — only with far more generous federal funding. In fact, for each dollar contributed, the federal government adds up to $3 in grant money… What’s more, anyone can contribute to an RDSP — parents, grandparents, friends, charities, foundations –it’s wide open.
Tags: budget, disabilities, participation, pensions, tax
Posted in Social Security Debates | No Comments »
Capitalism touted as health care’s saviour
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
Feb. 2, 2011
Dr. Arthur Porter of Montreal’s McGill University Health Centre called for government funding that is tied to specific services and harnesses free-market principles to prod institutions to treat patients better and more quickly… “Our current publicly funded, publicly delivered system creates little incentive to truly innovate… Some critics, though, suggest the idea would create “perverse” inducements, turning hospitals’ focus to the treatments that were easiest to deliver and generated the most lucrative fees, while more complex cases got shorter shrift.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, privatization
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
IMF chief twists Adam Smith’s view of inequality
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
February 1, 2011
Smith lived in an age of personal responsibility. Poor relief was a local, personal affair, as was the “beneficence” that Smith praised as the highest virtue. “Beneficence,” wrote Smith, “is always free, it cannot be extorted by force.” Forced redistribution would have offended Smith’s notion of justice, and he would instantly have spotted that “social justice” is a weasel concept that reverses the notion of justice entirely… Smith would have thought it ridiculous to suggest that a nation might become wealthier or happier by forced “redistribution”.
Tags: economy, ideology, poverty, standard of living, tax
Posted in Equality History | No Comments »
Families shouldn’t be left alone to care for Alzheimer’s victims
Monday, January 31st, 2011
January 31, 2011
Alzheimer’s is a disease that utterly destroys its victims personalities, leaving them bewildered wisps of their former selves, with nothing to look forward but a slow slide into incontinence, immobility and ultimately, a sad, pathetic death. And that doesn’t account for the suffering of the families… our society must steel itself for the wave of Alzheimer’s and dementia that is our future, and put in place the long-term care facilities and community support programs necessary to confront it. It won’t be cheap. But to do otherwise is unconscionable.
Tags: disabilities, Health, mental Health, standard of living
Posted in Child & Family Delivery System | No Comments »
Toward a lower corporate tax
Friday, January 28th, 2011
Jan. 27, 2011
Instead of cutting corporate taxes, Mr. Ignatieff proposes to jack rates back up to 18% and spend the additional revenue on home care for the elderly and daycare for toddlers. But as the response to similarly ambitious Liberal initiatives in recent years shows, the public has little appetite for a new nanny-state program… Reducing corporate tax cuts will keep Canada competitive and attract investment, at a time when our economic recovery needs all the help it can get. This is not the time for new social programs and grandiose government schemes.
Tags: economy, ideology, tax
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
Canada comes up short on jobs
Friday, January 28th, 2011
Jan. 28, 2011
Canada can no longer claim to have recouped all the jobs lost during the recession. The economy is roughly 30,000 jobs short, according to Statistics Canada… it has revised its labour data to reflect 2006 census figures, as opposed to using 2001 population data… However, it added the unemployment rate, at 7.6% as of December, remains unchanged. Based on the revisions, the agency says 428,000 jobs were lost between October 2008 and July 2009. From July 2009 to last month, the revised data suggest 398,000 net new jobs were created – meaning there is 30,000-job gap.
Tags: economy, globalization
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
The real costs of ‘free’ health care
Monday, January 24th, 2011
January 24, 2011
Canada’s health-care system encourages our citizens to abdicate responsibility for their own health. Our near-total absence of user fees, for example, encourages people to schedule doctor’s visits or visit emergency rooms without any awareness of the true costs to the system. In economic terminology this is known as moral hazard… The moral hazard explains why many of us fail to consider the health consequences of our lifestyles. Because there is no financial penalty to unhealthy living… A consequence of this is the overburdened health-care system…
Tags: economy, Health, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
Individual responsibility and the welfare state
Sunday, January 23rd, 2011
January 22, 2011
In Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, when social programs became a defining feature of national identity, as well as a weapon against Quebec separatism, there was much discussion, even in the Progressive Conservative Party, of guaranteed annual incomes, effectively paying salaries to citizens whether they are employed or productive or not. In the United States, more arithmetically sober heads prevailed… , but Europe now faces the problem, with aging and problems attracting assimilable immigration, of only 30-some percent of the population working while everyone else draws benefits of some kind.
Tags: economy, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Social Security History | 1 Comment »
Bringing coherence to our fragmented EI system
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
Jan. 21, 2011
Canada’s broken federal-provincial relations victimize the unemployed. A lack of co-ordination between those making decisions about the federal EI program and provincial social assistance programs creates gaps that are unjustifiable from a labour-market-efficiency and social-justice perspective. A coherent system would be run by one order of government. Other countries have one system. Canada has two parallel systems that are barely on speaking terms.
Tags: economy, standard of living
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
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