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Riches for top CEOs come at a cost to everyone else
Friday, January 7th, 2022
the federal government should review rules on how much executive compensation companies can deduct (the United States already caps it at $1 million per employee), capital gains and stock options, as well as instituting a wealth tax for the richest Canadians. “Higher taxation levels can reduce inequality and help to refill government coffers following the impact of the pandemic,” the report says.
Tags: economy, featured, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
What COVID-19 has taught us about caring for our elders
Wednesday, January 5th, 2022
A recent survey by the National Institute on Aging found that almost 100 per cent of Canadians aged 65 and older planned to live in their own home for as long as possible. Yet Canada spends 87 per cent of long-term care dollars on institutionalizing people in nursing homes rather than at-home assistance.
Tags: budget, disabilities, Health, housing, ideology, mental Health, Seniors
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Canada’s top CEOs saw average pay increase of almost $100k in 2020
Tuesday, January 4th, 2022
“… when the economy does poorly, it’s often just the low-wage workers that suffer, it’s not the CEOs… and that was really highlighted by the pandemic and the data for 2020”… the report found that among the richest 100 CEOs, 30 headed companies that received the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), 14 saw the structure of their bonuses changed in order to protect them from the impact of COVID-19 and five experienced both.
Tags: economy, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Equality Policy Context | No Comments »
Is there a made-in-Canada solution to high inflation?
Saturday, January 1st, 2022
Inflation and the pandemic have a lot in common: both attack household incomes, both hit low-income households hardest, and both demand government action to support incomes. Social assistance rates must rise, as they should have years ago. Minimum wages must rise. Federal transfers to low-income Canadians should increase. Painful 20th century policy prescriptions to cut inflation by squeezing the life out of the economy, through increasing interest rates and reducing government supports, are no answer to our 21st century problems. They will only make our problems worse.
Tags: child care, economy, globalization, ideology, participation, standard of living
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
What football tells us about the future of workers
Wednesday, December 29th, 2021
The Care Economy is huge and growing. We all rely on it at different points in our lives. There is a labour crisis in this sector, and it is a gendered crisis. And nobody’s talking about it. We’ve been hearing about these shortages, on and off, since the 1990s, and still don’t have a national strategy for human resources in health care.
Tags: economy, Health, ideology, immigration, participation, rights, standard of living, women
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
Why in-person learning matters: A dispatch from the front lines
Saturday, December 18th, 2021
As pediatricians working in school-based clinics in Toronto, we have witnessed the deterioration of students’ well-being with school closures… As we confront the next wave of the pandemic, we must focus on strategies to keep schools safely open, including: supporting pediatric vaccine equity and uptake, advocating for small class sizes, and access to high-quality masks and ventilation.
Tags: Health, mental Health, participation, youth
Posted in Education Debates | No Comments »
Taming inflation can be worse than inflation
Friday, December 17th, 2021
While Canadian inflation is running at 4.7 per cent, Canadian wages are also rising. For some of the most disadvantaged workers (new hires), average wages are growing at the impressive rate of 10 per cent a year — putting them well ahead of inflation… And this booming labour market may get better yet, as contracts expire and new ones are negotiated at a time when workers are wielding more power than they have in decades.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
Its critics call it ‘birth tourism.’ But is the practice real? COVID-19 is providing clues
Friday, December 17th, 2021
Griffith estimates that the percentage of “tourism births” has now reached one per cent of all births in Canada in an average year. “This is really a question of the integrity of the citizenship program… This is legal but it’s still a loophole that allows basically fairly affluent women and families to shortcut the process, find a backdoor entry and without going through the standard process of becoming a Canadian citizen.”
Tags: economy, ideology, immigration, jurisdiction, rights
Posted in Inclusion Policy Context | No Comments »
The migrant worker floodgates have opened. It’s a decision we might come to regret
Wednesday, December 15th, 2021
… public policy is rowing against market forces and demographic trends, to keep things cheap. The larger the share of migrant workers in a job market, the lower the wage growth. In our endless search for a cheap deal, let’s not pit ourselves as consumers against ourselves as workers… This nation of immigrants, the tenth-largest economy in the world, has two wishes, one of which will be granted: lower prices or better jobs.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, participation, standard of living
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
It’s time for this generation’s political leaders to tackle the hard issues in Canadian health care
Wednesday, December 15th, 2021
Provincial health-care systems differ widely over titles, practices, pay and performance metrics. Their contribution to wider sharing of best practices could be agreeing to some shared definitions, targets and an agency to measure performance… as the pandemic revealed, provinces in a health-care crisis must support each other.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, mental Health
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
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