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Modest country, ambitious leader [John A. Macdonald]
Monday, October 31st, 2011
Oct 22 2011
Macdonald didn’t believe in progress — in this sense he wasn’t a Victorian… Whether Conservative or Liberal, no government enacted any social legislation in Ottawa until a half-century later, in 1927. Macdonald believed that human nature did not change; by logical extension, there was therefore no point in trying to make the world a better place.
Tags: economy, ideology, immigration, rights, standard of living
Posted in Governance History | No Comments »
Largest-ever study on aboriginals in Toronto finds divided community, racism
Saturday, October 29th, 2011
Oct 28 2011
The largest study of aboriginal people ever conducted in Toronto has found a need for a seniors’ long-term care facility, priority child care spaces and awareness campaigns to correct systemic racism within the justice system. The Toronto Aboriginal Research Project found a divide between the city’s thriving aboriginal middle class and an underclass plagued by poverty and related social challenges… “For the middle class, there aren’t enough institutions for them to connect with aboriginal culture and identity”… For other urban aboriginals, meeting basic daily needs for housing and health remains a challenge.
Tags: child care, Indigenous, multiculturalism, poverty, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion Debates | 1 Comment »
Gun control keeps suicides down
Friday, October 28th, 2011
Oct 27 2011
Most firearm deaths in Canada are suicides (over 75 per cent). Only 24 per cent are homicides. Suicides in Canada will go up if the Prime Minister isn’t careful about what he repeals… gun control supporters like me may have placed too much focus on gun crime itself… Suicides dropped dramatically in Canada thanks to the federal gun registry… suicide is not about good guys and bad guys… With a gun, a suicide attempt is almost always a suicide.
Tags: crime prevention, ideology, mental Health, rights
Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »
Ontario legal aid plan to relax qualifying rules
Friday, October 28th, 2011
Oct 27 2011
Now, 16 years after the Ontario government tightened the rules in a massive overhaul of legal aid, it seems that’s about to change… they plan to loosen the rules over the next three years so more people are eligible for free help from a lawyer. The expansion, they say, will be funded through savings on the administrative side… The report notes Legal Aid Ontario’s cut-offs are substantially below the low-income threshold set by Statistics Canada… Canada is behind much of the world when it comes to legal aid qualifying guidelines…
Posted in Equality Delivery System | No Comments »
Small business, the romance is over
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Oct 20 2011
Fact is, the dismal failure rate of small businesses is such that they kill about as many new jobs as they create. About 40 per cent of new businesses fail in their first two years… Our misplaced romanticizing of small business is lousy public policy. We chronically misallocate taxpayer resources to subsidize with tax breaks and other largesse the lifestyle choice of folks who prefer to be their own boss… doctors, accountants, travel and real estate agents, beauticians, the trusts of wealthy families, and recipients of rental income on vacation homes and commercial real estate. None of those are risk-taking job creators.
Tags: economy, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
Native people forge municipal links
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
Oct 23 2011
… while much ink has been spilled about the lack of significant aboriginal policy reform at the federal and provincial levels, important changes in the aboriginal-non-aboriginal relationship are occurring at the local level… Indeed, over the last several decades, municipalities and aboriginal governments across Canada have signed a variety of intergovernmental agreements. These agreements, which number in the thousands, address a variety of important issues for both communities.
Tags: Indigenous, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Governance Delivery System | No Comments »
How to make inequality obsolete
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
Oct 24 2011
While Flaherty seems determined to shelter the rich from progressive taxation, there was no such catering to them on the part of Henry Simons, a founder of the conservative Chicago School of Economics. Simons considered excessive inequality “unlovely” and supported progressive taxation, arguing that capitalism would never survive in a democracy if the general public didn’t benefit from it… The Occupy Wall Street movement has made unbridled greed — so distasteful to Adam Smith and Henry Simons — suddenly controversial.
Tags: economy, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Equality Debates | No Comments »
Index provides a wider measure of progress
Monday, October 24th, 2011
Oct 21 2011
The Canadian Index of Wellbeing measures eight major areas: living standards, community vitality, democratic engagement, education, health, environment, leisure and culture and how we spend our time. While Canada’s GDP increased by an impressive 31 per cent from 1994 to 2008, the Index of Wellbeing rose just 11 per cent, according to the first composite report released this week. And even that modest overall increase masks areas where quality of life actually declined. The time crunch and income inequality both went in the wrong direction.
Tags: economy, featured, ideology, participation, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
Supreme Court stands up for the Internet
Sunday, October 23rd, 2011
Oct 23 2011
The issue before the court was whether links to content should be viewed as republication of that content for the purposes of defamation law… The plaintiff argued that linking to the offending content should be enough to hold both the original poster and the linker liable. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed, upholding a B.C. Court of Appeal decision dismissing the lawsuit. The majority of the Supreme Court supported reasons from Justice Rosalie Abella, who concluded “a hyperlink, by itself, should never be seen as ‘publication’ of the content to which it refers.”
Tags: ideology, rights, standard of living
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
The right to information
Sunday, October 23rd, 2011
Oct 22 2011
Canada’s Access to Information Act gives every Canadian citizen the right to access government records. Such information is not supposed to be kept secret. Too often, though, it is journalists who are singled out and thwarted in their efforts to get access to public information. As this year’s annual Newspapers Canada audit of our country’s freedom of information system found, in Ontario particularly, requests made by media and other groups that seek to hold government accountable were more likely to be flagged as contentious and take much longer than requests made for private reasons.
Tags: budget, ideology, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Governance Delivery System | No Comments »
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