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Canada Learning Bond helps low-income families
Monday, June 27th, 2011
June 26, 2011
Three years after arriving in Canada from the Philippines, the new mother had no job, no income and no home of her own, but she knew something that more than 1 million Canadians like her do not: Ottawa will give low-income parents a nest egg for their child’s higher education. Because she acted on this tip from her community centre, her son Luke, who is one, will have a $500 savings bond for future tuition, to which Ottawa will add $100 a year up to a maximum of $2,000. They need not kick in any money.
Tags: poverty, tax, youth
Posted in Education Delivery System | No Comments »
Mental health services for everyone
Monday, June 27th, 2011
Jun 26 2011
The focus on children and youth in the first three years of the government’s 10-year mental health strategy will make a difference. But action is also required now on mental health services for adults and seniors. If one in three people got treatment for cancer, no government or health minister would be able to justify such poor performance. This is the situation for mental health care in Ontario and Canada. Countries like the U.K., New Zealand and Sweden spend at least 10 per cent of their health budgets on mental health, while Ontario spends 5.8 per cent.
Tags: budget, ideology, mental Health, participation, standard of living
Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »
Poverty reduction does make a difference
Monday, June 27th, 2011
Jun 26 2011
Anti-poverty groups urged the provincial government to take bold steps to protect people from the economic downswing. They urged government to increase the Ontario Child Benefit, boost the minimum wage, and match federal stimulus spending. They also called on the province to raise incomes for adults living in poverty. The McGuinty government followed through on the first three steps. It also introduced full-day junior and senior kindergarten. But, crucially, it did not do anything substantial to deal with income security for adults.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, poverty, standard of living
Posted in Social Security Debates | No Comments »
Grassroots group takes back patients’ stories
Saturday, June 25th, 2011
Jun 25 2011
Allowing ourselves to be put under the microscope may be a necessary evil as a marginalized group trying to combat stereotypes and get disability issues into the mainstream, where they belong. In an effort to get social policy-makers to focus on us, we need to catch their attention… Now a group calling itself “a grassroots collection of individuals” is saying “Hands off our stories.” They are trying to reclaim the narrative process, reshaping it into something that is more equitable.
Tags: disabilities
Posted in Inclusion Debates | 1 Comment »
Union leader Sharleen Stewart is bent on making health care a top provincial election issue
Saturday, June 25th, 2011
Jun 24 2011
The SEIU plans to mount “the biggest ground campaign” ever seen in Canada. It intends to keep the focus on health care. And it intends to defeat candidates who threaten it. “Our candidate is health care,” Stewart said. “So when we go knocking on doors we’re going to talk to them about health care.” More than half of SEIU’s members work in health care — in hospitals, nursing homes and retirement homes, or providing in-home care and community services. These workers are predominantly female and often among the lowest paid in the system.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, privatization, rights, women
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
Studies warn drug prices will rise under trade deal
Friday, June 24th, 2011
June 24, 2011
The head of an agency tasked with safeguarding health care has been left in the dark by Ottawa on a multi-billion dollar trade deal that could result in soaring drug prices for consumers… Ontario potentially would be the hardest-hit province, paying $1.2 billion more annually… “Payers — consumers, businesses, unions and government insurers — would face substantially higher drug costs as exclusivity is extended on top-selling prescription drugs,” says [the] report, commissioned by the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association.
Tags: budget, economy, Health, pharmaceutical, standard of living
Posted in Health Delivery System | 1 Comment »
No running away from health care
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
Jun 22 2011
… the political strategists who are hoping that health care will simply go away as an election issue are going to be disappointed. The public isn’t interested in bidding wars — with their tax money — over which party will spend more on health care. This election — whether the parties like it or not — will be about which party Ontarians trust to reinvent and redesign our health-care delivery system.
Tags: budget, Health, standard of living, tax
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
Quebec’s child-care scheme pays for itself, economist
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
June 22, 2011
By 2008, about 70,000 more women with young children had entered the workforce who would not otherwise have been working… The increased economic activity, which includes mothers’ income and consumption taxes, more than covered the province’s $1.6 billion annual child-care costs that year… And it poured more than $700 million in additional revenue into federal coffers… If a similar program existed in Ontario, it would send another $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion to Ottawa… “This is why we say the federal government should make a contribution to Ontario and other provinces.”
Tags: budget, child care, economy, standard of living, women
Posted in Child & Family Delivery System | 1 Comment »
Feeding jails while police starve
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011
Jun 20 2011
Stephen Harper’s plan to pump billions of dollars into new penitentiaries — while starving Canada’s national police force of the money it needs to do its job — is ludicrous. It’s as if the Prime Minister actually wants to promote crime as a way of filling his new jails. The auditor general’s most recent report confirmed that the RCMP has been giving up many of its investigations into drug gangs, mobsters and organized crime because it doesn’t have the resources to pursue them.
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Strikes losing historic leverage
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011
Jun 20 2011
Union membership has steadily declined over the past three decades, to a current 30.8 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce. The comparable figure for the U.S. is a mere 12.3 per cent. The sharp drop in union membership is cited as a leading cause of the flatlining of inflation-adjusted middle-class incomes in Canada and the U.S… A 17-month strike at Caterpillar Inc. in 1994 marked a turning point in North American labour relations… striking workers eventually returned to work without a contract. Employers have been playing hardball ever since.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, rights, standard of living
Posted in History | 3 Comments »
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