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Advice for Jack Layton from distinguished roster of NDP elder statesmen
Sunday, May 15th, 2011
May 15 2011
Here’s what they expect him and want him to do: • Restore civility to Parliament. • Put economic equality front and centre… • Define the NDP platform’s cap-and-trade proposal for climate change. Come to grips with a carbon tax. • Try to align Quebecers’ social democratic values more permanently with a federal, as opposed to a separatist, party. • Articulate a foreign policy that would restore Canada’s role in the world, not as a warmonger but as an advocate of peace, human rights and development. • Lead a values debate at home to help reverse the right-wing tilt of our public policy.
Tags: budget, ideology, rights, standard of living
Posted in Governance History | No Comments »
Self-fulfilling prophets of health-care doom
Sunday, May 15th, 2011
May 15 2011
The political elites are engaged in a game of self-fulfilling prophecy. Straight-line cost projections and guaranteed federal revenue increases will ensure the cost increases they project. Canadians need government to bend the cost curve, not fund it. We need to figure out how we can shift gears and deliver more value for the tax dollars spent. We have successfully done so before and we can do so again… Fortunately, our challenge this decade is different. Then it was about fixing hospital care; now, we must harvest productivity gains from new technologies and virtualization of care.
Tags: budget, Health, mental Health, rights, standard of living
Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »
Adoptive parents say province is in dire need of subsidy program
Saturday, May 14th, 2011
May 13, 2011
Currently, adoption subsidies are the responsibility of the province’s 53 children’s aid societies. Since there is no provincial funding earmarked for subsidies, the money comes from general revenues on a case-by-case basis. It means some families in some parts of the province get generous help, while others get nothing… While foster families receive about $18,000 annually per child, the average annual subsidy to adoptive parents last year was just $4,350. Adoption subsidies were one of the key recommendations of the province’s 2009 Expert Panel on Fertility and Adoption.
Tags: budget, child care, disabilities, standard of living, youth
Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »
Liberals have to create a new political centre
Saturday, May 14th, 2011
May 14 2011
… progressives need a vision that not only safeguards citizens against the extremes of a globalizing market, but also meets the rising expectations Canadians have of services in the 21st century — all this in a manner that will be sustainable given 21st century budgets and demographics… The future for progressives rests in figuring out the political axes of the 21st century around which new solutions can be mined and new coalitions built… open vs. closed systems; evidence-based policy vs. ideology; meritocratic governance vs. patronage; open and fair markets vs. isolationism; sustainability vs. disposability, and emergent networks vs. hierarchies.
Tags: economy, featured, ideology, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Governance Debates | 1 Comment »
Adoption subsidies help children find a family
Saturday, May 14th, 2011
May 14 2011
Most children removed from their families for their own protection… are shuffled through various foster homes or, worse still, placed in institutional group homes… It’s also a bad deal for taxpayers who fund this expensive, ineffective system. Adoption was never the likely outcome for four siblings all with severe health and emotional problems. But… it happened because of the willingness of the local children’s aid society to pay an ongoing subsidy… less than half what the government was paying to keep these children in foster care
Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »
University professors teach better if they stopped lecturing
Friday, May 13th, 2011
May 12, 2011
Don’t lecture me. As a campus slogan, that could well catch fire in the wake of a new Canadian study suggesting the professorial monologues that have taught young science scholars for centuries should be banned from the classroom… “It should be wholesale transformation; you’re practising bad teaching if you’re not doing (interactive instruction),” says Wieman, who shared the Nobel physics prize in 2001. The study was released Thursday by the journal Science.
Tags: youth
Posted in Education Debates | No Comments »
More can be done to combat ‘wage theft,’ labour minister admits
Friday, May 13th, 2011
May 12 2011
… a new report that found one-third of low-income workers had their wages withheld or stolen by employers… a Workers’ Action Centre report… concluded that “the lack of protection in Ontario workplaces leaves many of the workers … with little hope of getting the wages they’re owed, resulting in significant economic hardship.”… DiNovo urged the government to follow recommendations such as targeting “industries like cleaning, hospitality, retail and construction, where newcomers to our province have a long, long history of substandard employment practices.”
Tags: crime prevention, economy, immigration, rights
Posted in Delivery System | No Comments »
Health care: From entitlement to empowerment
Friday, May 13th, 2011
May 12 2011
Canadians understand clearly that our public health-care system is in deep trouble. We know that it is fiscally unsustainable. We know that other countries get better results for less money. We know that an aging population and new treatments keep driving up costs faster than our ability to pay. We know that the boundaries between what is covered and what is not are creating both inefficiencies and unfairness… Political will is important, but the reality is that there are no easy solutions, at least not ones that will work.
Tags: budget, Health, standard of living, tax
Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »
Harm reduction on trial
Thursday, May 12th, 2011
May 11 2011
Today… Federal government lawyers will be in the court to present their case to shut down Insite, Vancouver’s supervised injection site for people who inject drugs…. To Ontario residents, there is no doubt such sites do improve health while reducing the spread of disease in the community and improving public order in the neighbourhood. To citizens who say the money should be invested in treatment facilities instead of supervised injection services — we need both. Each is along the continuum of health-care responses to injection drug use.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, Health, ideology, rights
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
eHealth: Half of Ontario health records to be electronic by 2013
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011
May 11, 2011
In two years, half of all Ontario residents will be able to walk into a health clinic and have a doctor access their up-to-date personal electronic health record. Ontario is actually awash with electronic records, but the problem has been that few systems can share information, Reed said… The entire province will eventually be covered in three regional hubs — one in the GTA, the others in northeastern and southwestern Ontario.
Tags: budget, Health, mental Health, standard of living
Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »
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