Posts Tagged ‘budget’

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Canada disability benefit severely underfunded in Budget 2024 and Canadians with disabilities will pay the price

Thursday, April 25th, 2024

One-in-seven people who access food banks nationally rely on provincial disability income support. In many provinces, that means living more than $800 below the poverty line each month… it was never about seeing just another income support program come into effect. It was about extending the type of tangible support to Canadians with disabilities living in severe poverty, helping them overcome its relentless cycle.

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Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »


We are rich Canadians and we support higher capital gains taxes

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024

Ottawa wants to raise taxes for Canada’s ultra-rich. Rich people like us want that, too… with 1 per cent of the country’s residents holding over a quarter of all wealth. We need higher taxes to level out this rising wealth inequality… to fund new spending on priorities like Old Age Security, clean economy, medical care, child care, and housing, but it doesn’t go far enough to address class distortions… we’d also like to see a “super wealth tax,” an inheritance tax, and progressive property taxes

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Trudeau would be wise to raise the GST to 7 per cent instead of reforming the capital gains tax

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024

… the GST has underwritten Canada’s social safety net for more than 30 years. In 2006… the GST accounted for 30.6 per cent of all federal tax revenue… Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and finance minister Chrystia Freeland have sought refuge in progressive populism with their plan to expand the capital gains tax. But the sustainable policy choice would be to put those two points back on the GST.

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Ottawa puts up $50M in federal budget to hedge against job-stealing AI

Sunday, April 21st, 2024

“There is a significant transformation of the economy and society on the horizon around artificial intelligence”… Some jobs will be lost, others will be created… AI is an issue “across sectors, but certainly clerical and customer service jobs are more vulnerable… two types of skills it makes sense to focus on in retraining — computational thinking, or understanding how computers operate and make decisions, and skills dealing with data.

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We need to revolutionize how we organize health care in Canada

Friday, April 19th, 2024

… “achieving high value for patients must become the overarching goal of health care delivery, with value defined as the health outcomes per dollar spent.” … Our government should focus less on who they are paying, and more on what they want to buy… This would facilitate innovations in care delivery across the system, and allow for more investment in integrated care programs that span the full continuum. Funding could focus on all-in coverage… including drugs, home care and virtual innovations.

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Posted in Health Delivery System | No Comments »


‘Aspirations are not going to lift people out of poverty’: Ontario disability advocates react to the federal budget

Friday, April 19th, 2024

… the feds have placed primary responsibility for funding disability-related social assistance firmly back in the province’s court. The budget calls out “the inadequacy of disability assistance provided by many provinces,” while saying that the federal government “aspires to see the combined amount of federal and provincial … income supports for persons with disabilities grow to the level of Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS).”

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Posted in Social Security Policy Context | 1 Comment »


Liberals tax the rich, but not enough to be considered populist

Thursday, April 18th, 2024

… in recent decades, business interests have strong-armed governments into redesigning the marketplace to favour their own interests, through tax and regulatory changes, and the rewriting of labour laws to disempower workers. These “neo-liberal” changes haven’t brought us the productivity gains that were promised, but they have made us a much less equal society… We need to reverse the “neo-liberal” policies that are responsible for such extreme inequality.

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Liberal budget hits a home run on housing, but plays small ball on care economy

Wednesday, April 17th, 2024

Here are three ways federal small ball could deliver big results without big spends in the coming months: Child care Workforce Deals… with a focus on workforce attraction and retention… tracking trends in the investments occurring in our long-term care, child care and health-care sectors… examining ways of putting new guardrails on public funding… Care services such as child care, long-term care, medical or dental community clinics can be a built-in feature of new housing and infrastructure developments.

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Fiscal folly in Ontario: New report reveals a cheapskate province

Tuesday, April 16th, 2024

In 2022-23, Ontario spent $3,251 less per person on public programs compared to the average of the other provinces… to reach the Canadian average, we would have to spend close to 27 per cent more on programs than we do now… On the revenue side, Ontario raises $4,033 a year less per person than the average of the other provinces… we would have to increase our total revenues this year by 32 per cent to be average.

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Protecting public health care from private investors

Wednesday, April 10th, 2024

In Canada, a single private equity firm already owns the largest national network of independent surgical centres — 53 operating rooms spread across 14 centres — in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and B.C… Approximately 90 per cent are publicly funded through partnerships with provincial health systems… Should profit-driven investors own health care facilities?

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Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »


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