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  • Child & Family Debates

    Why Canada needs a ‘Children’s Charter’

    posted September 21, 2018 / No Comments

    … infant mortality rates are approximately five times higher in Nunavut than they are in British Columbia. Childhood poverty rates are 50 per cent higher in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick than they are in Alberta. As health, education and social programs generally fall under provincial jurisdiction, without federal standards geographic disparities are likely to persist. Children First Canada has called for the implementation of a Canadian Children’s Charter. It has also called for the establishment of an independent national commission for children and youth to advocate for children’s rights within the federal government.

  • Child & Family Delivery System

    Ontario shouldn’t open the door to ‘big-box’ child care

    posted September 2, 2018 / No Comments

    … in a troubling regulation change last month, Premier Doug Ford’s government lifted the for-profit maximum thresholds, essentially opening the door to big-box corporate child care in Ontario. The government argues that lifting the cap will address shortages by allowing more daycares to open… The real concern was around international child-care chains. And that’s why the Ford government’s change is so troubling.

  • Inclusion Debates

    Have Mayor Tory and Council Delivered on Poverty Reduction?

    posted August 11, 2018 / No Comments

    In sum, thousands more residents do have access to jobs, housing, transit, child care, recreation programs and others services as a result of council decisions over the past four years. However, these modest service expansions have hardly put a dent in long waiting lists, or in Toronto’s high levels of poverty levels and inequality.

  • Child & Family Delivery System

    Why does government child-care policy often have little to do with children?

    posted July 28, 2018 / No Comments

    Economic growth is not the only goal we see masquerading as child-care policy. Some also see child care as a tool to increase fertility rates. Fertility concerns are genuine. With the exception of Israel, no developed country is reaching replacement fertility levels of 2.1. It’s hard to maintain generous social welfare benefits of any kind, be it health care, palliative care, or child care without enough children growing into future taxpayers… another non-child-related reason to enact child-care policy: to grow government, particularly the education ministries that would benefit

  • Social Security Debates

    Addressing poverty, not policing, is solution to gun violence

    posted July 19, 2018 / No Comments

    Providing opportunities, programs and social supports for daycare aged children as young as two, all the way through to assisting youth to pursue post-secondary education, it is resources rather than enforcement that go a long way to address poverty… Decades of research… all highlight the need to support and not punish our communities.

  • Health Debates

    ‘No Jab, No Pay’. In Australia, no excuse accepted for unvaccinated kids

    posted July 10, 2018 / No Comments

    The financial penalty for non-vaccination is imposed principally on the poor – those who receive income-tested benefits – while it is wealthier parents who are most likely to eschew vaccination… But the majority of parents of unvaccinated and under-vaccinated kids are not dogmatic; they are overwhelmed, usually by monetary and logistical issues. What they need are not financial penalties, but practical help – carrots, not sticks.

  • Social Security Policy Context

    30 years later, child poverty remains a national disgrace

    posted July 7, 2018 / No Comments

    Despite Canada being one of the world’s richest countries, 4.8 million people live in poverty — 1.2 million are children. More than 850,000 Canadians rely on food banks — and those numbers are growing — and more than 250,000 Canadians experience some form of homelessness annually… Instead of cutting poverty over the last three decades, we’ve seen tax and program cuts, the steady growth of precarious work and insufficient investments in our social safety net.

  • Child & Family Delivery System

    Child Care Deserts in Canada

    posted June 29, 2018 / No Comments

    This report attempts to map, for the first time in Canada, a complete list of licensed child care spaces across the country against the number of children in a given postal code. In doing so, a number of “child care deserts” are identified as postal codes where there are at least three children in potential competition for each licensed space.

  • Equality Delivery System

    How We All Can Help Improve Indigenous Child Welfare Today

    posted June 25, 2018 / No Comments

    … while we’re doing the hard work of implementing a new way of doing Indigenous child welfare, what could be done right now to help Indigenous families and kids in the current system? … offer Indigenous control, seek prevention, stop taking kids into care altogether… But other actions, some big and some small, don’t just need government to move forward. They need the buy-in, co-operation and good faith effort from everyone in Canada.

  • Social Security Policy Context

    Quebec shows the way to fight child poverty

    posted June 25, 2018 / No Comments

    Last year a Statistics Canada study found that though Quebec has the second-lowest household income in the the country, it also has the second-lowest rate of child poverty. Why should that be? According to Statistics Canada it’s because the province has chosen to invest generously in two proven poverty busters: universal day care and the most generous provincial child benefits in the country.

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