Posts Tagged ‘economy’

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Looming Healthcare Costs Threaten Tax Hikes Unless Focus Shifts to a New Approach

Thursday, March 31st, 2022

… focusing on alternatives to institutional long-term care such as improvements to homecare and community-living supports can help reduce costs (in addition to benefiting seniors). Improving Canadians’ overall health and controlling cost pressures will require substantial reform, with a renewed focus on good health promotion in lieu of the historic overemphasis on treating illness.

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Senators overwhelmed by emails, calls pushing conspiracy theories about basic income legislation

Thursday, March 31st, 2022

… there’s nothing new about conspiracy theories but the pandemic has “pushed them into hyperdrive,” fuelling a movement of people willing to believe there’s a global movement to “enslave” humanity… people in these online forums are largely unaware of how the government operates — or how a bill is passed through Parliament — and those knowledge gaps “are easily filled with fantasy.” “It’s easy to see a sinister plot when you don’t actually understand how the government works.

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Minimum wage meets maximum politics in pre-election Ontario

Thursday, March 31st, 2022

… Ford’s Tories… four years ago… cancelled a planned minimum wage increase — imposing a 26-month freeze on the old hourly rate of $14 an hour, shortchanging hundreds of thousands of working poor. Belatedly, Ford has ratcheted the rate back up to the previously scheduled $15, albeit about three years behind schedule. Now, after watching the premier play catch-up ahead of the June 2 Ontario election, the opposition parties are leapfrogging ahead of him

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The ‘care economy’ is growing the government, whether conservatives like it or not

Wednesday, March 30th, 2022

The government isn’t just getting bigger. It’s getting bigger specifically in the areas where costs are most likely to grow over the long-term… National child care, having been implemented, stands a fair chance of being permanent now. And COVID-19 has spurred even penny-pinching provinces like Ontario to commit to substantial health-care capacity expansions. 

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Look out Conservatives — big government is back, and Canadians like it

Wednesday, March 30th, 2022

Sean Speer, former economic adviser to Stephen Harper, wrote in The Hub in February, “We’ve gone from every major political party supportive of balanced budgets as recently as 10 years ago to today’s new multi-partisan consensus in favour of larger and longer deficits. Something obviously changed.”… historians may point to the moment last week when Canada’s social-safety net was significantly, and quite possibly, permanently expanded.

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On child care, don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good

Tuesday, March 29th, 2022

If the plan rolls out as described, it will improve early education for kids, cut costs for families at a time when they are badly pressed, and give the economy a boost by making it easier for women to participate fully in the workforce… All that being said, it’s still true that the Ontario deal is not all it could be. And, indeed, in some ways it is less than advertised… All this will be worked out in the years ahead.

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Trudeau and Ford to sign $10-a-day child care deal…

Monday, March 28th, 2022

Ottawa is looking at spending hundreds of millions more to create additional child-care spaces.  The cash would be provided under a separate infrastructure fund and offered to all provinces based on their share of the population under age 12. It was considered “a game changer” by those close to Ford… that’s separate from the child-care deal so Ottawa can still say it’s $10.2 billion (for Ontario)…

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Migrant workers make our agricultural industry viable. Why do we treat them as disposable?

Monday, March 21st, 2022

Employers — who are supposed to pay for the consequences of workplace injuries and disease — instead benefit financially from the WSIB’s discriminatory policies. Employers are getting richer on the backs of injured workers. This year, the government has decided to give a $1.5 billion rebate to employers, rather than support injured workers.

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Tuition should be free. Anything else imposes a regressive barrier to accessing higher education

Friday, March 11th, 2022

In 1990, just before Mike Harris unleashed his “common sense revolution,” roughly 20 per cent of Ontario universities’ operating income came from tuition. That figure is now more than 50 per cent, which means Ontario is well on its way to privatizing higher education… the federal government also contributes to inequitable access… An RESP is essentially a federal handout to the upper-middle classes — and the banks and markets that end up receiving those monies.

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Long banned in Ontario, private hospitals could soon reappear

Thursday, March 10th, 2022

… with the chaos created by COVID as a cover, the Ford government seems poised to allow a considerable expansion of private health care in the province… a dramatic development, allowing hospitals — the centrepieces of our health-care system — to be governed by corporate boards that prioritize profits, as in the U.S… private hospitals would undermine medicare by enabling well-to-do patients to gain faster access to treatment.

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