Home > jurisdiction
  • Governance Debates

    The evidence is clear. Canada needs electoral reform

    posted October 9, 2018 / No Comments

    The imperative of moving to proportional representation is neither a right-wing nor a left-wing point of view. It’s simply democratic common sense. And recent Canadian election results underline the urgency of getting a move-on… In a proportional system, every vote will be taken into account equally… Three of the past five federal elections have produced minority governments. With a first-past-the-post electoral system, this can be a recipe for increasing instability… such a system exaggerates the effects of even tiny swings in voting

  • Governance Debates

    To avoid catastrophic climate change, we need carbon pricing

    posted October 9, 2018 / No Comments

    The adoption of carbon pricing is accelerating, and there are more real-world examples that carbon pricing works with each passing year… The Nobel Prize and the IPCC report are just two more data points in a sea of evidence. Climate change is real, climate change is a problem and climate change deserves a serious policy response. There will be disagreements over how we move forward, but we need to tell the truth.

  • Debates

    The dirty little secret anti-carbon tax folks would prefer you did not know

    posted October 7, 2018 / No Comments

    You can try to cut emissions by other ways: regulations on business are a particular favourite. But those come with costs just as surely as a carbon tax does — every dollar of which would be passed on to the same “hard-working families” the critics pretend to care about. In fact, for virtually any alternative you can name (subsidies are even worse) the costs are higher — often much higher — per tonne of emissions reduced than for an equivalent carbon tax.

  • Child & Family Policy Context

    How Canada became an international surrogacy destination

    posted October 7, 2018 / No Comments

    Many people want to be parents and can’t do so without surrogacy, but they live in countries where surrogacy is either prohibited entirely, or prohibited for them… Canada is one of the few jurisdictions left in the world that both allows surrogacy and allows foreign participation in it… Canada… does not allow discrimination on the basis of marital status or sexual orientation… Canada is also fairly efficient about granting legal parental rights… A big question is whether Canadians need to think about recovering medical costs.

  • Health Delivery System

    Resources don’t match need for surgery

    posted October 5, 2018 / No Comments

    We have just eight full-time neurosurgeons and four orthopedists serving the regional referral population of 2.4 million. Everybody has an elective wait list one to two years long. It is months before we can look after acutely disabled people. None of us in this province operates as much as we could under the resource restrictions of a system that has failed to match the simple growth of the population for decades, never mind the growth of technology and care options.

  • Debates

    Ford’s move to flatline minimum wage is bad for workers, and Ontario

    posted September 28, 2018 / No Comments

    The Ford government is ignoring numerous studies that demonstrate that providing workers with a decent wage puts more money into the economy, which in the long term benefits everyone. It also leads to higher morale among employees, lower turnover and higher productivity for employers. Nor does increasing the minimum wage necessarily lead to job losses, as some business organizations suggest.

  • Child & Family Delivery System

    Ontario’s child protection system fails children, again

    posted September 27, 2018 / No Comments

    Just yanking kids from their homes, especially when they are placed into a system that has repeatedly proven incapable of dealing with their complex needs, isn’t a solution. The panel was struck by how often these kids were classified as “safe with intervention.” The tragedy is that they were far from safe because they didn’t get the constructive intervention they needed.

  • Governance Debates

    Doug Ford can’t apply the notwithstanding clause retroactively to impede democracy

    posted September 18, 2018 / No Comments

    In the light of his impatience in regard to changing the rules for the municipal election – and even to the time it takes to appeal judgments he dislikes – we can expect more retroactive overrides. These actions will, in effect, pre-empt the role of the judiciary designated by the Constitution to be impartial arbiters of the constitutional validity of legislation… The Charter expressly guarantees fundamental rights so that we can live our lives within a rights-protecting constitutional democracy dedicated to the rule of law.

  • Health Policy Context

    Study shows how national pharmacare plan could work

    posted September 17, 2018 / No Comments

    The authors are scathingly critical of those… who would use pharmacare to merely “fill in the gaps” left by existing private and public plans. Such an approach, they write, is merely a euphemism for off-loading the drug costs of expensive, high-risk patients onto the public system while leaving private insurers free to focus on those who are relatively healthy and thus more profitable… to be at all useful, a national pharmacare system must be universal…

  • Child & Family Delivery System

    Judicial appointments a process that can’t be rushed

    posted September 17, 2018 / No Comments

    When I became minister I committed to creating a better judicial appointment process — one that would be open, transparent and ensured that the best possible candidates became judges. I also wanted a judiciary that more accurately reflected the country it served… Among the judges I have appointed or promoted to new roles, more than half are women, eight are Indigenous, 18 are members of visible minority communities, 12 identify as LGBTQ2, and three identify as people with disabilities.

Older posts →