Posts Tagged ‘poverty’

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A Prescription for Better Health for Canadians

Monday, June 18th, 2018

If you exercise, eat well, get good sleep and manage your stress, you are going to be healthier than if you didn’t do those things. The point is that across the population some people are much more likely, and able, to make those healthier choices than others are. There’s a need for public policy that doesn’t just tell people to make better choices, but that helps create the conditions and provide the resources that enable individuals to make those healthy choices.

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To be a reformer, Trudeau must focus less on the middle class and more on the poor

Saturday, June 16th, 2018

We should demand a pan-Canadian strategy to address the needs of the millions of Canadians living in poverty. And, unlike what happened in 1989, this should include specific benchmarks and timelines for child poverty so that subsequent governments can be held accountable. There should be an annual report to Parliament on its implementation… With the federal government leading the way through targets and provision of the needed key investments, the provinces, First Nations and Indigenous communities should be brought in as participating partners.

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The real reason jobs left America

Saturday, June 9th, 2018

… the part of the U.S. that specialized in assembly-line manufacturing, and assembly lines are the easiest things in the world to automate… The data that strongly suggested we were heading for a mostly jobless future was available years ago, but most people ignored it. It was too hard to deal with… Most of the attempts to future-proof our politics are currently focused on developing various versions of a guaranteed basic income (Ontario’s pilot program being the biggest and boldest).

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Ontario’s political centre may have collapsed, but progressive values remain

Tuesday, June 5th, 2018

Ontarians still hew to centrist values when it comes to the big issues — the role of government, health care, immigration and so on… Ontarians are clearly fed up with the Liberals after 15 years and want a change at Queen’s Park. But they aren’t questioning the fundamental values that Ontarians (and indeed Canadians as a whole) have shared for decades, including a robust role for government in assuring the economic and social well-being of all citizens.

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A voter’s guide to the 2018 Ontario election

Monday, June 4th, 2018

The campaign of 2018 featured bold social policies for pharmacare, dental care and child care, though they may never come to pass. The bad news: The parties’ plans to pay for their promises don’t quite add up — and in the case of the Progressive Conservatives, were never made public as promised. The worst news: None of the above may matter, because this election is being fought mostly over personalities, not policies. For better or for worse, here’s how the major parties rank on five major issues facing the province in this election:

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Choosing none of the above in the Ontario election is a cop-out

Friday, June 1st, 2018

Ontario is far from a basket case. Its citizens enjoy as good a combination of health, wealth, safety and security, education and freedom as any place on earth. It isn’t as evenly distributed as it should be, and governments over the years have worked to lift up and support the most vulnerable… You can’t have it both ways, damning the leaders for what has gone wrong and not giving them credit for what has gone right.

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Why don’t people want free money? The uncertainty around universal basic income

Saturday, May 19th, 2018

The original idea, first introduced to the Canadian debate by former Conservative senator Hugh Segal in 2012, was that a guaranteed basic income would be a simpler, more effective and less intrusive way of getting help to both the unemployed and the working poor. But that’s not why so many people elsewhere are watching the Ontario pilot. They are responding to what at first seems an apocalyptic view of the future… [that] 47 per cent of U.S. jobs as liable to be automated in the next 20 years

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Ontario Making Progress on Child Poverty

Thursday, May 17th, 2018

Overall, the 2017 Annual Report underscores how critical it is for governments to develop and implement poverty reduction strategies with clear targets and timelines… The Ontario Child Benefit is an example of a policy that has had a major impact in reducing child poverty in Ontario: a clear reminder that good policies can make a real difference in the lives of people who are experiencing poverty.

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A Prescription for Better Health for Canadians

Monday, May 14th, 2018

… helping families raising children, would have a much bigger impact on the average Canadian’s health than spending more on the health-care system would… The worse a person’s childhood is, the more risk there is of everything from obesity and diabetes to substance abuse and suicide. If we really want to get upstream and prevent illness, it means doing more to support people who are raising children. It would take pressure off the health-care system and save money, but only in the long term.

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Filling the Cavities in Canada’s Dental Coverage

Friday, May 11th, 2018

A straightforward way of creating universality would be to gradually expand and merge existing public plans until everyone in the population was covered. However, universality does not necessarily mean that everyone must be insured through the same plan. As an alternative, we explore a mixed model with competition between private and public insurance in our recent C.D. Howe Institute report.

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