The Ontario PC government has announced the first cues about its plans for social assistance reform. Given that the previous PC government axed social assistance rates by 21.6%, there’s been widespread fear that rate cuts from the Ford government were on the horizon. But last week’s announcement included no…
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When Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau and Enrique Peña Nieto sign the USMCA, as they (or their designates) are expected to do this weekend at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, they will take another step on the road to replacing NAFTA. But there is still some distance to go, with…
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Earlier this year, the Chamber of Commerce released yet another report on how public protections and other regulatory requirements are undermining Canadian competitiveness—and how the government should go about deregulating to make life easier for businesses big and small. Though it wasn’t directly tied to the Trump administration’s massive gutting…
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Finance Minister Bill Morneau will deliver his fall economic statement this afternoon. As I was writing this, all indications were that the federal government would wisely sidestep a corporate tax cut war with the United States, much to the chagrin of rich investors in Canada. And let’s be honest. Canada’s…
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In the aftermath of the USMCA negotiations, the Trudeau government chalked up two significant “wins” for environmental protection and Canadian sovereignty: the elimination of investor state dispute settlement (ISDS), at least in the Canada-U.S. context, and the disappearance of NAFTA’s so-called proportionality clause in the energy chapter. The latter is…
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Ontario’s economic update, released today, is Act II of a financial fearmongering stunt. Act I was the line-by-line review that contends public expenditures have grown by an exorbitant 55 per cent over the past 15 years. We analyzed the out-of-context figures and coded language and described it as a frame…
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In the mid-1970s the average monthly cost of a cancer drug in the United States was about $100. By 1995 that cost had crept up to about $1,800 per month and today it is over $10,000. Similarly, while drugs for multiple sclerosis introduced in the mid-1990s cost about $8,000 per…
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From the beginning, Our Schools / Our Selves has taken seriously the feminist imperative that we must link the personal and the political. Students need to be given an opportunity, in the context of school curriculum, to make sense of their own lives through various forms of creative expression. What…
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How should we approach a rethink of our current public education system in Ontario? After all, there’s no question it’s high time for a review. One of Mordechai Rozanski’s recommendations from his report—released over 15 years ago—was to hold reviews every five years. This was about ensuring funding was sufficient…
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In a speech in May, Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz told a scary story about household debt. No matter how you measure it—as a share of disposable income (170%, a Canadian record), as a share of Canada’s GDP (100%, one of the highest factors in the world)—things look pretty…
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