January, 2009

The federal budget, announced on Tuesday, was significantly lacking on the ‘green’ front. It was clearly still Tory blue.

CPJ, along with environmental groups, hoped that the government would take this prime opportunity to implement a green budget, with increased funding for alternative energy, green infrastructure alternatives and measures to encourage technological innovation. This would have moved Canada towards a modern, sustainable economy. Read more »

Although economists were nearly unanimous in their advice before the budget that tax cuts are not a good form of stimulus, Budget 2009 includes $2 billion a year in tax cuts as part of its economic stimulus package. The government – as part of its coordinated campaign of leaks – had been hinting before the budget at tax cuts for the middle class, the “backbone of the economy.”

So when I saw the budget commitment to a tax cut for essentially anyone making less than $81,452, I began to wonder what “middle class” is in Canada. Read more »

While our full response to the federal budget can be found on our main website, over the next week we will be posting more detailed analysis of our response to specific investments and policies outlined in the budget. Please check back over our website in the next few days as they are posted.

WIth regards to funding for housing, CPJ applauds the federal government for including investments in affordable housing in its economic stimulus package. $1 billion in funding has been committed towards renovating existing social housing in Canada, as well as $600 million for on-reserve aboriginal housing, $400 million for seniors’ housing, and $75 million for housing for people with disabilities. Read more »

As you may know from reading Chandra’s blog from Monday (“Highlights from CPJ’s Poverty Workshops,”), CPJ hosted a series of workshops on poverty last week in Southern Ontario. Since Chandra has already described how they went, I thought this might be a good chance for me to reflect on my own experience of the workshops as an intern and what I took away from them. Read more »

According to the budget leaks over the past week, we will see some changes to EI in today’s budget. The speculation is that premiums will be frozen to prevent rising premiums from contributing to unemployment. Nothing has been said yet about raising benefit levels or reforming access rules.

Over at the Progressive Economics blog, Andrew Jackson has posted the Executive Summary of a report commissioned by Human Resources and Social Development Canada on “Income Redistribution Impacts of the EI Program.” Read more »

The Speech from the Throne was bare bones, clocking in at a mere ten minutes. It noted that the government will present an economic stimulus plan, based on consultations, and stated that the government stands behind the priorities outlined in its first throne speech. Read more »

Last week Karri, Mariel and I traveled to Southern Ontario for a series of Envisioning Canada Without Poverty workshops. At each workshop, we had great participation from an audience of interested activists, church members, students, clergy and CPJ members.

At the workshops, CPJ staff took turns leading the participants in a dialogue about poverty from the perspective of human dignity, exploring what poverty looks like in Canada, and how a poverty reduction strategy would work to address the complexity of poverty and provide accountability to governments and citizens. The second half of the workshop focused on the importance of advocacy and strategies for successful advocacy. Read more »

The government’s Economic and Fiscal Update this past November proposed to remove the right of women to file pay equity complaints with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and make pay equity a part of the collective bargaining process instead. It is disheartening to see that the government has chosen to target women’s right to equal pay instead of creating a plan to stimulate the economy. Read more »

Canadian politics haven’t offered much in the way of inspiration recently, even though inspiration is the new political buzzword. Canadians have been appalled in recent years by the mean-spiritedness, the partisan obsessions, the lack of coherent vision or policy substance and repeated broken promises. This disgust has contributed in no small part to the record voter apathy manifested by the 59.1% voter turnout in October.

In the latest issue of the Catalyst, I noted that voter turnout and increased vote-swapping point to the need to start having conversations about the health of our democracy. So I was exceedingly pleased to see Canwest wade into the conversation with an excellent series on Canadian democracy by Richard Foot. Read more »

It’s clear to everyone (with the possible exception of the Fraser Institute) that the Budget will be and should be a stimulus package.

What that stimulus package should look like is now up for dispute. At CPJ, we’ve been clear that we believe it should include a poverty reduction strategy, EI reform, and investment in green infrastructure. Our former socio-economic policy analyst, Greg deGroot-Magetti, explained why tax cuts don’t generally work well as a form of stimulus. Read more »

Finance Minister Flaherty has hinted that tax cuts will be part of the fiscal stimulus in his next budget. It raises the question, “What will you do if you get a tax cut?” In far too many cases, the answer is either to pay down personal debt or save. What we need is effective fiscal stimulus. That means getting money circulating in the local economy. And that means putting money in the hands of people who are going to spend it. Read more »

The countdown to the Vancouver Olympic Games in 2010 is progressing, and now the fight has begun to prevent an upswing in human trafficking.

Sporting events such as the Olympics or the World Cup of Soccer have often been occasions for increased trafficking in humans, especially for the purposes of sexual exploitation. Read more »

In Carol Goar's article in today's Toronto Star, she presents some of the key challenges facing the Employment Insurance program in Canada and how it came to be what it is: a badly broken economic stabilizer. Read more »

This week’s web feature looks at the basic needs of every human being, arguing that these are rights rather than privileges that some people do not deserve. Some will of course respond that basic rights don’t necessarily require public sector provision. But ultimately, the state has a responsibility to step in when there is a gap, and people’s needs are not being met through other means. Read more »