By Chandra Pasma | Monday, March 30th, 2009 - 3:50PM
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Yesterday I spoke at the Lenten series of All Saints Anglican, St. Joseph’s Catholic and St. Paul’s Eastern United churches. This series brought together three congregations in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill neighbourhood for reflections on covenant. My visit yesterday focused on covenantal economics and poverty.
I spoke first about our current economic situation of greed, inequality and poverty, and how it is the opposite of covenantal economics. A covenant is a binding obligation to meet a commitment. Covenant economics embrace care for people and for the land. Read more »
Cabinet minister Gary Goodyear recently made headlines for refusing to state his beliefs on evolution. The response highlighted the uncertainty with which many Canadians approach the topic of faith and politics. Some Canadians believe that faith has no place in politics; others believe that politics is a power struggle in which people of religion must seek to impose their religious values on others. These are both problematic propositions. Faith cannot be separated from politics, but people of all faiths have a responsibility to engage in respectful, dialogue-based politics that practice public justice and seek the common good. Read more »
By Mariel Angus | Friday, March 27th, 2009 - 1:19PM
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At 8:30pm tomorrow, turn off your lights for one hour and join millions of people around the world who are taking action against climate change! Read more »
By Mariel Angus | Friday, March 27th, 2009 - 11:08AM
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Yesterday afternoon, the Ontario government unveiled its 2009 budget. This budget has been anticipated by many for its inclusion of funding commitments to poverty reduction measures that were outlined in November’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. Read more »
Lauding Parliament’s unanimous support of a joint motion urging world leaders to make the fight against poverty a priority, Citizens for Public Justice (CPJ) reiterated its call for an action plan to reduce poverty in Canada. Read more »
By Chandra Pasma | Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 - 2:53PM
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Today was a good news and bad news day for Employment Insurance (EI). The bad news is that Statistics Canada released figures for January showing that the number of people receiving EI benefits rose 4.4% compared to December. 560,400 Canadians were receiving EI benefits in January. That is an increase of over 100,000 people compared to February 2008. Read more »
Welcome to the March issue of Ola!, the monthly e-newsletter of Citizens for Public Justice. As the snow disappears and hints of spring emerge, let us continue to speak out for justice across our whole nation. Read more »
By Mariel Angus | Monday, March 23rd, 2009 - 1:52PM
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On Friday, March 20, I attended a talk by David Batstone, the founder of the Not For Sale Campaign to end the global slave trade. In his talk, Batstone called human trafficking “the tragedy of the 21st century.” He presented some troubling statistics: it is estimated that there are 27 million people enslaved around the globe today. Read more »
While Canadians responded with fear and outrage to the possibility of a coalition government, many other countries are used to coalition governments. Experience from Germany and the Netherlands suggests that coalition governments can work well, offering stability and good governance. They represent accommodation of multiple viewpoints, and offer a positive platform for governance that does not restrict the role of other parties to opposing the government. Lessons from Europe could provide useful alternatives for the Canadian system, offering a more collaborative, transparent approach. Read more »
By Mariel Angus | Friday, March 20th, 2009 - 4:00PM
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Today, the government of Ontario announced its intention to invest in affordable housing and increase child benefits to support low-income Ontarians. Read more »
By Mariel Angus | Friday, March 20th, 2009 - 2:52PM
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In both France and Germany, government legislation to reduce working hours has been used as a policy to help create employment. But reducing the standard workweek is also a subject where public policy and culture can both influence one another. Read more »
By Mariel Angus | Friday, March 20th, 2009 - 2:46PM
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In my last blog, I explored some of the theoretical arguments that are for or against the implementation of a reduced work week. Now, I will examine two countries – France and Germany – where government policy has reduced the average workweek for economic and social reasons. Read more »
By Mariel Angus | Thursday, March 19th, 2009 - 2:27PM
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In my last blog, I discussed the increasing use of work-sharing by companies as a method of reducing layoffs during the current recession.The idea of a reduced work week is not new – in fact, is a topic that has been explored by economists for decades.Many social and economic arguments have been made for capping the work week at 40 hours, and even for reducing it from five days to four. Read more »
“Human dignity is a right to be protected and promoted.” People of many persuasions and perspectives in society would likely agree with this statement; and Christians in particular would nearly unanimously affirm that this is among the first principles of their faith.
While we might readily agree on the priority of human dignity in principle, putting principle into practice is a continuing challenge. Let me offer here a brief reflection on resources from Jewish and Christian biblical traditions that might help with the challenge of putting belief into action. Read more »
CPJ’s Envisioning Canada Without Poverty campaign, launched in April 2008, contained a call for the 2009 federal budget to include a poverty reduction strategy. But as we saw in late January, there was no such strategy in the budget. Does this mean our endeavours were unsuccessful?
“Absolutely not,” stated Chandra Pasma, CPJ’s public justice policy analyst. With letters, emails and phone calls, CPJ members let their MPs know that poverty is an important public justice issue, one that needs to be addressed immediately. Read more »
In many industrialized countries, governments offer some form of assistance to families, helping with the cost of raising children. However, the extent to which this assistance meets the needs of families can vary significantly between countries. Compared to other industrialized countries, Canada’s level of investment in childcare is dismal. Read more »
To many of us, “human trafficking” conjures up pictures of the European slave trade, with rickety ships plying trade routes carrying human cargo in one direction and the fruits of slave labour in another. It doesn’t sound like something that happens in modern day Canada.
But the truth is, human trafficking happens here. Canada is a destination and a source country, as well as a transit country for trafficking in persons. And that is something that should make us all uncomfortable. Read more »
Michael was an average sort of guy. He worked hard. He played hard. Then, in 1993 he was diagnosed with cancer. He was told it would be the toughest fight he would ever fight. But when he could no longer work, he began to slide into poverty. It was then that the real battle began.
For 14 years, he was stripped of his dignity and shackled by the chains of poverty. He was forced to make impossible decisions like whether to buy “new” used clothes or a pair of winter boots, whether to pay his phone bill or buy a bus pass to get to his doctor’s appointments. Read more »
By Mariel Angus | Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 - 8:58AM
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The global economy is sinking deeper into a recession and stories of layoffs at factories, plants and businesses are appearing daily in newsstands across the world.However, despite many gloomy articles, there are also stories appearing of companies and employees that are working together to come up with ways of fighting the impact of the downturn. One way of doing so is through work-sharing. Read more »
By Chandra Pasma | Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 - 2:49PM
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Last week I attended a conference sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, “Till Elections Do Us Part: What Makes a Coalition Government Work?” The event brought European and Canadian scholars and members of parliament together in a dialogue about creating and maintaining coalition governments, including lessons learned from Canada’s pre-Christmas experiment with a coalition.
The dialogue was extremely informative, and the comparative insights provided a lot of food for thought. It was particularly useful to view Canada’s system through outside eyes, and German journalist Gerd Braune provided a wakeup call to Canadians that while we smugly view our system as the best in the world, seen from another perspective our system is rather dysfunctional! Read more »
By Mariel Angus | Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 - 1:11PM
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Yesterday, the government of Alberta released a ground-breaking new plan that aims to end homelessness in the province over the next ten years.The Alberta Secretariat for Action on Homelessness has created a Plan for Alberta with the objective of ending homelessness by 2019. Read more »
By Mariel Angus | Monday, March 16th, 2009 - 4:10PM
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There are many great parts to being a CPJ intern: commenting on recent public policy decisions, learning about the federal political system and writing blogs about current events. One of the best parts of all has been having the opportunity to meet with politicians who are directly involved in the policy-making process Read more »
Vancouver has one of the highest rates of homelessness in Canada. The lack of affordable and supportive housing has left hundreds of people without a warm, safe and decent home. It is estimated that there are over 1,700 people living on the streets and in shelters in Vancouver. 50 percent of these are people who are chronically homeless, having gone without a home for over a year. And the problem is growing. Read more »
By Chandra Pasma | Friday, March 13th, 2009 - 2:56PM
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The House of Commons gave unanimous consent Wednesday to a motion calling on the government to “do everything possible to ensure” that the G8 and G20 address poverty. The G20 will be meeting early next month in London, England, while the G8 will meet this July in La Maddelena, Italy. Read more »
By Chandra Pasma | Friday, March 13th, 2009 - 2:17PM
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I probably risk sounding like a broken record on Employment Insurance reform, but it’s not just me saying it. This week, the House of Commons passed a motion introduced by NDP Member of Parliament Chris Charlton, calling on the government to reform EI.
The motion, which was debated on an NDP Opposition Day last week, calls for five reforms to EI. Read more »
Welcome to the March issue of Ola!, the monthly e-newsletter of Citizens for Public Justice. As the snow disappears and hints of spring emerge, let us continue to speak out for justice across our whole nation. 
