New Environics poll reveals Canadians reject SPP priorities

Ottawa - As Stephen Harper prepares to attend the North American leaders’ summit on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) in New Orleans next week, a new Environics Research poll shows that Canadians disagree with key elements of North American integration. The survey commissioned by the Council of Canadians shows considerable opposition to regulatory harmonization, energy integration and bulk water exports. It also reveals that Canadians are not sold on security cooperation with the U.S. and would overwhelmingly like to see the SPP debated publicly and voted on in Parliament.

“It’s been four years since the launch of the SPP, and while corporations have been given a seat at the negotiating table, the Canadian government has never asked the public how they feel about it,” says Maude Barlow, chairperson of the Council of Canadians.

Highlights:

* 87% of Canadians agree that Canada should be able to set its own independent environmental, health and safety standards and regulations even if it could limit trade with the United States.

The SPP commits Canada to widespread regulatory convergence which has already resulted in Canada adopting weaker standards, most recently through consumer product legislation.

* 89% of Canadians agree that Canada needs an energy policy that protects Canadian supplies and the environment even if it means placing restrictions on exports and foreign ownership.

The SPP calls for greater energy integration and a fivefold expansion of the environmentally destructive tar sands project in Alberta.

* 88% of Canadians want a national water policy that recognizes clean drinking water as a basic human right and that also bans bulk water exports.

But at an SPP-related meeting in Calgary last year, commissioned by all three governments, the issue of bulk water exports was firmly on the table.

* Only 47% of Canadians feel that improving the Canada-U.S. trading relationship would justify harmonizing our security policies with the US and sharing personal information with American security agencies.

This means that Canadians are not sold on the very raison d’être of the SPP, yet the last Harper budget committed an additional $165 million towards security initiatives in the SPP agreement.

* 86% of Canadians feel there should be an open, public debate on the SPP, and that the agreement should be brought to Parliament for a vote.

Four years after the launch of the SPP there has been no public consultation or any parliamentary debate. “How can the government continue to push this agenda behind closed doors, when the public overwhelmingly rejects it?” asks Barlow.

The organization is calling for public consultation and parliamentary debate on the SPP and an end to all talks aimed at promoting continental integration between Canada and the United States.

Environics Research interviewed 1,007 Canadians by telephone during the period: April 7th – 10th, 2008. The margin of error for a survey of this magnitude is +/-3.1 percent, nineteen times out of twenty.

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For more information, please contact:
Meera Karunananthan Media Officer: Tel.: (613) 233-4487, ext. 234; Cell: (613) 795-8685; meera@canadians.org.

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The Council of Canadians
700-170 Laurier Avenue West, Ottawa, ON K1P 5V5.
Tel: (613) 233-2773; Toll-free: 1-800-387-7177
Fax: (613) 233-6776
inquiries@canadians.org
www.canadians.org

http://www.thestar.com/News/Ideas/article/410662

Great Lakes levels are plunging yet we still treat water like it’s a limitless resource. We have to get our act together and start paying the real price. And soon
Apr 06, 2008 04:30 AM
Chris Wood
Special to the Star

The Great Lakes, and those who work or live around them, are witnessing profound changes in climate. No one knows that better than Linda Mortsch.

Her childhood was spent near the banks of the St. Lawrence River, at Cornwall, in a house built in 1958 from lumber salvaged from an historic inn that was due to be submerged, along with half a dozen riverside villages, to make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway. Today, she teaches geography at the University of Waterloo, investigating how the changing weather will affect the Great Lakes.

Mortsch walked me through the Lakes’ historic water calendar. Typically, the year begins with most smaller lakes and rivers – and large expanses of the great ones – locked in ice. Snow covers the land. As spring comes, the snow and upland ice melt, releasing a vast pulse of fresh water to the Lakes.

Superior, the largest lake, receives the biggest pulse. As the winter’s snow-melt flows in, the Lakes’ levels rise, with Superior reaching its peak earliest and the lower lakes peaking progressively through the summer until the annual pulse of winter runoff reaches Lake Ontario, usually around Labour Day. The Lakes are at their lowest in December and January, when the cycle begins again.

Now this timeless rhythm is changing. Average air temperatures in the Great Lakes region rose by nearly a degree Celsius over the last 100 years, faster than the world average. Winter and spring have warmed even more, with highs as much as 4 degrees Celsius above those of the last century.

By 2003 places like Sault Ste. Marie and the Kawartha Lakes were getting a month fewer days below freezing and nearly two months fewer of cold nights each winter than in 1950, but 30 more very hot days and nights each summer.

With less snow hanging around anywhere in the Lakes’ basin, the yearly pulse of melting snow and ice starts earlier and carries less water into the Lakes.

By far the greatest threat to the Lakes, however, comes from the insidious amplification of evapotranspiration (ET). Evaporation already extracts more water from the Great Lakes than all our human diversions combined.

Across Ontario, calculated losses to evaporation claim two-thirds of every centimetre of rain or snow the province receives. Scientists who monitored lakes in northwestern Ontario between 1970 and 1990 discovered that as temperatures rose by 1.6 degrees Celsius – more than twice the global average for that period – rainfall declined. But evaporation ballooned by 50 per cent. Annual runoff into Lake Superior plummeted by almost two-thirds, from 40 centimetres to only about 15.

[The combination of late-forming ice on the Lakes, and that invisible thief evaporation, may have been largely responsible for this past winter's record snowfalls in eastern Ontario and Quebec. With little ice to protect the Lakes' water, it easily evaporated into the dry arctic air that flows south during the winter, riding the wind to fall back to land later as snow. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the record heaps of snow were not evidence of climate change slipping into reverse — but of it going into overdrive.]

If less water flows into the Great Lakes each spring, and more of it is drawn out by evaporation over longer ice-free seasons, exactly how much lower will the Lakes be at the end of each year?

If Mortsch and her colleagues are correct, Lake Superior’s seasonal low-water levels could fall 38 centimetres below present-day lows before mid-century. Lake Ontario could drop more, losing 54 centimetres from present-day lows, with the deepest impact in the spring. But Lake Erie, already the shallowest of the five, could fall as much as 85 centimetres below its current low-water level. Another study has suggested that the St. Lawrence River at Montreal could in some late summers be at barely half its present volume.

THE CONDITIONS that will give our society its best shot at flourishing through the new climate’s violent mood swings are evident. We must use less water whenever we can, extracting more work from every drop we do use. We must minimize our vulnerability to extremes of weather. To reduce our risk, we must “design in” flexibility and resilient adaptive capacity from the get-go. At every turn we should copy or employ the original and still best example of resilience to climate change: nature itself.

And one more thing: any response that would prepare us adequately and in time for the turbulent weather ahead must surely find a way to work with the aspirations, psychology and economy of our society, rather than against them.

Improvements to the water efficiency of industrial processes, cropping and livestock practices and our personal sanitation occur incrementally, in the small or large innovations each of us makes. They can’t be centrally prescribed, any more than one device could solve every industry’s pollution problem. At best they can be motivated.

So why are we so unmotivated to make our water last? Perhaps for the same reasons so many of us fail when we try to diet: we cheat. While praising water as “priceless” in the abstract, we value it at next to nothing at the tap. When we treat water that way, it’s cheaper to let it leak from old pipes than to fix the holes.

Our systemic dishonesty about the value of water is of a piece with the larger fraud we’ve perpetrated by failing to account in full for the myriad other services that natural ecosystems provide to our dollar economy. These range from the “free” fish in the ocean to the marsh-raised wild waterfowl that fill the larders in many northern communities; from the carbon dioxide that forests scrub out of the atmosphere to the forests’ moist exhalations that cool the local environs before returning downwind as welcome rain.

They include the waters bearing freighters through the Rock Cut south of Sault Ste. Marie and the crust of ice that shoulders the weight of winter traffic into Manitoba’s St. Theresa Point. At the grandest scale, they embrace the vast planetary distillery and filtering system that cleanses our water.

Sixty per cent of these critical services are now over-exploited and run down, the United Nations Environmental Programme found in its Millennium Assessment of the global ecosystem, precisely because they are undervalued in commerce.

“Technology and knowledge can reduce considerably the human impact on ecosystems,” the project’s scientific board underscored in a statement. “They are unlikely to be deployed fully, however, until ecosystem services cease to be perceived as free and limitless, and their full value is taken into account.”

We dare not carry on this way. The health of our habitat must become as automatic and seamless a consideration in our economic decisions as the price of money (which affects everything from billion-dollar takeovers to personal credit-card spending).

Far from segregating nature from human commerce, in other words, we must urgently reintegrate the two. Bringing natural services “onto the books” of our conventional economy would mean not only fully acknowledging their benefits, but also paying for their maintenance. It would give each of us a sharp new awareness of the load we place on the planet and an immediate reason to lighten it.

NO DEVICE CAN accomplish this task better than a correctly set price. Price includes an entire chain of costs that go into a product’s creation and supply, from raw materials to labour. There’s more to getting a mango than a Macintosh apple to Toronto in January, so the mango costs more.

Over time, multiple considerations have entered pricing: the cost of insuring the workers who make the product, the cost of taxes to pay for the roads over which it gets delivered, and so on. Increasingly, prices for some products, like electronics, include disposal costs.

Certain social costs that should be included in prices aren’t yet: in particular, the burdens borne by the “low-wage” societies that manufacture exports. Overall, however, the trend is in the right direction. But while we’ve made progress in integrating human social costs in prices, we’ve done extremely poorly at including nature’s contribution. A more inclusive price for water would dramatically change the incentives in the countless decisions we make in our daily lives

“People say you can’t put a price tag on the priceless,” remarks ecologist Gretchen Daily. “I agree – nature is priceless. But if we don’t (put a price on it), it’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet: People go whole hog and it’s gone.”

Those who advocate the public commons and a human right to water are correct that water runs through us all. It infuses every aspect of economic, social and cultural life and every hour of the day. For this very reason, neither government, no matter how powerful and intrusive, nor any self-appointed overseer from “civil society,” can possibly ensure its wise use.

Only we can do that, through the decisions we make in our homes, fields, office cubicles, plant floors, schools and shopping malls or wherever else we spend our time. It’s what we each do daily in the marketplace that will determine whether collectively we protect our water and the natural systems that provide it, or despoil both.

The marketplace is the most flexible problem-solving institution we have. Adapting it to the smarter use of water veers away from the one-size-fits-all frame of last century’s “big engineering” and outdated eco-Marxism that sets disciples of Blue Gold on course toward a tragedy of the commons.

It directs us instead toward a liberating ecology of persistent innovation in which a diversity of solutions can prosper.

http://parentcentral.ca/parent/article/410900

Data analysis method urged for all provinces
April 7, 2008

Kristin Rushowy
TORONTO STAR

Poor students are doing far worse on standardized tests than the results themselves indicate, says a groundbreaking study that links children’s birth and health records to education data.

A study of Winnipeg children in Grades 3 and 12 in 2001-02 showed that while three quarters or more of those from lower socio-economic groups writing provincial tests earned a passing grade, when all eligible children at those ages from poor homes were included, only about one-third were successful test takers, says the study out of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy at the University of Manitoba.

By linking birth, health and education data, researchers were able to conclude how many kids from poor homes had left school, had failed at some point to place them in a lower grade, were otherwise absent or exempt from the provincial test or hadn’t completed it.

“The Manitoba data linking provided this most remarkable result,” said Clyde Hertzman, president of the Toronto-based Council for Early Childhood Development, part of a group of researchers pushing for every province to create such databases.

“Rather than using the classroom as the denominator, you use the population as the denominator. At the upper end, the pass rate drops slightly, but at the low socio-economic end, the pass rate drops in half,” he said.

Many of the children counted were “so weakly attached to the school system” they simply didn’t show up to write the provincial test, he said.

These were kids “off the radar system,” he said.

While such data comparisons aren’t available in Ontario, there’s no reason to think the situation is much different here, he said.

Manitoba’s shared data system is an example of methods all provinces should be using to monitor the well-being of children, he added.

The Manitoba research was one of four approaches cited in a recent report by early childhood researchers as “the building blocks of the system of early childhood development statistics that Canada needs.”

Dr. Kellie Leitch, the federal government’s adviser on healthy children and youth, recently called for better information management, calling it “invaluable in the development of public policy and programs which can have a meaningful impact on child and youth health.”

“Those kinds of things do put a shine on significant problems – problems you don’t see when you only look at school data,” added Dr. Robin Williams, chair of the early childhood council and Niagara Region medical officer of health.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/410520

Apr 05, 2008 04:30 AM
Laurie Monsebraaten
Staff Reporter

A Toronto plan to provide safe, affordable homes for more than 200,000 vulnerable families and individuals in the next 10 years may never get off the ground if Ottawa doesn’t contribute, warns Ontario Housing Minister Jim Watson.

“Unless there is federal funding there’s going to be virtually no new affordable housing because we can’t afford to do it on our own,” Watson said in an interview. “I can’t speak for all the municipalities … but they are stretched, as you know, to the limit.”

Watson’s comments come in the wake of a provincial-territorial housing ministers’ meeting this week with federal Human Resources Minister Monte Solberg, which ended with no assurances Ottawa will fund federal-provincial housing programs beyond next March.

It comes as Toronto begins the first of four public consultations this month on its proposed Affordable Housing Framework. The $469 million, 10-year plan, unveiled last fall, targets just about everyone from the homeless to people trying to buy their first home. It relies on Ottawa and Queen’s Park to cover most of the cost.

Toronto Mayor David Miller said the city is taking Wednesday’s federal-provincial stalemate in stride. “We’re going to go ahead and we’re going to set out our strategy and define the federal and provincial role,” Miller said yesterday. “But without Ottawa’s enthusiastic participation we can’t do as much as is needed.”

If Ottawa won’t come to the table, Miller said he expects Queen’s Park to support the city.

The previous Liberal government in Ottawa approved $1.6 billion in federal housing and homelessness programs nationwide that expire next March. If funding isn’t renewed, Ontario will lose its share: $301 million for affordable housing construction and repair and $67 million for homelessness projects.

Solberg has said he’s not prepared to renew or extend funding until he has completed a review to ensure the money is being used effectively.

Provinces and municipalities have also been trying to get Ottawa to develop a national affordable housing strategy so the three levels of government can work together to help some 4 million Canadians in need. Nearly 67,000 Toronto households are on housing waiting lists.

Watson said Ontario welcomes the federal review.

But with no assurance of funding for next year, many programs will be closed.

“We want to be constructive. But we’re hitting a brick wall with the federal government,” he said.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/411040

Apr 07, 2008 01:39 PM
THE CANADIAN PRESS

Too many people only consider the environmental impacts of global warming and don’t realize public health is at serious risk as well, the Ontario College of Family Physicians said today as it added its voice to the chorus of climate change concern.

The effects of climate change could bring on a new onslaught of health problems nationwide and even small incremental rises in temperatures could have a “profound effect” on public health, the review suggests.

“When we think about climate change, we typically think about how it will affect our environment, but we need to start thinking about how it affects our health too,” said college president Dr. Renee Arnold.

“The negative health effects of climate change are profound, and will be irreversible if we don’t get our act together now and stop damaging our environment.”

The review, which the college calls the most comprehensive of its kind worldwide, states there’s already evidence that abnormal heat waves can trigger public health crises.

A two-week heat wave in France in 2003 is cited as one startling example, when about 15,000 people died prematurely as the country was struck by intense heat.

The report also envisions a future where Canadians commonly return home from Caribbean vacations with malaria or dengue fever, and warns the medical community will have to be prepared to deal with conditions they’ve never dealt with before.

Warmer weather would also allow ticks that carry Lyme disease to survive in areas where they couldn’t before; if left untreated, Lyme disease can cause chronic arthritis and neurological symptoms.

Public health units could also be faced with more cases of the West Nile virus, which can cause meningitis, encephalitis and a polio-like syndrome.

The American Public Health Association raised similar concerns about climate change last week and said its effects on the public could be one of the top challenges facing the health community.

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/408989

Apr 02, 2008 04:30 AM
Vanessa Lu
City Hall Bureau Chief

Toronto Mayor David Miller is still going on a trade mission to China later this month, but he has promised to raise the issue of human rights in Tibet.

“I’ve said, where appropriate, I would raise human rights issues,” Miller told reporters yesterday, after meeting with representatives of the Joint Action Committee for Tibet, who had asked him to cancel the trip. He dismissed suggestions that going on the week-long mission to Beijing, Shanghai and Toronto’s sister city of Chongqing was tacit support for China’s government.

“City-to-city exchanges have an important role. Canada has decided to constructively engage with China, and as a result there have been tremendous changes,” Miller said. “It works in a way that often gets over disputes between national countries.”

He added he will specifically raise concerns about Tibet while in Sichuan province, which borders on Tibet. As well, the mayor promised to send a letter to China’s consul-general here outlining concerns raised by Torontonians about Tibet.

“We’re disappointed that he’s still going,” said Tsering Lama, national director of Students for a Free Tibet, after the meeting.

But Lama said it will be a step forward if Miller brings up these specific issues:

* Concerns about 15 monks who have not been heard from since the protests began last month.
* Urge the Chinese government to allow in foreign media and international fact-finding missions.
* Bar the Olympic torch from going through Tibet to avoid the possibility of more violence.

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/408995

‘Utter nonsense’ to call city’s top-tier employees overpaid, Miller says
Apr 02, 2008 04:30 AM
John Spears
City Hall Bureau

Top-level managers at the City of Toronto got pay raises in the 4 per cent range in 2007, according to salary data released by the province.

City manager Shirley Hoy said the above-inflation increases occurred because the city’s top managers are given a salary range when they move into their jobs that allows them to earn extra money if they achieve set objectives.

Hoy’s own pay and benefits increased 4.8 per cent in 2007, to $320,208 from $305,495.

Some other increases for senior managers at the city and its agencies:

Chief financial officer Joe Pennachetti got a 4.4 per cent raise, to $258,207 from $247,225 and deputy city manager Sue Corke got a 3.1 per cent raise, to $237,331 from $230,129. Chief medical officer David McKeown got a 4.5 per cent increase, to $235,589 from $225,392, and emergency medical services general manager Bruce Farr got a 4.4 per cent hike, to $175,992 from $168,620.

Police Chief Bill Blair’s pay went up by 3.4 per cent, from $262,497 to $271,533. Hoy said in an interview that top managers’ basic increase is the same as city councillors – about 1.9 per cent this year.

In addition, most work through a salary range. When they first move into a job, they may be told the salary range is $200,000 to $225,000 and have a starting salary at or near the bottom. .

In subsequent years, they receive the same cost of living increase as councillors, but can earn up to 3 per cent more in a given year if they meet performance objectives. Performance bonuses can continue year to year until the top of the salary range is reached.

Hoy said a consultant who has been studying the city’s managerial pay scales is to report by summer.

Mayor David Miller told reporters yesterday that city salaries “in general terms” aren’t rising faster than anywhere else. He said any suggestion that city staff are overpaid compared with the private sector is “absolute and utter nonsense.”

He noted that Hoy runs a payroll with 40,000 people. “Find a company that has 40,000 employees and find what the president makes. You’ll find it’s significantly higher.

“It is true we pay our cleaners a decent living wage so that they can afford to live in dignity in this city. It’s true. We pay them more than minimum wage. I’m glad we do.”

Premier Dalton McGuinty, asked about the ballooning “$100,000 club” on his watch, defended the affordability of the Ontario public service: “We are now running the second most efficient operation, according to Stats Canada, when it comes to provincial governments.”

Brian Cochrane, who heads the union representing the city’s outdoor workers, noted his members got a 3.25 per cent increase on Jan. 1, 2007. (They get a further 3.25 per cent hike today, and 0.75 per cent on Oct. 1.) The contract expires at the end of the year, as does the contract for CUPE inside workers.

Cochrane said the union believes managers’ incentive system has led to an increase in worker suspensions without pay for disciplinary matters. He said imposing suspensions “becomes a tool in the bag” to achieve performance targets by reducing payroll costs.

With files from Robert Benzie and Vanessa Lu.

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/408973

Owner of Markham St. bookstore specializing in architecture says she can’t fight zero margins, onslaught of online vendors and sudden rise in the Canadian dollar
Apr 02, 2008 04:30 AM
Christopher Hume
Urban Affairs Columnist

Toronto may be a city that reads books, but not one that goes to the store to buy them.

After 29 years on Markham St., Ballenford Books, the city’s best architectural bookstore, will close its doors.

“I was delusional,” says owner Susan Delean, “because I hear from people I like. But it’s got to the point where it’s become a personal thing. I’m putting my family in a situation where they’re in financial jeopardy.”

According to Delean, a store like hers can no longer survive the onslaught of the Amazon.coms of the world. For most buyers, their appeal lies in the lower price of books sold online, about 30 to 40 per cent lower than bookstore prices.

The fact that Amazon’s lineup doesn’t come close to Delean’s only makes things worse, she says.

Then there’s the sudden rise in the dollar, a crisis for the Canadian publishing industry. Add to that the slim margins available to booksellers that aren’t chains, even at the best of times.

“I’ve been in boiling water for so long I didn’t realize the extent to which I’ve been boiled,” says Delean, speaking from a point somewhere between anger, sadness, shock and relief. “We cannot compete, so it gets to be very difficult to rationalize your existence. It’s grown clearer and clearer. Booksellers are operating on less than nothing.”

Just last week, Canada’s oldest bookstore, the Book Room in Halifax, shut down after 169 years. Owner Charles Burchell told reporters that he knew it was time to move on when a book ordered by a tenant who lives above the shop was delivered to him by mistake.

“The book was on our shelf,” Burchell told the CBC, “so they could have come down in two minutes and picked the book up, but they chose to order by computer and wait five [to] seven days for it to come in.”

How’s that for convenience?

“I am very sad about this,” says Toronto architect and Ballenford regular David Dennis. “It is a treasure. Now I’m stuck buying stuff from the Internet sight unseen. And the Internet just doesn’t have the depth, neither do general interest bookstores. I guess it’s the way of the world, and the way of business.”

As Dennis also points out, Ballenford was a cultural centre as much as a bookstore. The store featured a continuing program of architectural exhibitions and regularly hosted book launches.

“None of that earnest work was amounting to anything,” Delean says. “But I do feel we got support from the architectural community.” In fact, a group of architects bought the shop in 1993 after it went bankrupt for the first time. Delean bought it from them in `94.

“The irony is that business was growing,” she says. “But in reality it’s a zero-margin business. The publishers set the store price, but Amazon sets the selling price, and it’s usually lower than ours. So we find ourselves in a bind because of cash flow; and no one’s giving an inch.”

Michael McClelland, architect and Ballenford fan, suggests that the store move to the Distillery District and “rebrand itself, perhaps as a bookstore/café/gallery.”

“It’s a wild card,” he admits, but worth pursuing.

Indeed, the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen combines all three elements.

Delean and her husband, Larry, both studied architecture. He works at the University of Toronto School of Architecture, Landscape and Design, where he runs the materials workshop. The couple has two children, age 4 and 8.

The irony is that architecture has never been more on people’s minds, especially here in Toronto. Toronto has been enlivened by some of the leading global practitioners, including Frank Gehry (Art Gallery of Ontario), Will Alsop (Ontario College of Art and Design), Daniel Libeskind (Royal Ontario Museum) and Norman Foster (U of T’s Leslie Dan Pharmacy Building). If that’s not enough, in Mississauga – Mississauga, no less! – developers hold international design competitions for condo towers.

In other words, architecture is bigger than ever.

But in the case of Ballenford Books, it seems this new interest in buildings doesn’t extend to what’s inside them.

Christopher Hume can be reached by email at chume@thestar.ca.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Ontario/article/408958

Report shows Ontario child poverty rate still rising; system penalizes working poor
Apr 02, 2008 04:30 AM
Laurie Monsebraaten
Staff Reporter

When Andrea Duffield’s youngest child started Grade 1 last fall, the single mother of three got a part-time job in the hope of pulling her family out of poverty.

But the extra income caused her subsidized rent to double. And after taxes and work-related expenses, her Toronto family wasn’t any further ahead.

Despite Ontario’s growing economy and low unemployment rate, one in eight children (12.6 per cent) were living in poverty by 2005, a percentage that has been rising since 2001, says the Ontario Campaign 2000 in its annual report to be released today.

That figure applies to after-tax incomes. In before-tax incomes, previously used as the yardstick, child poverty in 2005 was at 17.3 per cent. In 2001, the child poverty rate in Ontario was 10.3 per cent after taxes and 15.1 per cent before taxes.

The advocacy group is demanding that Ontario’s upcoming anti-poverty strategy ensure that every adult working full-time full-year is able to live above the poverty line.

Duffield’s predicament points to the need for continuing social support for people working in low-wage jobs.

“I don’t know why they don’t give low-income people a grace period before they raise (subsidized) rent,” Duffield said. “We just need some time to get on our feet.”

Some 70 per cent of the province’s poor children belong to families like hers, with at least one parent working, says Ontario Campaign 2000. More than 41 per cent have a parent working full-time, full year, the group says.

“A job is not a guaranteed pathway out of poverty,” says its report.

The report’s 2005 findings define poor children as those living in families whose after-tax income is below Statistics Canada’s low income cut-offs.

In 2005, the cut-off was $20,956 for a lone parent with one child living in a large city like Toronto. For a family of four, it was $32,556.

When she is not working, Duffield, 36, runs her family of four, which is not on welfare, on just $17,000 a year in child support and government child benefits.

While decrying poverty levels, Ontario Campaign 2000’s new report says the province has taken some promising steps in the past year.

The minimum wage just went up to $8.75 an hour and will rise to $10.25 by 2011. Ontario low-income families will get a new child benefit worth up to $50 a month starting in July, increasing to $92 a month by 2011. And a Queen’s Park poverty-reduction committee is expected to produce a legislative plan by the end of the year.

The advocacy group wants this anti-poverty strategy to help the children of single mothers, visible minorities, recent immigrants and aboriginals.

“These children are between 1.5 and almost three times more likely to be living in poverty,” the report says.

Ontario Campaign 2000 notes that Quebec has taken steps that reduced its after-tax child poverty rate by more than half to 9.6 per cent in 2005 from a peak of 22 per cent in 1997.

“This shows that it’s achievable,” said the group’s spokesperson Jacquie Maund.

Jan Vink, a principal in Flemington Park, an area teeming with immigrants, says Ontario has to do more to recognize the credentials of foreign-trained professionals who get stuck in menial jobs.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PREMIER FORESEES MORE WAGE HIKES

The working poor can expect a higher minimum wage after it hits $10.25 an hour in two years, Premier Dalton McGuinty pledged yesterday under increasing pressure to boost the rate, which rose to $8.75 on Monday.

“We don’t have a plan in place beyond that right now, but I can tell you we will certainly have one before then,” McGuinty said.

“We think that the minimum wage should continue to grow in a progressive way that has some bearing on inflation and the cost of living.”

New Democrat MPP Cheri DiNovo (Parkdale-High Park) has introduced a private members’ bill to raise the minimum wage to $10.25 now and $11 an hour by 2011.

Rob Ferguson

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/409341

Apr 02, 2008 08:21 PM
Sheryl Ubelacker
THE CANADIAN PRESS

Fewer young people are involved in bullying, hooked on tobacco or spending as much time in couch-potato behaviour compared with a few years ago, says a new report on the physical and emotional health of Canadian youth.

But while there’s reason for optimism, says the Public Health Agency of Canada’s report released Wednesday, certain lifestyle behaviours among Canadians in their pre-teen and early-teen years continue to raise concern.

On the good-news front, principal author William Boyce of Queen’s University said bullying has declined slightly among the 9,500 Grade 6 to 10 students from across Canada who participated in the 2006 study on which the report is based.

“Bullying is still high in the sense that it’s too high – almost 40 per cent of students report having been bullied over the past year – but it has decreased from 2002, when it was about 43 per cent.”

Boyce attributes the drop to better awareness in schools and the broader society about the effects of bullying, whether it be physical, verbal, sexual or via cyberspace.

“Most of those (types) have gone down, except the reports of racial bullying have actually gone up a little bit – but only a little bit, not a huge amount – since we last measured in 2002.”

Still, he said one intriguing finding of the report is that bullying escalated among one group within the 11- to 15-year-olds taking part.

“Kids who come from families with more wealth and more assets, that take more holidays, have more computers in the house, etc., they are involved in higher rates of bullying,” Boyce, director of the Social Program Evaluation Group at Queen’s, said from Kingston, Ont.

In anonymous questionnaires filled out by the students, 41 per cent of high-affluence youth admitted to bullying others, compared to 32 per cent of low-affluence youth.

Those from wealthier families also had more serious injuries, with the younger kids tending to get hurt in organized sports, while “it seems to be the older kids were taking other kinds of risks and getting in trouble,” said Boyce.

“Some of them were just accidents, some of them were in the area of fighting, so we’re not quite sure why these are related to family wealth but there was a strong relationship,” he said.

“In other words, having a lot of resources and wealth isn’t always the best thing. It doesn’t necessarily indicate that kids are at an advantage in all areas of their lives. It sometimes perhaps means more opportunities for getting hurt in some sports or using certain equipment – but it may also help kids with a chip on their shoulder get into trouble or be a bully.”

Even though the proportion of youth involved in bullying was down overall, the percentage carrying weapons of some sort – although not necessarily to school – “is higher than certainly we would like to see it,” said Boyce.

Asked if they had carried a weapon in the previous 30 days, 17 per cent of boys said they had – 61 per cent of them toting knives and 14 per cent guns. Four per cent of girls reported carrying weapons, with 72 per cent of these holding knives and six per cent guns.

Boyce said the study found fighting had gone up slightly since 2002, and that might be one reason more were carrying weapons, though not necessarily to bolster aggressive actions.

“I think a lot of the kids that carry weapons are not intending to use them, but they are bringing them for what they consider protection in situations,” he suggested.

There was also encouraging news regarding tobacco use in the report, with a “good drop” in the percentage of students reporting daily smoking since 2002.

“It’s been going down for the last two or three rounds of this survey,” he said. “But it’s down now to about four per cent of boys and six per cent of girls in the higher grades. That’s gone down about 10 per cent for each of them.”

The report also showed that while more young people are engaging in physical activity than in 2002, the proportion of kids who are overweight or obese has climbed.

Overall, there was a 50 per cent hike in the number of youth considered obese (with a body mass index of 30 or more) – to six per cent in 2006 from four per cent in 2002.

The proportion of those considered overweight (BMI of 25-plus) went up among boys, to 20 per cent from 17 per cent, while declining among girls, to 12 per cent from 15 per cent.

Boyce said the researchers found that having a good family relationship – with strong parental trust and communication – appears to have a significant influence on whether young people engage in healthy or risky behaviours.

“So the sort of warm and fuzzy good things about families are actually important to good health for youth,” he said. “And on the opposite side, real problems in those areas will also affect youth.”

A supportive school environment where kids feel good about themselves also affects behaviour, added Boyce, noting that the study is partly aimed at looking for which “places” would be the most effective for targeting interventions to help youth participating in risky lifestyle choices.

“Kids with poor family relationships are more likely to report, for example, getting drunk. And kids living with only one parent are more likely to be involved in bullying.”

“For us the issue is what is it about these contexts and settings which are influencing these behaviours. Because we think that’s what can be addressed through either health education or some type of intervention, particularly in the school.”

“So we’re trying to find out not just what kids are doing and the way they feel about their lives, but what’s associated with that. Where can we get an opening to try to influence that?”