I seldom if ever blog about a personal consumer experience. However, I have been very much moved by a recent customer service experience with the world’s largest company: Apple. Like many who own the iPhone 6, I experienced a huge loss in loading speeds for applications and email a couple of months ago. Like others. […]
Last year, I joined a group of experts to draw up a roadmap for income security reform in the province of Ontario. Some were knowledgeable in a field of inquiry or a profession: executives, advocates, lawyers, professors, administrators and a doctor. Others were experts in their lived experience of poverty. We came together to provide […]
In 1793, no poor law was introduced into Upper Canada with the settlement of Muddy York. After all, it was supposed to be a Utopia. Forty Four years later in 1836, two years after the reform of the British Poor Law, the first declaration of public responsibility for poverty was made, 2 years after […]
SOURCE: YouTube.com (watch the video) STATION: n/a PROGRAM: n/a TIME: 3:00 p.m. REFERENCE: Speech Toronto Housing Network DATE: July 18, 2009 LENGTH: 00:09:35 TRANSCRIPT: Stapleton Speech Toronto Housing Network Forum Margaret Hancock: John Stapleton from the Metcalf Foundation and St. Christopher House. JOHN STAPLETON: What I’d like to do is have you think of […]
Just 29 years ago, the Social Assistance Review Committee delivered its 674 page report called Transitions on September 6, 1988. It was groundbreaking as it devised other programs that would replace the role of welfare. That only partially came to pass with child benefits and the small Working Income Tax Benefit. In the years from […]
The 50 year experiment forcing welfare recipients and low income persons with disabilities into financial destitution finally appears to be over. In Charles Sousa’s Budget 2017, asset limits for single welfare recipients will be raised from $2,500 to $10,000 for a single person and to $11,000 for a lone parent with two children. Persons with […]
Late last year, some colleagues and I released a report on called ‘The Cost of Poverty in Toronto’. We found that poverty costs the Toronto economy between $4.4 and $5.5 billion per year. For this discussion, I will use a figure of $5 billion. Since Toronto has never been poverty-free and there is no comparable […]
On January 10, 2017, Matt Galloway of CBC’s Metro morning interviewed Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins on the fentanyl opioid crisis and noted that: “….if our food supply was threatened by a food poisoning, then all hell would break loose and that you would have all levels of government moving in the blink of an eye to […]
I’m often tempted to weigh in on the popular appeal of bombastic, right-wing celebrity politicians, yet I hesitate when smart commentators say exactly what I was thinking – people like the brilliant Rick Salutin of the Toronto Star, Marcus Gee in the Globe and Mail, or Charles Blow in the New York Times. They always […]
When Canada first built its railways, forever remembered in the sepia photograph of the last spike, the idea was that railways spawn communities, commerce, and population growth. It was the undisputed economic model. It is precisely why, along with connecting communities, that both Canada and the United States built their railways in the first place. […]
