Tag: Doing Social Policy

  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 yourself going into a time machine, and you're going to go back 77 years to 1932. And if you could go in that time machine and think of what Toronto looked like in 1932, about five blocks from here, right at this time of year - there was during the month of July of 1932 a Royal Commission on Direct Relief run by Ontario's top businessman. At that time, it was a fellow by the…

The following policy aptitude test is administered on occasion to policy classes I attend at various levels. Many classes have scored 0 out of 20 and then missed all the tiebreakers. I don’t get asked to address many classes.   Spell Westminster (question issued orally)   Common reply puts in an extra 'i'   What is the symbol on a government member's business card?   A coat of arms (if they can get that, I award a point) - 'some type of crown' gets no points   What is the symbol on a public servant's business card?   - Ontario - Trillium (or) - Canada - stylized flag of Canada in red   Do cities have a distinction between political folk and public servants in terms of the symbols on…

 Here is  a PDF of the ten elements of social policy advocacy that will connect with the public. It is a simple checklist based on John Kenneth Galbraith's 4 part concept of the conventional wisdom and Jonathan Haidt's 6 elements of the moral palette. Only Gandhi and Mandela have promoted movements that touch on all ten.

Zero tolerance and unwritten rules There is a sign facing traffic on the southbound Don Valley Parkway in Toronto between York Mills Road and Lawrence Avenue that announces that the 90km per hour speed limit will be enforced with zero tolerance. The sign has been there for as long as I can remember likely dating from the mid 1990’s, shortly after the phrase was coined. “The term "Zero Tolerance" appeared for the first time in a report in 1994. The idea behind this expression can be traced back to the Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Act, approved in New Jersey in 1973…..According to scholars, zero tolerance is the concept of giving carte blanche to the police for the inflexible repression of minor offenses… ”[1] During periods when the Don Valley Parkway was not   congested, I conducted the personal experiment…

First it was a community, then a city, then a municipality and now a District in the Toronto megacity. Scarborough is a very interesting place to live in the new millennium because it is accidentally green and inadvertently poor. When I began analysing the data on the working poor in Toronto for the Metcalf Foundation, I began to notice that the community I have lived in for 35 years was becoming poorer. Here is an excerpt from the Working Poor in the Toronto Region “Although increases and decreases are largely in balance west of Scarborough, far more increases in working poverty (increases of more than 10%) occur east of Yonge Street. More decreases occur west of Yonge Street. In other words, the … working poor seem to be moving eastward.”…

Social policy, at its simplest and most active, is the articulation of ideas to effect positive change for people based on strong principles and the best available evidence. Social policy is a good thing and is historically a strong suit of governments. Therefore, it is extremely interesting that Canada now has a federal government that appears to wish to get out of social policy. They are achieving this end in five ways: Through staff cuts and attrition in the  government departments like Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) that do social policy; By declaring that large aspects of social policy like poverty reduction are  the responsibility of someone else ( i.e. provinces) By making sure that charities do not conduct social policy that could be construed to have political…