|
|
Zheng Wu, "Recent Trends in Marriage Patterns in Canada" Trends in marriage rates and remarriage rates do not seem to have shifted so radically when one takes a longer-term perspective. However, there have been significant shifts, with rising trend of cohabitation. Tha author gives some possible explanations. More and more women, particularly married women, are now in the labour force. The earning gap between men and women is narrowing. There is also evidence that the economic position of young men is deteriorating. Young people are now staying in school longer than ever before. He thinks these factors are likely to continue to feed a downward trend in marriage rates. Frances Woolley, "For a Radical Redesign of Our Tax Treatment of the Family" Canada is unique internationally in not having any universal child benefit or tax deduction. The child tax benefit is targeted toward low- and moderate-income families, while the child care expense deduction provides relief to some two-earner and single-parent families. But the system has a number of gaps: two-earner families who juggle schedules so that someone is always able to pick up the children, traditional middle class families, and families with children in their early teens may receive little or no recognition for their family responsibilities. The author argues that what Canadians need is not more recognition for family status, but rather less. Children need to be seen not as an appendage of their parents, but as people in their own right, with rights to recognition in the income tax system. Focussing on children would lead to a tax system that was not only fairer, but also more efficient. Shelley Phipps, "Comparing the Economic Well-Being of Children in Lone-Mother Families in Canada, Norway and the US" The author compares policies and outcomes for children living with lone parents in Canada, the United States and Norway. Children living in lone-mother families in Norway have, on average, better outcomes than children living in lone-mother households in Canada and the US. If we are interested in learning how to help this potentially vulnerable group of children, we might thus look to the Norwegian example. Further research is clearly required, but one hypothesis suggested to explain the better outcomes in Norway is the very generous transfer programs offered lone-mother families. Martin Dooley, Lori Curtis, Ellen Lipman and David Feeny, "Child Health and Family Socioeconomic Status" The author's objective is to improve our understanding of the roles which family structure and low income play in the determination of child health in general and psychiatric disorders in particular. He first considers several barriers which the analyst must face in attempting to make policy inferences from research with currently available data. He then summarizes his findings from two data sources - the Ontario Child Health Study and the new National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, concluding with a review of what these results can tell us about appropriate policy responses. Miles Corak, "How Children Get Ahead in Life: Does Money Matter?" In this article, the author documents the extent to which children in low-income families grow up to become low-income adults, and more generally examines the degree to which money matters in determining the attainments of all children regardless of their parents' position in the income distribution. Kate Upperman and Anne Hélène Gauthier, "What Makes a Difference for Children? Social Capital and Neighbourhood Characteristics" The US and Canada have alarmingly high rates of child poverty which in turn profoundly affect their well-being. But poverty is not the sole determinant. Other factors such as family circumstances, race and ethnicity, or the neighbourhood where children live may also have deleterious effects. Furthermore, social capital and some neighbourhood characteristics may moderate negative impacts. In this paper the authors review the literature to find out what makes a difference for children. Nicholas Bala, "Reforming Child Welfare Policies: Don't Throw Out the Baby With the Bathwater" The Canadian media have been filled with the news that the child welfare system is in crisis, with reports of child abuse deaths and public inquiries into the failings of provincial child welfare systems. While some sound proposals are being made to improve how public agencies deal with children whose parents are "inadequate," some of the public dialogue fails to account for the complexity of defining and responding to "inadequate parenting." And some of the recent proposals risk creating a child welfare system that is overly intrusive, and ultimately harmful to children and families. This article provides a critically assessment of the plan for child welfare reform in Ontario released in June of 1998. Katherine Covell and R. Brian Howe, "A Policy of Parent Licensing" The authors argue for a policy of parent licensing in Canada. Current laws regulating parenting are reactive and inadequate, and assume parenting is a right rather than a privilege. Too many children are being raised by incompetent parents. The costs to the individual and to society are too high. Requiring a parent license would be consistent with the principle of children's rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Canada is obligated. Licensing also would provide a societal validation of the importance of parenting, promote competent parenting and health child development, and facilitate intervention where necessary. Susan A. McDaniel, "Public Policy, Demographic Aging and Families" The contours of familial interdependencies are very much shaped by policy and market changes. Demographic aging is laying bare the weaknesses of existing social arrangements, particularly public policy for covering market failures. The principles on which our society has built so-called social safety nets are laced with holes and far from shockproof. This means that when shocks occur such as the economic restructuring Canada has experienced over the past decade, families in multiple generations become the shock absorbers. As public transfers shrink even more, families may huddle ever more closely, for good or bad, to share resources and to maximize opportunities. André Burelle, "L'amorce d'un débat ouvert entre fédéralistes" The author of Le mal canadien takes the critical remarks levelled at his book by Jane Jenson, in Beyond the Impasse, as an invitation to an open debate between federalists on Trudeau's vision of Canada. He argues that preserving and even extending Trudeau's individualistic liberalism and unitarian nation building through Ottawa's spending power in order to unify "Anglophone Canadians," while allowing Quebec and Aboriginal people to regain their "national" autonomy through simple opting out, won't work. Multinational asymetrical federalism, as pictured by Will Kymlicka and Jane Jenson, is bound to fail for lack of any "supranational glue" between federated partners. According to Burelle, a common ideal of justice based on equivalent instead of identical treatment of citizens and communities,and codecision of the constraints all federated partners must abide by in the exercise of their sovereign powers in order to secure the Canadian economic, social and politicial union, can provide this supranational glue and is our only way out of the impasse. Alan C. Cairns, "The Supreme Court, The UDI Reference and Democracy" A process that could lead to the breakup of Canada has to be fair to the Quebec party that may leave and to the rest of Canada. The current referendum process within Quebec is manifestly unfair to the fundamental interests of the rest of Canada. If the Supreme Court intervention based on the reference on the legality of UDI helps make that process fairer, then its roles deserves the label "democratic." David Cameron, "National Unity: Are We on the Threshold of a New Era?" Over the last three decades, the national unity question has been presented as a problem which needed to be fixed. That approach probably helped keep the problem alive. Conditions are ripe for a radically new national unity paradigm and Jean Charest has the potential to play a key role in the emergence of that new paradigm. If, instead of seeing the national unity issue as a problem, one regards it as a tension to be accommodated, an arrangement to be lived with, a practical situation which is not perfect, but eminently tolerable, it opens up a very different, more realistic and constructive perspective on our current situation. |
