Canadian Social Research Newsletter

Canadian Social Research Newsletter
October 16, 2005

Welcome to the weekly Canadian Social Research Newsletter, a listing of the new links added to the Canadian Social Research Links website in the past week.

The e-mail version of this week's issue of the newsletter is going out to 1499 subscribers.

Scroll to the bottom of this newsletter to see some notes and a disclaimer.

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IN THIS ISSUE:

Canadian Content

1. Make Poverty History Day of Action to End Child Poverty in Canada - October 17
2. October 17: 24 hours of feminist mobilization --- World March of Women --- Canadian Women's March 2005
3. New from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives:
--- The share of income tax paid by the rich - October 13
--- Federal fiscal forecasting - October 5
4. New from Statistics Canada:
--- Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, 2003 - October 13
--- University enrolment, 2003/04 - October 11
--- University degrees, diplomas and certificates, 2003 - October 11
5. Health Care in Canada 2005 (Canadian Institute for Health Information) - June 8
6. Federal consultations on seniors and people with disabilities extended until the end of 2005 (Social Development Canada)
7. Government of Canada Response to "Accessibility for All" (Social Development Canada) - October 2005
8. Alberta's $400 Resource Rebate cheques misguided (Parkland Institute - University of Alberta) - October 10
9. Microcredit
10. What's New from the Childcare Resource and Research Unit ( University of Toronto) - October 14

International Content

11. Poverty Dispatch Digest : U.S. media coverage of social issues and programs --- October 13
12. Poor and Homeless Continue to Face Major Challenges in Urban Areas - U.S.
13. Globalisation and the Reform of European Social Models (Bruegel - new European think tank) - September 2005
14. International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (United Nations) - October 17

Have a great week!
gs

Gilles Séguin
Canadian Social Research Links
http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net

E-mail:
gilseg@rogers.com

1. Make Poverty History Day of Action to End Child Poverty in Canada - October 17

Make Poverty History Day of Action
to End Child Poverty in Canada
News Release
October 13, 2005
"Canadians from Vancouver to Charlottetown will be wearing white bands on October 17 and calling for an end to child poverty in Canada. October 17 is the United Nations International Day for the Eradication of Poverty and the Make Poverty History campaign will be focusing on the sad reality of child poverty in Canada. More than one million children in Canada - that's one in six - are poor. Every month, 770, 000 people use food banks. Forty percent of those relying on these food banks are children."

Make Poverty History Events Calendar of Activities across Canada
for the National Day of Action to End Child Poverty in Canada (October 17)

Source:
Make Poverty History (Canada) [Platform] - "...united by the common belief that poverty can be ended."
Related Link:
Make Poverty History (International)

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October 17th - A Call to End Child Poverty in Canada
Source:
Campaign 2000

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Celebrate Oct. 17 - International Day for the Eradication of Poverty
- October 17 Information Kit (PDF file - 415K, 6 pages)
Source:
National Anti-Poverty Organization

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Google Web Search Results : "End Child Poverty in Canada"
Google News search Results : "End Child Poverty in Canada"
Source:
Google.ca

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- Go to the Non-Governmental Organizations Links page: http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/ngobkmrk.htm
- Go to the Social Research Links in Other Countries (Non-Government) page: http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/internatngo.htm

2.
- October 17 --- 24 hours of feminist mobilization
- World March of Women
- Canadian Women's March 2005

World March of Women
October 17, 2005 - Join us for the 24 hours of feminist mobilization
"On October 17, women in all time zones will successively take to the streets at noon to stage actions for one hour. This is how they will show their support for the blueprint for society depicted in the Women's Global Charter for Humanity."

Relay of the Women's Global Charter for Humanity, March 8 - October 17, 2005
Between March 8 and october 17, 2005, there will be the world relay of the Women's Global Charter for Humanity. The women from various countries will be passing the Charter from country to country. They will also organise actions to highlight this symbolic passing and the values of the Charter. These women will be sewing together a solidarity quilt that will illustrate the values of the Charter.

Women's Global Charter for Humanity

Canadian Women’s March 2005
Get Ready for October 17th, 2005
24 Hours of Feminist Action and Solidarity
"The Canadian Women’s March 2005 Coalition is committed to the elimination of poverty and violence in Canada and to making the links between local and global actions. We are committed to continuing our work to meet the 13 demands developed by the World March of Women in 2000 to eliminate poverty and violence against women in Canada. Today, major investments on social programs are still needed and none of the 13 demands have been met. This is why in May 2005 we supported relaying the Global Charter for Humanity across Canada. The Charter was created and agreed upon by 6000 women’s organizations world wide. It is based on five core values; equality, freedom, solidarity, justice and peace. It is a feminist vision of a world free of exploitation, poverty and violence."
Related Link:
World March of Women in the Year 2000 - September 2000

Google Web Search Results : "Women’s March 2005"
Google News search Results : "Women’s March 2005"
Source:
Google.ca

- Go to the the Canadian Non-Governmental Sites about Women's Social Issues page: http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/womencanngo.htm
- Go to the Links to International Sites about Women's Social Issues page: http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/womeninternat.htm

3. New from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives:
--- The share of income tax paid by the rich - October 13
--- Federal fiscal forecasting - October 5

Canada’s high-income earners are not overtaxed—report
Press Release
October 13, 2005
"Despite recent reports to the contrary, Canada’s high-income earners do not pay a disproportionately large share of personal income tax. A new analysis by Prof. Neil Brooks of Osgoode Hall Law School, released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, takes a closer look at the numbers in Statistics Canada’s “Tax Incidence in Canada.” The Stats Can report sparked a series of news stories this spring claiming the top 10% of income earners pay 52% of the total tax bill but Brooks finds these figures both misleading and incomplete in assessing the fairness of the tax system.

The Statistics Canada study showed that the share of federal income taxes paid by the top 10% increased from 46% in 1990 to 52.6% in 2002. Brooks points out, however, that this increase is not a result of the tax system becoming more progressive. Instead, the main reason for the increase was because the share of earned income going to the most affluent among us increased by 12.6% over that same period, while the share going to the bottom 50% of tax-filers declined."

Complete analysis:

The Share of Income Tax Paid by the Rich:
The Business Press Gives another Lesson on How to Deceive with Statistics (PDF file - 115K, 7 pages)

Related Links:

What's New? - Canadian, U.S. and international resources from Jan 2000 to the present.
Child Care in the News - media articles from January 2000 to the present
ISSUE files - theme pages, each filled with contextual information and links to further info
Links to child care sites in Canada and elsewhere
CRRU Publications - briefing notes, factsheets, occasional papers and other publications

Also from CRRU:

Towards a national system of early learning and child care
Regularly updated
"(...) On April 29, 2005 the governments of Canada and Manitoba struck an historic Agreement-in-Principle on early learning and child care. This was followed by a similar agreement between the federal government and the province of Saskatchewan. These agreements are the beginning of what is hoped to be a series of strong bilateral agreements between the federal government and the provinces/territories. These historic agreements build on a meeting of the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Ministers Responsible for Social Services in November 2004 and a subsequent meeting in February 2005. They (with the exception of Quebec) agreed to shared principles to guide the development of a new national system of early learning and child care."
NOTE: this is a large (and growing) collection that includes government and non-governmental reports, press releases, news articles and other documents dealing with the new federal-provincial-territorial arrangements for early learning and child care in Canada.

- Go to the Non-Governmental Early Learning and Child Care Links page: http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/ecd2.htm

11. Poverty Dispatch Digest :
U.S. media coverage of social issues and programs --- October 13

POVERTY DISPATCH Digest
Institute for Research on Poverty - U. of Wisconsin
This digest offers dozens of new links each week to full-text articles in the U.S. media (mostly daily newspapers) on poverty, poverty, welfare reform, child welfare, education, health, hunger, Medicare and Medicaid, and much more...
The Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offers a free e-mail service that consists of an e-mail message sent to subscribers each Monday and Thursday, containing a dozen or so links to articles dealing with the areas mentioned above. The weekly Canadian Social Research Links Poverty Dispatch Digest is a compilation, available online, of the two dispatch e-mails for that week --- with the kind permission of IRP.

Here's the complete collection of U.S. media articles in this week's Poverty Dispatch Digest:
(click the link above to read all of these articles)

October 13, 2005

Today's subjects include: Poverty Statistics - Opinion // Marriage and Fertility Study // Community Redevelopment Strategies // Hurricane Katrina and Poverty // Homelessness Study // Health Care Savings Account Proposal // World Poverty and Gender Discrimination // Urban Poverty Study // Urban Poverty - Milwaukee // Child Support Pass-Through - Wisconsin // Marriage and Fertility Study - Selected States // Homelessness - Philadelphia // Low-Income Energy Assistance

October 10, 2005

Today's subjects include: Poverty Factoids // Poverty and Personal Responsibility - Opinion // Benefits for Hurricane Evacuees // Hurricanes, Poverty, and Depression - Opinion // Child Tax Credit and the Poor - Editorial // Plight of the Poor - Bronx, NY // Call to End Poverty in California // Looming Cuts in Health Services - Maine // Health Insurance for Children - Illinois // Use of Food Stamps - Colorado, Queens, NY // Student Achievement Gap and Wealth - Guilford County, NC // Student Achievement Gap - Colorado // Minimum versus Livable Wage - Maine // Heating Assistance - Ohio // Homelessness - Arizona

Each of the weekly digests offers dozens of links or more to media articles that are time-sensitive.
The older the link, the more likely it is to either be dead or have moved to an archive - and some archives [but not all] are pay-as-you-go.
[For the current week's digest, click on the POVERTY DISPATCH Digest link above]

The Poverty Dispatch weekly digest is a good tool for monitoring what's happening in the U.S.; it's a guide to best practices and lessons learned in America.

Subscribe to the Poverty Dispatch!
Send an e-mail message to John Wolf [ jwolf@ssc.wisc.edu ] to receive a plain text message twice a week with one to two dozen links to media articles with a focus on poverty, welfare reform, child welfare, health, Medicaid from across the U.S.
And it's free...

Source:
Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP)
[ University of Wisconsin-Madison ]

For the current week's digest, click on the POVERTY DISPATCH Digest link at the top of this section.
Recently-archived POVERTY DISPATCH weekly digests:

- October 6, 2005
- September 29
- September 22
- September 15
- September 8
- September 1

POVERTY DISPATCH description/archive - weekly issues back to January 2005, 50+ links per issue
NOTE: this archive is part of the Canadian Social Research Links American Non-Governmental Social Research page.

- Go to the Links to American Government Social Research page: http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/us.htm
- Go to the Links to American Non-Governmental Social Research (A-J) page: http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/us2.htm
- Go to the Links to American Non-Governmental Social Research (M-Z) page: http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/us3.htm

12. Challenges of the Poor and the Homeless in America - October 11, 12
(Selected U.S. media)

Poor and Homeless Continue to Face Major Challenges in Urban Areas - U.S.

Crowded Out By Luxury Lofts, Poor Seek Relief
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-downtown12oct12,0,2051236.story?coll=la-home-local

Polk Gulch cleanup angers some
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/12/POLKSTREET.TMP

Nation taking a new look at homelessness, solutions
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-10-11-homeless-cover_x.htm

Study: U.S. poor trapped in urban areas
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/10/12/poverty.study.ap/index.html

Katrina’s Window: Confronting Concentrated Poverty Across America [pdf]
http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20051012_concentratedpoverty.htm

United States Interagency Council on Homelessness [pdf]
http://www.ich.gov/

"As the recent tragedy wrought by Hurricane Katrina revealed, poor and homeless residents of America’s cities remain particularly vulnerable. Whether it is the phenomenon of gentrification or the world of natural hazards, many continue to remain marginalized in terms of opportunities, whether they be economic or otherwise. This week, a number of news pieces once again reminded the general public about the precarious situation faced by this group. In Los Angeles, the City Council decided to impose the first limits on the luxury loft and condo boom that is gradually pushing out single-room-occupancy hotels, most of which are concentrated in the city’s downtown area. While this type of creeping development may affect the poor in increasingly popular urban places, less successful cities continue to have many neighborhoods with concentrated poverty. As a report from the Brookings Institution released this week noted, poor planning over the past several decades has continued to concentrate public housing at the urban core. Generally, the end result is that many urban dwellers remain cut off from the rapid economic and housing growth that has been experienced around the urban fringe. [KMG]

The first link will lead users to a nice article from this Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times that discusses the recent action taken by the City Council. The second link leads visitors to a San Francisco Chronicle article that discusses the recent trend towards gentrification in the city’s Polk Gulch neighborhood. The third link leads to a USA Today article from this past Monday, which talks about how the recent Hurricane Katrina tragedy may transform certain aspects of addressing the homelessness situation in the country. The fourth link will take visitors to a CNN news piece, which talks about the recent report from the Brookings Institution that examines the concentration of urban poverty throughout a number of US cities. The fifth link leads to the full text of that report, authored by Alan Berube. The final link will take users to the homepage of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. [KMG]"

Source:
The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2005.
http://scout.wisc.edu/
NOTE: The Scout Report is a weekly newsletter that's available by e-mail or online.
Just go to the Scout Report site to check out the rest of the current issue as well as back issues, and to sign up for the e-mail edition.

- Go to the Homelessness and Housing Links page: http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/homeless.htm
- Go to the Links to American Non-Governmental Social Research (M-Z) page: http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/us3.htm

13. Globalisation and the Reform of European Social Models - September 2005
(Bruegel - new European think tank)

Globalisation and the Reform
of European Social Models
André Sapir
Background document for the presentation at ECOFIN Informal
Meeting in Manchester, 9 September 2005

Complete paper (PDF file - 117K, 19 pages)
Executive summary (PDF file - 26K, 2 pages)

Four European Social Models

"There are so many differences among national welfare state systems that the very notions of “European model” or “Social Europe” are rather dubious. I prefer to use the now familiar grouping of national systems into four different social policy models in order to examine the relative performance of each model along a number of dimensions. The four models cover four different geographical areas.

Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland and Sweden, plus the Netherlands) feature the highest levels of social protection expenditures and universal welfare provision. There is extensive fiscal intervention in labour markets based on a variety of “active” policy instruments. Strong labour unions ensure highly compressed wage structures.

Anglo-Saxon countries (Ireland and the United Kingdom) feature relatively large social assistance of the last resort. Cash transfers are primarily oriented to people in working age. Activation measures are important as well as schemes conditioning access to benefits to regular employment. On the labour market side, this model is characterized by a mixture of weak unions, comparatively wide and increasing wage dispersion and relatively high incidence of low-pay employment.

Continental countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg) rely extensively on insurance-based, non-employment benefits and old-age pensions. Although their membership is on the decline, unions remain strong as regulations extend the coverage of collective bargaining to non-union situations.

Finally, Mediterranean countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain), concentrate their social spending on old-age pensions and allow for a high segmentation of entitlements and status. Their social welfare systems typically draw on employment protection and early retirement provisions to exempt segments of the working age population from participation in the labour market. The wage structure is, at least in the formal sector, covered by collective bargaining and strongly compressed."
[Excerpt from the paper, pp. 5-6]

Source:
BRUEGEL (Brussels)
"... a new think tank whose aim is to contribute to the quality of economic policymaking in Europe"

- Go to the Globalization Links page: http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/global.htm

14. International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (United Nations) - October 17

First United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997-2006)
- incl. links to : Information on the Decade - Reports and resolutions (current and previous sessions) - Bulletin on Poverty Eradication - Meetings/Events - more...

October 17 - International Day for the Eradication of Poverty
"The United Nations General Assembly declared 17 October as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, to be observed beginning in 1993. It noted that activities undertaken with respect to the Day will take into account those undertaken each 17 October by certain non-governmental organizations and invited all States to devote the Day to presenting and promoting, as appropriate in the national context, concrete activities on the eradication of poverty and destitution. The General Assembly also invited intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations to assist States, at their request, in organizing national activities for the observance of International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, paying due attention to the specific problems of the destitute."
[General Assembly resolution 47/196 of 22 December 1992]
- incl. links to messages from the Secretary-General and the President of the General Assembly, official press release, press briefing and conference, summary of events planned around the world and more...

Source:
United Nations
Economic and Social Development