Canadian Social Research Newsletter

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 1353 subscribers.

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Revenue Minister McCallum announces new funding program for charities
News Release
May 17, 2005
"John McCallum, Minister of National Revenue, today launched the Charities Partnership and Outreach Program, a funding program designed to support compliance-related education and training projects for charities.Beginning today, up to $3 million in funds will be available to the voluntary sector annually for education and training on charities regulation. More specifically, up to $1 million in years one and two, $2 million in the third year and $3 million per year on an ongoing basis. Organizations will be able to receive contribution funding of up to a maximum of $500,000 per year per project."
Source:
Canada Revenue Agency

May 20, 2005
Family income 2003
For the first time ever, couple families in Oshawa had the highest median total family income among all census metropolitan areas. The median for couple families in Oshawa reached $80,300 in 2003, up a slight 0.3% over 2002, after adjusting for inflation. The median is the point where exactly one half of incomes are higher and one half are lower.

Ontario's poor get left behind
May 18, 2005
By Carol Goar
"...it would have cost the government about $110 million to honour its pledge to index social assistance to the cost of the living. That is less than the $400 million the Liberals gave Casino Windsor in February; less than the $235 million subsidy they handed General Motors in March; and less than the $120 million they found to sweeten their deal with the Ontario Medical Association a few days later. Most voters aren't likely to notice. They've never needed welfare and don't have much contact with those who do. They're not inclined to punish politicians who promise to help the poor, but don't deliver. It is really a matter of conscience for McGuinty..."
Source:
The Toronto Star

May 17, 2005
Study: Is inflation higher for seniors? 1992 to 2004
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) tracked very closely the inflation experienced by seniors as a group between 1992 and 2004, according to a new study. This is important because the CPI is used to index old-age pensions. During this 12-year span, seniors-only households experienced an average annual rate of inflation of 1.95%. This was only slightly higher than the rate of 1.84% for all other households, and 1.86% for all households combined. The study examined the inflation rate experienced by households composed exclusively of seniors aged 65 and over, comparing them with all other Canadian households and the official CPI.
Complete report:
Is Inflation Higher for Seniors? (PDF file - 169K, 14 pages)

McGuinty Government Breaks Down Barriers To Help People Move From Welfare To Work
Better Health, Employment And Child Care Supports Part Of Province's Plan To Bridge People Into Permanent Employment
News Release
May 17, 2005
"TORONTO – The McGuinty government is helping Ontario Works clients get back into the workforce by overhauling Ontario's social assistance programs and providing new health, employment and child care supports, Minister of Community and Social Services Sandra Pupatello announced today."
Four key measures:
- extending health benefits for up to six months (up to one year in exceptional cases) or until employer health benefits are available for people exiting social assistance for employment.
- a flat exemption rate of 50 per cent on earnings to provide a better incentive for Ontario Works clients to work and earn more.
- increasing the maximum deduction for informal child care costs from $390 to $600 per month to provide another child care option for working parents.
- Creating an employment benefit of up to $500 to help recipients who obtain full-time employment pay for job-related expenses like uniforms and transportation.

Canadians and Their Money: A National Symposium on Financial Capability
Government Conference Centre, Ottawa
June 9-10, 2005
"How well do Canadians understand financial matters, apply their knowledge and take responsibility for financial decisions? What does that mean for policy makers? The Policy Research Initiative (PRI), Social and Enterprise Development Innovations (SEDI) and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) have partnered to seek answers to these questions. The symposium will feature leading-edge national and international experts who will engage with government, non-profit sector and business representatives in two days of discussions about the current state of policy and practice surrounding this increasingly important topic."

Learning What Works — Volume 5, Number 1 (PDF file - 1.7MB, 15 pages)
Spring 2005
Newsletter
Table of Contents:
- Asset-Building Strategies for the Poor: Is Policy Ahead of Research?
- Whither Welfare? (Excellent overview of recent welfare reforms in Canada and the U.S.!)
- One-on-One Help for Addressing the Employment Needs of Long-Term Unemployed IA Clients
- Why Experience-Rate the EI Program?
- School Readiness: Evidence From the Manitoba 2004 EDI Parent Survey
- Bulletin Board

Related Link:
The Self-Sufficiency Project
"The internationally known Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) demonstrated that single parents who were long-term welfare recipients would leave income assistance (IA) for full-time employment faster if work could be made to pay significantly more than welfare. SSP also showed that this could be accomplished while increasing employment earnings and reducing poverty. The increased taxes revenue and lower transfer payments paid for much, or in the case of new welfare applicants, almost all of the cost of the program."

A Literature Review of Experience-Rating Employment Insurance in Canada
Working Paper
by Shawn de Raaf, Anne Motte, and Carole Vincent
May 2005
"This working paper reviews both the theoretical and empirical literature on experience-rating unemployment insurance programs. In reviewing the existing research, the paper identifies a number of lessons learned to determine whether an experience-rated Employment Insurance (EI) program might, by modifying the behaviour of Canadian firms and workers, address the magnitude of subsidies some firms receive from the program year after year or lessen the extent to which claimants frequently rely on EI benefits."

Source:
Social Research and Demonstration Corporation
"The Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) is a nonprofit organization created specifically to develop, field test, and rigorously evaluate social programs designed to improve the well-being of all Canadians, with a special concern for the effects on disadvantaged Canadians."

Each week, the Childcare Resource and Research Unit disseminates its "e-mail news notifier", an e-mail message with a dozen or so links to new reports, studies and child care in the news (media articles) by the CRRU or another organization in the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC). What you see below is content from the most recent issue of the notifier.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
NEW POSTINGS AVAILABLE ON THE
CHILDCARE RESOURCE AND RESEARCH UNIT’S WEBSITE
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

---------------------------------------------------
WHATS NEW
---------------------------------------------------

>> OECD Thematic Review of ECEC: Austrian background report
by Kromer, Ingrid; Phoser, Alena & Zuba, Rheinhard
Background report from the Austrian government provides comprehensive and critical descriptions of ECEC policies and organization, as part of the OECD’s Thematic Review.

---------------------------------------------------
CHILD CARE IN THE NEWS
---------------------------------------------------

>> Daycare deal in hands of N.B. premier: Dryden [CA-NB]
NB Times & Transcript, 19 May 05
Social Development Minister Ken Dryden says there are no more negotiations left to hash out with the provincial government to finalize a daycare deal. Dryden said he has signed off on Ottawa's end of the deal and it is simply up to the premier to pick up the pen and finalize the agreement.

>> P.E.I. negotiating better child care deal: Gillan [CA-PE]
Guardian (Charlottetown), 19 May 05
P.E.I Health Minister Chester Gillan is denying Opposition accusations that he is dragging his feet when it comes to signing a new deal for child care. He said the per capita funding formula proposed by Ottawa does not account for the fact that P.E.I. has a much smaller population and would face proportionately higher administration and startup costs for a new system.

>> Dollars for day care [CA-NS]
Chronicle Herald (Halifax), 17 May 05
Nova Scotia became the fifth province to reach a child care deal with Ottawa, inking an agreement on Monday worth $137.3 million over the next five years.

>> Grandparents take over as mums go back to work [AU]
Sydney Morning Herald, 16 May 05
More than 20 per cent of Australian mothers rejoin the workforce by the time their child is six months old, a new national survey of childhood in Australia shows.

>>‘Bébé boom’ will put France ahead of UK and Germany [FR]
Independent, 13 May 05
According to demographic calculations by the French government, a booming birth rate will push the population of France to 75 million by the year 2050. Two children or more are the norm for French couples. France spends more than any other EU country - 4.5 per cent of GDP - on policies that promote child care and assist families.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This message was forwarded through the Childcare Resource and Research Unit e-mail news notifier.
For information on the CRRU e-mail notifier, including subscription instructions , see http://www.childcarecanada.org
The Childcare Resource and Research Unit (University of Toronto, Canada)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Current developments in Early Childhood Education and Care: Provinces and territories
Regularly updated
"This resource is a collection of useful online readings about current early childhood education and care policy and program delivery issues in each province and territory. Within each jurisdiction, information is organized into three sections: news articles, online documents and useful websites."

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.

May 19, 2005
Compiled by the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and distributed Mondays and Thursdays

Today's subjects include: Social Class in America Series // Social Class in America - Opinion // Minimum Wage // Faith-Based Initiatives // Study of Former Foster Children // Preschool Expulsions // Earned Income Tax Credit - Wisconsin // Home Loan Assistance for Illegal Immigrants - Madison, WI // Financial Security Scorecard - Wisconsin // Individual Development Accounts - Pennsylvania // Unemployment Rate - Michigan // Medicaid - Wisconsin // Medicaid Editorial Series - New York // Health Care Program - Tennessee // Lack of Health Care Coverage - Chicago // Food Stamps - Ohio // Social Service Computer Problems - Colorado // Child Support Guidelines - Minnesota // Living Wage - New Mexico // School Achievement - New York // Computer Access for Homeless - Louisville, KY // Homelessness - Minnesota, Athens County OH, Santa Monica CA

Each of the weekly digests below 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 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...

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

Assessing the New Federalism: Eight Years Later (PDF file - 718K, 68 pages)
2005 (paper date April/May 2005)
"Since 1996, the Assessing the New Federalism (ANF) project of the Urban Institute and its partner Child Trends has analyzed the experiences of low-income families and children during major shifts in the
nation’s social welfare policies. Concentrating on welfare, employment, and health insurance, ANF research has also examined child welfare, immigrant families, and such policies as child care that help families integrate work with child rearing. Assessing the New Federalism: Eight Years Later synthesizes selected findings from more than 450 ANF publications plus dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and research presentations. These findings illustrate dramatic changes in the experience of low-income families, those who have been on welfare and those who haven’t, from the mid-1990s to the present. This report also cites the ANF publications that provide more detail and includes an annotated source list of other institutions and work in the field that complement what ANF has done."
[Excerpt from report's intro]
Source:
Assessing the New Federalism
[The Urban Institute]

Social Watch
"Founded in 1995, Social Watch was first established to provide a global platform for non-governmental organizations to monitor and promote the effective implementation of the commitments made by national governments during the United Nations World Summit on Social Development. Since that time, the group's work has continued in the areas of monitoring poverty eradication and gender equality and users with interests in these areas will appreciate both the organization's annual report (available from the homepage) and its country-by-country reports. One very well-developed interactive graphic feature is the development indicator section of the site. Here, visitors can view representations of such indicators as female adult literacy, deforestation, and fertility across the globe, along with discrete data from each country. Additionally, many of the materials offered here are available in Spanish as well."
Review by:
The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2005.
- Current issue of the Scout Report

Sources and resources - excellent collection from Social Watch --- 200 links to resources for NGOs.

Disclaimer/Privacy Statement

Both Canadian Social Research Links (the site) and this Canadian Social Research Newsletter belong solely to me, Gilles Séguin.

I am solely accountable for the choice of links presented therein and for the occasional editorial comment - it's my time, my home computer, my experience, my biases, my Rogers Internet account and my web hosting service.

I administer the mailing list and distribute the weekly newsletter using software on the web server of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).
Thanks, CUPE!

If you wish to subscribe to the e-mail version of newsletter, go to the Canadian Social Research Newsletter Online Subscription page and submit your coordinates:
http://lists.cupe.ca/mailman/listinfo/csrl-news

You can unsubscribe by going to the same page or by sending me an e-mail message [ gilseg@rogers.com ]

------------------------

The e-mail version of this newsletter is available only in plain text (no graphics, no hyperlinks, no fancy bolding or italics, etc.) to avoid security problems with government departments, universities and other networks with firewalls. The text-only version is also friendlier for people using older or lower-end technology.

Privacy Policy:
The Canadian Social Research Newsletter mailing list is not used for any purpose except to distribute each weekly issue.
I promise not share any information on this list, nor to send you any junk mail.

Links presented in the Canadian Social Research Newsletter point to different views about social policy and social programs.
There are some that I don't agree with, so don't get on my case, eh...

To access earlier online HTML issues of the Canadian Social Research Newsletter, go to the Newsletter page:
http://www.canadiansocialresearch.net/news.htm

Please feel free to distribute this newsletter as widely as you wish, but please remember to include a link back to the home page of Canadian Social Research Links.

Gilles

E-MAIL:
gilseg@rogers.com