When the federal budget was presented in April, many people with disabilities and organizations who assist them were looking forward to announcements surrounding the Canada Disability Benefit. The legislation that set the framework for the Canada Disability Benefit, C-22, passed with unanimous support in the House of Commons a year and a half ago, and received Royal Assent a year ago, making it law.  People with disabilities and their advocates had been waiting for quite a long time to see...

Intimate partner violence remains a shameful and under-discussed issue in Canada. According to Statistics Canada, between 2009 and 2022, 18 per cent of solved homicide victims were killed by an intimate partner. This is also a problem that disproportionately harms women, with 46 percent of solved homicides of women and girls being perpetrated by an intimate partner (men killed in solved homicides by an intimate partner is a still significant, but much lower rate of six percent.) The rate of...

A few weeks ago, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food (AGRI) published a report titled A Call to Action: How Government and Industry Can Fight Back Against Food Price Volatility. The report is obviously a reaction to the astounding increase in food prices over the course of the past few years and propose ten significant recommendations following lots of witness testimony on how we can bring prices down. The report comes as many Canadians are justifiably reaching...

Canada Day is once again just around the corner, and it means something a little different for everyone. Of course, it’s our national holiday, a day to remember Confederation and the building of our nation. It’s a day we remind ourselves of our collective past and our shared future of this place we call home. It’s a celebration of the red and white of our maple leaf, and the values of freedom and democracy. It’s all of these grand things, but Canada Day can also be small...

In her mandate letter, the Minister of Indigenous Services was tasked with the goal of working “…to eliminate all remaining long-term drinking water advisories, and closing the infrastructure gap by 2030, with a focus on building sustainable and affordable housing.” This is a laudable goal, but what exactly is the infrastructure gap felt by First Nations, what is required to achieve the goal of closing this gap, and is the government actually moving towards achieving this...

Last week, the House of Commons Procedure and House Affairs Committee (PROC) began reviewing the House’s policy on workplace harassment and violence prevention. This, in years’ past, would register as an innocuous meeting not worthy of generating even a small story in the back of a paper or deep in a website. That’s not what happened, as the PROC Committee heard witness after witness, frequently MPs, recount in excruciating detail the extreme level of harassment, threats of...

To say that a significant portion of Canadians are getting fed up with Loblaws’ chain of grocery stores is, at this point, underselling customers’ frustrations with the grocery giant. According to Statistics Canada, grocery prices have risen by 21.4 percent over the past three years, a painful rise that salaries haven’t come close to keeping up with. While Loblaws maintains they had no choice but to raise prices to astronomical levels for consumers, another “no...

This week, Policy Horizons Canada, a think tank that explores trends to examine potential challenges future Canadians and governments may need to contend with, released a report titled Disruptions on the Horizons. It’s an interesting document that tasked over 500 separate stakeholders with describing what they believe to be the most likely to reshape or challenge the Canadian way of life. It’s a fascinating thought experiment that lays out the major issues we will likely need to...

This year marks the 42nd anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms being signed. The Charter forms an enormous part of our Constitution, and carries with it the fundamental guarantees of our freedoms, including the freedom of association, expression, & religion, and of our rights, including equality, mobility, & legal rights that form much of the backbone of our judicial system. The Charter is as fundamental to the Canadian way of life as the maple leaf, so much so...