Ontario Alternative Budget

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A new Ontario Alternative Budget Technical Paper, Close Encounters of the Thirties Kind, by social policy expert John Stapleton, provides a blow-by-blow account of the similarities between Ontario circa 1930s and today. Stapleton finds 11 similarities between the Great Depression and the Crash of 2008 and calls on senior governments to take the lessons of the 1930s and act swiftly to minimize Ontario’s current recession.
Ontario’s 2009-10 budget is a substantial, complex budget.
TORONTO – Without government action, the lack of adequate income security programs could plunge Ontarians suffering the worst of the current recession into dire straits, says a report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). Silence of the Lines: Poverty Reduction Strategies and the Crash of 2008 shows how the economic downturn is already worse than the Great Depression but predicts different results for Ontarians who end up down on their luck.
TORONTO – Ontario taxpayers could be saddled with $585 million in higher costs due to the provincial government’s decision to let private sector bidders oversee 14 hospital projects, says a study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) and the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO). The study examines the province’s claim that alternative financing and procurement (AFP) deals with the private sector, will save the public purse $341 million. The study concludes that this prediction is, at best, optimistic.
Toronto-based social policy analyst John Stapleton teaches us a valuable history lesson with his new piece The Last Recession Spook, released by the CCPA as part of its Ontario Alternative Budget technical paper series. This paper looks at the history of public investments during economic downturns and finds the ghost of the last recession (in the 1990s) still haunts Canadians, limiting our thinking of what’s possible to modest terms.