Does school fundraising worsen inequality in Toronto elementary schools in terms of academic outcomes? Many parents fear as much. Despite those fears, my research shows, there is no strong link between academic results in Toronto elementary schools and their private fundraising prowess.
Schools report the amount of external funds raised to the Toronto District School Board, and in some cases it is a large amount of money. In a recent study for the C.D. Howe Institute, Huijie Guo and I investigated the link between school academic results and the amount of funds raised.
The bottom line is that external funds raised by schools do not translate into…
As a Nobel Laureate once said, “The times they are a-changin’.”
The global trading system has been thrown into disarray with Donald Trump’s election and his clear disdain for international trade commitments – or, put another way, his stridently protectionist policies designed, he says, to make America great again.
This amounts to a decisive turnaround from the leadership role U.S. administrations have played since formulating the Bretton Woods agreements of 1947-48. Those American-led efforts produced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and ultimately the WTO Agreement of 1994, with the United States leading and cajoling other governments to agree to an orderly international trading system based on widely, if…
As of now, it looks like there will be no new health accord between the federal and provincial/territorial governments in the immediate future. It would be a pity if this means no reallocation of aggregate healthcare spending toward home care and mental health programs, two areas where additional spending could greatly benefit patients. Barring this, however, the failure to agree on a new accord is better than a repeat of the 2004 agreement and could ultimately lead to a better alignment of responsibilities in Canadian healthcare.
The federal government’s willingness to help provinces pay for healthcare helped establish Canada’s universal Medicare system in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Half a century later, however, our model of divided…
