Futureproofing Canada

The conversation surrounding the COVID-19 recovery has been almost entirely centred on the economy. Governments have allocated countless resources to protecting people from economic hardship and keeping businesses afloat. But there is one aspect of Canada’s recovery that has received little attention from policy-makers: How do we heal people and cities, so that when we “build back better” we are building a society that includes and works for everyone? This type of healing does not require a vaccine. It requires a rethink of who we are and how our cities operate. The pandemic did not create the issues that dominate the news cycle, such as racism, sexism and the repression of marginalized voices, but it did make these issues much more prevalent in everyday life. This week’s podcast guest is Jay Pitter. An award-winning place-maker and author, she works in her practice to mitigate the growing divide in cities across North America. She will be discussing marginalized and underrepresented groups, their experience during the pandemic, and what policy-makers can do to truly build back better.

En dépit de nombreux rapports qui préconisent depuis plus de 20 ans une réforme majeure des soins de longue durée au Québec, aucun gouvernement n’est véritablement passé à l’action. L’indignation en réaction aux défaillances systémiques révélées par la pandémie entraînera-t-elle un véritable changement ? Quelles politiques faut-il prioriser pour lancer une réforme en profondeur qui produirait des résultats probants ? Le balado de cette semaine est l’enregistrement d'un webinaire que l’IRPP a tenu le 3 juin 2021. Il portait sur les problèmes du système de soins de longue durée qui doivent être abordés dans le Québec post-pandémique. Réjean Hébert, Marie-Louise Leroux et Yves Couturier étaient les invités de cette rencontre animée par Charles Breton, directeur du Centre d'excellence sur la fédération canadienne de l'IRPP.

COVID-19 has shaken the Canadian labour market to its core, and it has revealed that our Employment Insurance system is not well equipped to handle a major disruption to the economy. In the first half of 2020, roughly 2.4 million Canadians were laid off or had permanently lost their jobs. By January 2021, roughly 511,000 individuals had been unemployed for more than six months. In response to these unprecedented unemployment numbers, the federal government created a patchwork of emergency response benefits to cover the gaps in the EI system. Now, as vaccinations go out across the country and the economy reopens, people will need to get back to work. EI could provide a stepping stone, but will the current system get people back to full-time employment? A new IRPP study argues that the system could be improved by redesigning the working-while-on-claim provisions, which allow claimants to take part-time or casual jobs and still keep a portion of their EI benefits. The authors of the study, IRPP Research Director Colin Busby, Stephanie Lluis, professor of economics at the University of Waterloo, and Brian P. McCall, professor of education, economics and public policy at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, join us on the podcast to discuss their research.

The story of western alienation runs parallel to the story of Canada. Both stories have their roots in 1867, when a country was born out of the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. At the time those two provinces were leaders in business and population numbers. But in the western part of the country, a different story was started – one of alienation – that would lead to the creation of modern-day political parties and calls for separation from the rest of Canada. Despite attempts by successive governments to reduce it, western alienation persists, and while it may seem that current political issues are driving these feelings, the root cause remains in 1867. The current political debates around big issues like energy or the environment, and other issues such as equalization payments, are manifestations of long-lasting grievances in the west dating to the founding of the country. Canada’s original sin ─ building the country on the foundation of the eastern provinces ─ persists. To discuss these issues, this week’s guest is Loleen Berdahl, professor and head of political studies at the University of Saskatchewan. She has been studying western alienation and how it fits into the context of pan-Canadian regional conflict for two decades. Her recent essay for the IRPP’s Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation delves into the origins of western alienation and recommends ways to tackle it.

COVID-19 has been one of the largest disruptions in the Canadian labour market in the country’s history. Not only were some sectors like tourism nearly decimated, the economy as a whole took a hit - making it extraordinarily difficult for laid-off Canadians to find jobs that they could easily transfer their skills to. Retraining workers who have lost their jobs so that they can successfully transition into a new field has been an elusive goal for governments. This is partly because skills retraining is a difficult to sector to navigate for policy-makers, but also because studies have shown mixed results in the benefits and drawbacks of this training, which has shaken the public’s confidence in whether or not it’s an economically viable solution. But given the pandemic’s toll on our labour market, it is time for governments to start taking a serious look at skills training, and to develop a functional system so that workers can find not just any job, but the right job for them. Kelly Pasolli, along with Karen Myers and Simon Harding of Blueprint, conducted a study for the IRPP that examined previous research on skills training to find what worked and what didn’t. Through this research, they found two promising systems that Canadian workers could benefit from. For this episode of the Policy Options Podcast, we speak with Kelly Pasolli about these systems, and what Canadian governments need to do to successfully retrain under- or unemployed workers for the post-pandemic future.

Canada has vaccinated nearly 40 per cent of its citizens, an important milestone in the fight against COVID-19. But underlying this success is a concerning aspect of the global vaccine rollout: wealthy countries like Canada have taken the lion’s share of vaccines – 87 per cent, leaving medium- and low-income countries with just 0.2 per cent of the vaccine supply. Not only is this a moral concern, with the pandemic ravaging medium- and low-income countries that may struggle with increased health-care demands, it’s also a health concern as new variants emerge from the hardest-hit areas. But there is a plan to correct this, and Canada has an opportunity to support it: COVAX, a program designed in early 2020 with the hopes of distributing vaccines globally and equitably. Today’s guests are Annie Bodmer-Roy, the director of international policy and programs at UNICEF Canada, and Srinivas Murthy, a clinical professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of British Columbia and a consultant with the World Health Organization. They will be speaking about the global inequality in vaccine distribution, and how Canada can support COVAX in its goals.

On April 19, 2021, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland presented the first federal budget in two years. Among the many new and updated policies, one stood out especially – the promise of affordable universal childcare for all Canadians. Universal child care had been promised in the past and never come to fruition, not for lack of political will or public support, but rather because it is such a difficult policy to enact. One place in Canada, however, already has universal, affordable child care: Quebec. The federal government plans on taking this model of child care and replicating it in every province and territory. But this system is not perfect, and the government needs to be careful not to make the same mistakes that Quebec has made while creating this policy. This week we are joined by Sophie Mathieu and Gordon Cleveland to speak about the Quebec model of child care, and how this policy will be enacted across the country. Sophie Mathieu is a postdoctoral researcher at Université TÉLUQ in Quebec City, with a focus on family policy in Quebec. She holds a PhD in sociology. Gordon Cleveland is emeritus associate professor of economics at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and a member of the Expert Panel on Early Learning and Child Care Data and Research. He is also president of Cleveland Consulting: Early Childhood Education and Care Inc.

This special episode of the Policy Options Podcast is a recording of our recent webinar on the 2021 federal budget. The webinar can also be found online at IRPP.org, or on YouTube. This budget came with high expectations. Public debate around such issues as reforming long-term care, helping displaced workers transition back into the labour force, righting the impact of the “she-cession,” and the relative powers of the provinces, had Canadians wondering which sectors would see funding. On April 20, 2021, the day after the tabling of the federal budget, our panel of experts held an in-depth conversation around the key policy issues critical to Canada’s post-pandemic recovery.

In March 2020, Canada saw a major “office-drain,” as office workers made the sudden switch to working from home. Most were told that this would be a temporary solution to the social distancing orders and lockdown measures put in place to lower the spread of COVID-19. But just a few weeks later, COVID-19 was named a full-blown pandemic, and talk of returning to the workplace became less and less hopeful. Now, over one year later, a majority of Canadian office workers are still working from home, and there is still no timeline for a safe return to work. Our guest this week is Jean-Nicolas Reyt. Reyt is an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at McGill University, and has studied work-from-home since 2010. Over the past year, he has had a rare opportunity for a researcher: the chance to see his theories play out in the real world. Reyt has used “earnings calls” – calls made by CEOs to their investors – to track how Canadian and U.S. executives have been talking about working from home, how their perceptions of this style of work have changed, and what is and isn’t working. In this episode, he shares his insights about how far we’ve come, and how much farther we have to go.

Indigenous treaties are enormously significant for both First Nations groups and Canada. These treaties are constitutionally recognized agreements that lay out the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and Canada, where Yukon is a leader in treaty-making. Out of the 14 Indigenous groups that live in the territory, 11 hold signed treaties with the government. But there is a disconnect between the generation of leaders who originally negotiated these treaties, and the youth, young people between 16 and 30, who are now taking the reins of governance. These individuals did not grow up under the Indian Act, and were not there to witness the negotiations in person. Our guests for this episode of the podcast are Gabrielle A. Slowey and Geri-Lee Buyck. Gabrielle A. Slowey is a professor in the Department of Politics the director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University, and has worked with Indigenous groups in Yukon to train youth to negotiate and implement treaties. Her new paper, published by the IRPP’s Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation, describes her work with communities to develop a treaty negotiation simulation, where young people can learn from the elders and experts who negotiated the original treaties. Geri-Lee Buyck is an Indigenous youth from the Na-Cho Nyuk Dun First Nation. Buyck is a first-year student at Vancouver Island University, and took part in one of these simulations