Montreal – The Institute for Research on Public Policy is pleased to announce the appointment of Dan Gardner as editor of Policy Options, Canada’s premier public policy magazine.
Over a long career with the Ottawa Citizen, Gardner travelled all over Canada and the world, writing investigative feature stories on justice and human rights. Later, he became a national affairs columnist. His work at the Citizen garnered the top prizes in Canadian journalism, including the National Newspaper Award, the Michener Award Citation of Merit, the Canadian Association of Journalists Award and the Amnesty International Canada Media Award. He is also the best-selling author of Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear (2008), Future Babble (2010) and Superforecasting (forthcoming). His books have been published in 11 countries and translated into 7 languages.
“We are simply delighted to have someone of Dan’s calibre join the IRPP team to lead our flagship publication through the next phase in its development,” IRPP President Graham Fox said. “Policy Options has transitioned in recent years from a largely print product to a multi-platform forum for debate, and it is critically important to us that we continue to build on that momentum. Dan’s wide-ranging experience, as well as his curiosity, intellectual rigour and entrepreneurial spirit, make him the ideal leader to develop PO‘s full potential.”
As editor, Gardner will build on the magazine’s strong foundation and continue to lead its digital evolution. His appreciation of the country’s shared concerns – and its distinctions – will be reflected by an array of new voices in both official languages, from Canada and from outside Canada, to ensure Policy Options remains the premier forum for engaging policy discussion.
“I couldn’t be more excited. Public policies shape our lives, communities and nations,” Gardner said. “It will be a privilege to bring people together for such important conversations.”
Dan Gardner’s appointment is effective January 1, 2015.
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Policy Options is published six times per year by the Institute for Research on Public Policy. The IRPP is an independent, national, bilingual, not-for-profit think tank headquartered in Montreal. To receive updates from the Institute, please subscribe to our e-mail list.
Media Contact:    Shirley Cardenas   tel. 514-594-6877   scardenas@nullirpp.org
Montreal – Having led the print and digital transformation of Policy Options since 2012, editor Bruce Wallace is leaving the magazine to return to US-based journalism in January 2015. During his term as editor, Bruce successfully renewed the print magazine, expanding the array of voices in its pages and showing how photography and other visual tools can help convey public policy issues. Together with a strong team of colleagues, he developed a new Web platform that has positioned Policy Options as a leading forum for Canadian policy debates in the digital media age.
“We are sorry to see Bruce leave but understand his desire to return to the enterprise journalism upon which he built his career. We thank him for his tremendous contribution and wish him every success,” said Graham Fox, president of the IRPP. “Together, we achieved our goal of revitalizing and refreshing the magazine in print and online. Bruce leaves a much-improved Policy Options ready to be a player in the digital arena, where so much of our policy debate now occurs,” he continued.
“I am grateful to Graham and everyone at the IRPP for the opportunity and freedom they gave me to reimagine the magazine,” Wallace said. “We broadened the policy discussion to look at new topics, especially those raised by rapid technological change, and we have made Policy Options into a print and online magazine driven by ideas rather than events. I’m proud of what we accomplished, and I leave knowing that the magazine is well positioned to meet the challenges ahead.”
An announcement regarding the new editor will be made tomorrow.
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Policy Options is published 6 times per year by the Institute for Research on Public Policy. The IRPP is an independent, national, bilingual, not-for-profit think tank headquartered in Montreal. To receive updates from the Institute, please subscribe to our e-mail list.
Media Contact:    Shirley Cardenas   tel. 514-594-6877   scardenas@nullirpp.org
For immediate distribution – October 28, 2014
Montreal – As the government implements a wave of budget cuts, should its home-care strategy, to be announced this fall, rely more on families to ensure the needs of seniors are met? Should it expand the role of the private sector in long-term care? On November 6, the IRPP will bring together an experts panel to explore these and other questions on this topic.
Jean-Pierre Lavoie, adjunct professor at the School of Social Work at McGill University and UniversitĂ© du QuĂ©bec Ă MontrĂ©al, will discuss the recommendations in his recent IRPP study (written in collaboration with Nancy Guberman and Patrik Marier). Also on the panel will be Julie Miville-DechĂŞne, president of the Conseil du statut de la femme, and Martine Castonguay, founder of l’Organisation de l’habitation et de l’hĂ©bergement pour l’individu and former director general of the Association des ressources intermĂ©diaires d’hĂ©bergement du QuĂ©bec.
See https://irpp.org/2014/10/02/soins-de-longue-duree-au-quebec/ for more details about the webinar.
What:
“Où vont les soins de longue durée au Québec?”
When:
November 6, 2014
10:00 a.m. – 11:30 p.m. ET
Where:
Register now for the free webinar (in French only)
Media are invited to register.The panellists will be available for interviews. For more details, please contact the IRPP.
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The Institute for Research in Public Policy is an independent, national, nonprofit organization based in Montreal.
Media contact:   Shirley Cardenas   514-594-6877   scardenas@nullirpp.org
The unexpected and largely unreported good news about homecare in this country is that the vast majority of Canadians who receive home help or homecare for a chronic health condition are getting all the services they need.
According to a recently released Statistics Canada article, 2.2 million individuals representing 8 per cent of Canadians 15 years and older, received homecare in 2012. Most of these individuals – 1.8 million – consider that over a one-year period they received all the services they required (such as personal care, transportation or household maintenance) to help with their daily activities. Only a minority, approximately 15 per cent, said they had unmet homecare needs.
Fully meeting the needs of the vast majority of homecare recipients is a notable achievement for Canada considering this country has no national homecare system and considering that provinces, which have jurisdiction over homecare, are known for anemic budgetary expenditures in this area.
So how does Canada achieve so much with so little? The answer is a heavy reliance on informal, unpaid caregivers.
Informal caregivers consist mainly of spouses and adult children of persons with homecare needs, but may also include their other relatives, friends and neighbours. Women are more likely to be caregivers and to provide more care hours than men, and spouses are the first resort for care.
Together, 8.1 million informal caregivers provide an estimated 70 to 80 per cent of all homecare in this country, free of charge. Every year, they are saving the public purse an estimated $24- to $31-billion – no small amount. Thanks to their major contribution, formal services paid by taxpayers play only a subsidiary role in home help and homecare provision.
Paid providers from public healthcare agencies come into play when unpaid family care is not available or is insufficient, and when other options, volunteer or private, are not viable either.
So what’s the problem?
Unpaid caregivers typically want and prefer to provide the care to their loved ones rather than having formal care providers come into the home. But the role can be demanding.
According to a 2013 Statistics Canada report, nine in every 10 informal caregivers provides care for a year or more. One in every 10 provides 30 hours or more of care every week. One in five considers that caregiving impacts their physical and emotional health negatively. Many informal caregivers incur care-related out-of-pocket expenses, miss days at work, or have to reduce their paid work hours. Some even quit their job. For employers, this may translate to absenteeism and lost productivity.
A detailed analysis by the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) author Janice Keefe shows that only limited and inconsistent financial supports and in-kind services are available to informal caregivers. As a result, caregivers are left mostly on their own to deal with the negative – and sometimes catastrophic – economic, health and well-being consequences.
In other words, unpaid caregiving comes at a cost for the ones who provide it.
Then there’s the reality that not everyone has a network of friends and family they can call on who are able, capable or willing to handle sometimes complex care needs – in many cases the needs are required over long periods of time. In 2012, nearly 461,000 Canadians 15 years of age and older suffering from a chronic condition needed homecare but had none – formal or informal.
What happened to them as a result is left in part to our imagination. But evidence suggests some of the care gaps may well have resulted in individuals unnecessarily entering hospitals or being transferred to nursing homes instead – at a substantially higher cost to governments than formal homecare.
Many Canadians don’t realize that homecare services are not included in medicare, or that provinces are not required to provide support and often do so only sparingly. The problem will likely be exacerbated over the next two to three decades as the number of elderly Canadians needing assistance is expected to double. Demographic trends and changing patterns of participation in the labour force are such that a smaller cadre of adult children will be left to look after their aging parents.
Relying on unpaid caregivers left on their own is not a sustainable solution – and is likely to have serious consequences for Canada in the future. It’s time for governments to step up and care for our caregivers – and make homecare a priority.
Nicole Bernier is an advisor with EvidenceNetwork.ca and research director of the Faces of Aging program at the Institute for Research on Public Policy. This article also appeared in the Globe and Mail.
The reaction in Canada to the referendum in Scotland has been interesting to watch. Some have looked to the process as a model for us to follow should there ever be a third referendum in Quebec. Others have offered up the Canadian federation as a model for a future, federated United Kingdom. These arguments merit consideration, but they also serve to obscure a more fundamental lesson for us to draw from the Scottish experience.
The dynamics of the home stretch of the Scottish campaign probably hit too close to home for many political observers in Canada. As we watched pro-union leaders improvise a counteroffensive to a rising YES vote, and then watch the YES side improvise its response, it was almost impossible not to let our minds dart back to 1995. And while we should be careful not to make too many inferences as to what the Scottish vote means for Canada, one lesson stands out.
As the campaign rhetoric heated up, there was no reliable, independent policy research to act as a counterweight to some of the positions taken by leaders in both campaigns: costs of separation, impact on future economic growth, broad strokes of what a relationship between an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK would have looked like – to say nothing of EU membership. In case we had forgotten how fundamentally ill-prepared both sides were in the lead up to our own vote in 1995, author and journalist Chantal Hébert has vividly reminded us in her new book The Morning After that all of our leaders – YES and NO – had not a clue on what they would have done if 25,000 people had voted the other way on that fateful night.
Twenty years after that near-miss, those of us who are committed to a united Canada probably know less about how we should approach the next referendum than we did on the eve of engaging in the last one. There was a brief moment of collective panic last February when federalist opinion leaders were convinced then-Premier Marois had her majority in the bag and we realized we were unprepared for what might follow. But the day after the historic PQ defeat, too many of us quickly congratulated ourselves that the “other side” was on the mat, and decided we could therefore go back to addressing “real priorities.” To the proponents of that view, I ask: what priority could possibly be more real to a country than to seek to understand itself better?
Canada is changing. By almost every meaningful measure, we are not the same country we were a few decades ago. Our economy is more open to the world and draws its strengths from different regions and sectors. Our people are older, more diverse and more urban. Our provinces have a different relationship with Ottawa and with each other. All the while, many of our fundamental challenges remain the same. A founding partner in Confederation has yet to sign on to our country’s basic law, we continue to struggle with the aspirations of our regions, and fundamental issues concerning our Aboriginal peoples remain unresolved. We need to renew our approach to solving pan-Canadian problems, and the only thing we know for sure is that the ”˜old ways’ won’t get us there.
Precisely because the constitutional noise is dialed down almost to mute, now is the time to invest in rethinking federal arrangements and institutions, and better understanding public attitudes toward the federation. If Canadians want to make progress on Senate reform, relations with Aboriginal peoples, eliminating internal trade barriers, agreeing on a national approach to energy and climate change, recognizing the specificity of Quebec as a nation within a united Canada, or resolving any fiscal imbalance, we have to start by re-engaging on the basic research we stopped doing 20 years ago because of lack of budgets and political will.
To be prepared, governments across Canada have to declare today that understanding our country is a top priority. This is not about choosing, or not, to “open the constitution.” It is about making sure we know enough about ourselves and the country we share to be ready with meaningful answers when difficult questions come up. Fini, l’improvisation.
Let us not await the next crisis unprepared and in ignorance. We will find it is then too late for preparation and insight. Besides, if the project of Canada isn’t worth the investment, what is?
Graham Fox is president of the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP), a national, independent, nonpartisan think tank headquartered in Montreal. This article also appeared in National Newswatch.
Public debate on Quebec’s Bill 3 has focused almost entirely on whether the proposed changes to municipal pensions are “fair.” This doesn’t ask enough of the provincial government’s reform efforts.
Bill 3 should instead be judged on whether it will give municipal employees a pension system less prone to deficits and better able to manage the challenges posed by tight budgets and an aging populace. By this yardstick, Bill 3 doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Across Quebec, some 170 municipal pension plans together face a projected deficit of around $4 billion. To plug this hole, Bill 3 proposes three major changes to these generous pension plans: employee contributions will be increased, total pension costs will be capped at 18 per cent of any municipality’s payroll costs (split equally, up to 9 per cent/9 per cent, between employers and employees), and current retirees’ benefits will no longer be indexed to inflation. Future pension deficits will be shared between workers and employers.
Arguably, this puts too much pain on retirees who have limited options to replace the future income they would lose. It also asks retirees to share the burden of providing relatively generous pensions to future workers who have never bargained for these benefits.
A fairer Bill 3 would leave retirees untouched, ask current employees to pay more for their pensions and put their future colleagues on less costly plans.
A more robust Bill 3 would make Quebec’s municipal pension plans more durable through at least three major additional changes.
First, municipal pension plans should share the risk for future payouts more evenly between employees and their employers. Right now, municipal pensions provide “defined benefits”: they promise specific payouts to retirees while employers have to make up any shortfalls if employee contributions and investment returns prove inadequate to cover pension costs.
For this reason many employers in the private sector have moved to “defined contribution” plans, where workers pay in specific amounts without any guarantee of how much they will receive in retirement. All of the risk is on their shoulders.
A “target-benefit” system offers a better alternative. Under this model, a core pension benefit would be guaranteed, with additional benefits tied to investment returns. This would give workers some future security while also reducing risks for municipal employers.
By splitting the burden of future deficits between employers and workers, Bill 3 is already pointing Quebec’s municipal pensions toward a target-benefit design. The provincial government should simply adopt this system now.
Second, Quebec’s municipal pension funds should be pooled together for more effective management. At present, pension contributions get invested by individual employers, but few – if any – municipalities have the capacity and fund size needed to allocate these monies effectively. As a result, returns may be lower and costs may be higher than they could be otherwise.
West of Quebec, most provinces pool their municipal pensions under a single manager: think of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS), one of the world’s biggest and most influential sovereign wealth funds. By bringing many plans together, they attract better management talent, expand the range of assets in which they can invest, reduce risks, and cut costs.
Quebec pioneered pooled management of provincial employee pensions with the creation of the Caisse de dĂ©pĂ´t et placement in 1965, but few municipal pension funds take advantage of its scale and expertise. Admittedly, the Caisse’s size didn’t prevent it from suffering major losses at the outset of the recent financial crisis. But the Caisse doesn’t invest like a typical pension fund: it’s mandated both to earn the highest possible returns and to invest to support Quebec’s economic development.
This points to the third major reform missing from the current debate: The Caisse should be unchained from its dual mandate, and allowed to focus exclusively on maximizing yields for its pensioners. This would create a greater incentive for municipal pension plans to use its services.
Bill 3 can be made fairer. But more important, it can also be made much more effective at safeguarding Quebec’s municipal pensions for years to come.
Brett House is senior fellow at the Jeanne Sauvé Foundation at McGill and the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Tyler Meredith is research director at the Institute for Research on Public Policy. This article also appeared in Montreal Gazette.
