OECD and Health Care: Canada’s $4.8 trillion national net worth

Canada’s health care system is similar to most members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The only OECD members who do not have a public health system on par with other members are the USA and Mexico. In spite of that the United States continues to pay a higher percentage of its GNP to its health care system than Canada [1].

Canadians view its medicare system as “a moral enterprise, not a business venture (Romanow 2002:21)” and they overwhelmingly support the tenets of the Canada Health Act which states that need not money determines access to health care. “Canada’s Medicare system since its inception in 1966 has become one of the “most fully socialized health care systems.” In the 1960s medical systems in Canada and the US were similar. Medicare was a$100 billion enterprise in 2002, one of our Canada’s’s largest expenditures (Romanow2002:20). However, this amounts to a smaller percentage of Canada’s national net worth which was $4.8 trillion as of December 2006 (StatisticsCanada 2006) than that of in 1992. Commissioner Ray Romanow’s mandate in 2001 was to “review medicare and engage Canadians in a national dialogue on its future”(Romanow 2002:6). This was accomplished through an 18-month investigation resulting in a report that was evidence-based and values-driven making recommendations to strengthen and improve medicare’s quality and sustainability making it more truly national, more comprehensive, responsive and accountable (Romanow2002:6).” In the 1970s pharmaceutical costs accounted for a small percentage of total medicare costs. By 2002 they were among the highest costs in the systemand they continue to rise. The report did not confirm claims that user fees, medical savings accounts, de-listing services, greater privatization, a parallelprivate system, as proposed by the leaner goverment lobbyists, were the cure for the medicare system (Romanow2002:21).

More surgeries, treatments and tests are being performed, but demands often outstrip their ability to deliver the necessary services on a timely basis. As a participant in the Commission’s “Policy Dialogue on Access”at Dalhousie University put it, long waiting times are not caused by the system performing fewer diagnostic and surgical procedures but because medical advances now allow us to deliver more of these services and to a wider range of people (Romanow 2002:192)

Public and private sector care providers (including fee-for-service doctors) have been part of our health care system since the inception of medicare in Canada.

Whereas in the 1970s medicare costs consisted mainly of physican fees and hospital expenditures (Romanow2002), currently the cost of pharmaceutical expenditures is the most rapidly increasing part of medicare (Lexchin 2007). In his recent Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report Lexchin (2007) reveals how the cost of pharmaceuticals accounted for $18.5 billion in 2004 and $20.6 billion in 2005. Spending on physicians was c. $18 billion in 2005. It is crucial to note that shareholders in pharmaceuticals enjoyed substantially greater returns than shareholders (20.1% in 2003; 23.5% in 1996) in other forms of manufacturing (10.8% in 2003 and 12.2 % in 1996) in Canada.[2] Canada, Mexico and the United States do not have as comprehensive public plans for pharmaceuticals as do other OECD countries where the greatest expenditures on pharmaceuticals come from the public purse. OECD governments have more control over amounts spent on pharmaceuticals.

A List of Acronyms

CCPACanadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

CIHI Canadian Institute for Health Information

OECD Organisation for EconomicCo-operation and Development

PMPRB Patented Medicine Prices Review Board a part of Health Canada, sets an upper limit on how much companies can charge
for new patented medications.

Footnotes

---

[1] The US spent more on administrative costs. They also spent more per person $2548 (US) compared to $1886 (US) in Canada. See http://www3.who.int/whosis/core/core_select_process.cfm

[2] Given that pension plans returns are based on the strength of investment portfolios we find ourselves in 2006 with a moral dilemma. How do we ensure the future of pension plans with a healthy investment portfolio while calling for ethical management of that same portfolio?

Selected Bibliography

Lexchin, Joel. 2007.”CanadianDrug Prices and Expenditures: Some statistical observations and policyimplications.” Ottawa, ON:CanadianCentre for Policy Alternatives. ISBN 978-0-88627-520-4.

OECD health data 2004.

Romanow, Ray. 2002.Buildingon Values: The Future of Health Care in Canada –Final Report. ISBN0-662-33043-9.

Making the grade: the role of the Fraser Institute in deciding your school’s future

Philip H. Winne, Nesbit, John C., Gress, Carmen L. Z. 2006. “Cautions about Rating BC’s Schools.” Faculty of Education. Simon Fraser University. 2006-10-31 15:44

The Issue: This is the second year The Vancouver Sun has published a special section on the academic effectiveness of BC’s elementary schools as rated by the Fraser Institute. We’re told the Institute’s ratings of elementary schools, as well as the report it released in April rating econdary schools, are widely discussed. Reportedly, families consult them when buying homes in hope of boosting educational opportunities for their children. Although it doesn’t happen in BC, in the U.S., some jurisdictions use ratings like these, along with other information, to decide how much funding schools receive.

It’s worth keeping in mind the Institute’s rating of a school is not the same thing as what students know or how competent teachers are or how effective schools are. Focusing on students, there’s more to what they know than any one rating can reveal. As well, there is evidence that ratings like these are related to socioeconomic status and wealth. For example, see Selcuk Sirin’s award winning article, “Socioeconomic status and academic achievement: A Meta-analytic review of research 1990-2000”, published in the Review of Educational Research in 2005, and the 2006 Statistics Canada study, “Income and the Outcomes of Children,” by Shelley Phipps and Lynn Lethbridge, respectively. When important decisions are at stake, it’s important to understand what these kinds of ratings are and what limits they have.

The Institute poses a very worthwhile question: “In general, how is the school doing academically?” To answer it, they calculate a rating from 0 to 10 points for each elementary and secondary school that enrolls at least 15 students. Our answer to this question would take a book.

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007.“Think Tanks: Corporate Director Board Interlocks: Fraser Institute.”

Nishnawbe Aski Nation’s editorial in $55B diamond industry’s Rapaport News

Moratorium on what some call Canadian ‘Blood Diamonds’? De Beers Canada benefit from government stalling tactics on land claims to extract valuable raw resources leaving behind environmental devastation. Many of the 45,000 Cree and Ojibwa in NAN region live in fourth world conditions in post-RCAP Canada. How many more NAN youth will choose suicide? Let’s not forget Nishnawbe Aski Nation’s Kash’s still unsolved water problem.
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For more reading check out my Customized Search Engine on Nishnawbe Aski Nation on Swicki

Neither Left nor Right, just wrong: Canadian Public Policy stalling tactics

Benign colonialism for dummies: how to impress OECD while Canada’s First People live in Brazil-like favela. Canadian Public Policy research has been usefully challenged by seasoned journalist Atkinson Fellow Marie Wadden’s recent series which continues her research begun in 1978 in response to the hidden horrors of Canada’s Innu town, Davis Inlet. The True North strong and free has been limping for a long time.

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Neither Left nor Right, just wrong

Decades later, Wadden concerned about the elusive solutions for problems of addiction in Canadian Aboriginal continues her research by visiting remote communities to find stories that will unsettle Canadian complacent apathy, compassion fatigue and worldly-wise jaded perspectives. We just do not want to give up the adventure stories that inspired our youth of Arctic explorers in frozen, isolated, hinterland Hudson Bay posts. Perhaps her shocking series will shake our stubborn pryde in our grandfathers’ mythologies while shamefully neglecting tragic tales from our Other grandparents.
Her passion for the subject earned her the 2005 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy and led her to a year-long, cross-country trek to look at the causes, effects and potential solutions to the addiction crisis among Aboriginals. Her series of stories — Tragedy or Triumph; Canadian Public Policy and Aboriginal Addictions — is appearing in the Star and online at thestar.com/atkinson. Wadden began her career at CBC television in Newfoundland 27 years ago and has won numerous journalism awards. The St. John’s resident is the 17th winner of the Atkinson Fellowship and the first from east of Montreal. The fellowship, sponsored by The Atkinson Charitable Foundation, the Toronto Star and the Beland Honderich family, aims to further liberal journalism in the tradition of Joseph E. Atkinson, the Star’s founder. The Atkinson Series, Tragedy or Triumph, Canadian Public Policy and Aboriginal Addictions

Seven years in a Third World military dictatorship did not prepare me for the harsh reality of the everyday lives of Canadian Inuit and First Nations. I felt shame, powerlessness and confusion stemming from years of work as insider in cultural institutions devoted to Inuit studies. It took me ten years to build heightened levels of trust so all the stories pored out. The more I learned and accepted without offering bandaid solutions, patent excuses, weak explanations or high-haded social theories, the more stories seemed to come to me. It was as if I had a pair of antennas, an open channel to a stream of unending stories each one corraborating the other. The more I learned the more I questioned so I paralleled the kitchen table accounts with deep research into footnotes of published materials, Hansards, and cross-disciplinary work. I asked more specific questions of Inuit elders and the knowers in communities. (The knowers were often Inuit women of any age who had been chosen to learn more because of their superior abilities to learn languages. Their emotional maturity, discretion and wisdom was daunting. Often stories were shared in whispers. I would never get permission to share them. Potent stories of individual personal strength, survival could not be shared because the surviving members of the perpetrators of violence and injustice were still alive. In small isolated hamlets there are systems of power in everyday life that are as imposing as those on parliament hill. This explains why a convicted sex offender can be chosen to represent a community (where family violence is extremely high — off the charts in terms of the Canadian average) in the political arena. In Third World countries there is always the hope that education and maturity, in civil society and democracy, might provide improved access to human rights for citizens. My despair, my overwhelming sense of hopelessness, became consuming as I realized that this tragedy was taking place in one of the more advanced democracies with a relatively informed civil society. I began to meticulously develop a detailed timeline of the social histories of First Nations, Inuit (and African-Canadians). I would take the stories shared by friends and students and cross-reference them with dates provided by classical ethnographers, anthropologists, art historians, museologists, geographers, geologists, administrators and Hudson Bay Company reports. I reread the entire series of Inuit Studies, Inuit Art Quarterly and realized that it was not bad research on my part that made me so shamefully unaware. The very cultural institutions on whom we depend for insight into our shared communal memories, these institutions have failed us miserably. They continue to perpetrate distorted histories insisting covertly on presenting a benign colonialism. Examine the brilliant RCAP, the most in-depth (and expensive) report, undertaken using a progressive research methodology called Participatory Action Research (PAR). It’s on-line and available for anyone! Read the section on how our institutions of public curricula were specifically called upon to reexamine distorted histories in collaboration with Inuit and First Nations communties. The do as I did and examine what these institutions have done since then. A tourist visiting Canada’s cultural institutions, either virtually or in glass, steel and stone buildings, such as the National Gallery of Canada or the Museum of Civilization, or exploring Cybermuse, will not learn of the depth of despair of First Nations and Inuit communties. They will leave perhaps learning something of the heroic status of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Inuit art cooperatives, the benefits to Inuit of entering the international art market, the exquisite aesthetics of Inuit clothing from the pre-1950s, Inuit legends shortened and deformed for consumer tastes. They will learn about the dynamic Inuit culture as if the best of the culture sank with the Nascopie. Explorers and Hudson Bay Company employees are heroized when their work should now be reviewed through the lens of the informed, intelligent generation born in the 1930s and 1940s. Remove the overt desire to portray colonialism in Canada’s north as benign, to continue to cherish histories of post WWII heroism of southerners who conquered the hinterland to benefit all Canadians. Challenge the assumptions that learning English, the market system and the northern form of Canadian democracy was beneficial in the long-run. Unsettle the assumption that the errors were in the past and we should all move on. The litany of mistakes outlined in this brilliant, moving, informed series can be complemented by a thorough reading of one of Canads’ most-difficult-to-read stories, Mistakes. Let’s ask the communal archives of memory for the answers to the questions about what really happened to Inuit-Scottish, Inuit-Danish and Inuit-Icelandic children abandoned in the 1930s, 1940, 1950s, 1960s by their fathers who returned south and built profitable careers on their heroism, adventures in Canada’s north while ignoring pleas from their former partners, and even own children abandoned to the care of small vulnerable hamlets. We no longer accept that the genetic pool of the Scottish, British, American, Danish and Icelandic improved Inuit and First Nations do we? How can we continue in 2006 to lionize those who felt pryde in their improvement of the gene pool? Is there no way that we can honour our blue eyed grandfathers without simply forgetting. We need serious, committed memory work on the level of what has been done in Post WWII Europe. The situations are in no way the same. But the revamping of our institutions of communal memory is just taking too long. In Post WWII Europe it became evident over the decades that it could not be ignored by national cultural institutions. In Canada it has been politically shrewd to use delaying tactics in our museums just as we have in land claims issues, and the dozens of other recommendations of the RCAP. Read the most recent articles by Canada’s anthropologist and you will find apologies for these institions arguing that great progress has been made. After al we do have an Algonquin canoe floating silently in the Group of Seven section of the National Gallery of Canada. Silently is the word. Speak to renowned Algonquin elder William Commanda and put his voice through a loud speaker in those galleries. Listen to him describe the starvation when tourism trade grew as southerners flocked north to enjoy the Canadian Shield. Hear his gentle, firm voice as he describes in elaborate detail how he built canoes to stave off starvation as the First Nations communities were denied access to their fishing camps which had become the land of the tourists. He speaks without rage. His voice is still powerfully spiritual. He calls for a freeing of the rivers from the damage of the dams. In the room devoted to Canadian art of the 1950s install a Stan Douglas type piece where the voices of Inuit and First Nations whose lives were irrevocably changed by the one of the worst incidence of TB on the planet speak of their grandfathers, camp leaders, fathers, the hunters, trappers and fishers buried in unmarked graves near Moose Factory’s sanitorium.

In the National Gallery of Canada’s Inuit Art section (in the basement) remind visitors that the artists whose works continue to be revered, have suffered starvation in Canada in the 1940s and 1950s, have succumbed to alcoholism, and drugs, that they have met violent deaths through suicides, murders, or in preventable house fires. How many Canadians know the other stories connected to Inuit women artists who made history when they were honoured with the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest award or the Royal Canadian Academy? One died alone in a hospital near Montreal in the 1980s, so depressed because of her linguistic isolation (she could only speak Inuktitut) that she gave away her ulu, the woman’s knife so affectionately mentioned in articles about Inuit art. Another was confused at one time when nortern officials refused food to her family during the peoriod of starvation in the 1950s. What about Canada’s most widely admired Inuit artist whose works are honoured internationally who was now ill, forced to live on city streets and was so badly beaten by police he carried a lump on his forehead for weeks. They and/or their families still live in houses where the entire contents of their fridges are a plastic bottle of ketchup and mustard. The have developed diabetes. A few have become violent and abusive. So many Inuit artists are in the Baffin Correction Centre at any given time that local people suggest a visit as part of the itinerary for Iqaluit, Nunavut’s art scene. Then let’s see some footage of the renowned Inuit elder and activist, as he describes through his son, artist and interpretor, his trip to New York or his interpretation of one of his carvings. Let’s hear him sing with tears in his eyes, the song he wrote for the homeless man on the streets of New York. Where is the strong articulate voice of Sheila Watt-Cloutier in any contemporary site claiming to represent to Inuit culture? If you do not know this name you should. She has made history. What about Paul Okalik, Peter Erniq. These are names all Canadians should know. Let’s begin with something simple: honest, inclusive timelines. Let’s contextualize stories about Inuit culture. Stop funding Inuit studies unless there is a critical component that examines issues, not as tidy sanitized disciplines that claim to be protecting Inuit art and culture from the sordid truths of everyday life. Inuit art and culture are dynamic, alive, robust. The Inuit art and culture market will survive but perhaps not by continuing to enrich southerers or those who live decades in the north, return to the south and continue to become enriched on their insider knowledge. If Inuit benefited fully from their own art production in a sustainable, equitable fashion there would be far less need of so much government intervention. There is more percapita talent in the tiny hamlet of Clyde River waiting for a venue than there is many southern cities. There is also far more youth suicide, violence against women and despair.

Footnotes:

The private Atkinson Foundation, founded in 1942 by former publisher of The Toronto Star, promotes social and economic justice in the tradition Joseph E. Atkinson. This includes the work of Armine Yalnizyan, (2000), “Inequality Rises As More Families Slide To The Bottom Of The Income Scale: Tax cuts don’t address economic reality says new report,” Centre of Social Justice, January 27, 2000 http://www.atkinsonfoundation.ca/publications/The_Great_Divide_Armine_
Yallnizyan.htm

Finally Canadian university students use the law to assert their rights

Students sue for more Teaching Assistants (TAs). Professor-as-stars-on-stage perform to ‘classes’ of 1200 students who pay c.$400 to 650 each a term per course! Not enough Teaching Assistants since PhD students (TA stable) are now forced into subsidizing universities as their sessional lecturers. No wonder PhD students have high rates of attrition.

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At any rate, universities have the best lawyers and their backs are covered. It is ill-advised for a solitary student to take on a huge administration. These undergrad students however are unsettling something else. They are using their status as clients which was conferred upon them by the business model that our cultural and educational institutions have adopted since the 1990s deficit-panic. These are not just irate PhDs. These are a broad-based clientele pool. Bad images carried in the media have an economic impact. Wait until Macleans add this variable in their analysis of universities. “How many times have students submitted law suits against your institution in the last academic year?” How many times was in carried in mass media? Whose lawyers won?” In the end, does it matter? Once the legal question is raised in cyberspace, bright student lawyers fresh out of a frustrating BA experience might enjoy the challenge and find an original legal angle to protect students from their own universities. These are the new generation of students brought up feeling entitled. They are students-as-clients. Maybe they can fare better than previous generations whose education suffered, student debts soared during the 1990s. Maybe this generation will find legal ways to assert their rights so they can sustainably survive their university studies and even manage to have a life after university where their debt load does not get in the way of relationships, marriage, decisions to have children, own their own homes, etc. Any one born in the 1940s or 1950s who went to university in the late 1960s and 1970s in Canada got their BAs if not MAs with the government of Canada’s generous student loan program. These are the people now administering, teaching in our cultural and educational institutions. They are also in policy research, public policy decision-makers.

My own PhD became unsustainable as there was never enough time to at the same time fulfill the overwhelming obligations that come with sessional lecturing, my own PhD research, writing, conference presentations, publications while learning to navigate through the unexpected twists and turns in the politics of academia. I had enrolled as part-time student who intended to remain part-time. For two years I benefited from an Ontario Graduate Scholarship. But after following the ill-pondered advice of my Department’s Graduate Student Advisor, I took on a huge challenge, an exciting opportunity in Iqaluit, Nunavut which ended up stretching out over 18 months. I lived there in Canada’s coldest climate for weeks on end, sometimes for up to four months at a time. It was a huge sacrifice in terms of my family in the south, but it was fulfilling as well. The advisor had convinced me that I should remain enrolled as a full-time student so I would not lose my scholarship.

Within weeks of returning from Nunavut my laptop with 18 months of images files, audio files, research, teaching materials and data was confiscated. I had to plead to be given a week to purchase a new PC and transfer files carefully to make sure nothing was lost. I tried to burn CDs of everything I had done but I know some really valuable email correspondence with students was gone.

The real shock came later when I was informed that I had lost my Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Apparently while I was in the North working on Carleton University’s pilot project, I had not kept up with my Comprehensive exams in the time frame they anticipated for a scholarship student. At my meeting with the new Graduate Studies Coordinator I was informed that I was no longer a desirable candidate for funding.

A month later I completed my second Comprehensive Exam with distinction. Nothing changed in terms of funding so I was obligated to take on yet another new course to design, teach, present, administer, evaluate and mark. I had 65 students and was promised a qualified TA. Three weeks into the course the TA I was assigned returned from her European trip to announce she would rather take on a TA contract with a 1st year course instead of working with my course which was student-centred, media-intense, technology-intense, theory-intense. By the end of September it was clear that there were no TAs available for my class. I had to work late into the night to keep up with the work as this was my first time teaching this course. I loved the material, the students, the class discussions, the creativity. But it takes work to succeed in engaging students especially when the content is complex.

Through all of the sessional teaching work I was still paying the university $6000 a year as full-time student! As a sessional lecturer I was being paid $1000-$1200 a month per course. From that they took back $500-$600 a month for tuition fees. The ddpartment administrator failed to sign our contracts on time that year so none of the PhD student/ sessional lecturers were paid at the end of September. I did not have enough money to buy the textbooks I had assigned for the students! I later found out that this particular university had a $50,000 a year fund devoted to providing teaching materials for PhD/sessional lecturers which the Department Adminstrator knew nothing about! Months later when I was struggling to save my flailing PhD, I met with the Human Resources lawyer who explained to me (with a digital recorder in operation visibly in the middle of the table) that they did not widely publicize the existence of the fund since there wouldn’t be enough money if everyone applied. This blue-eyed, handsome young lawyer listened with such sympathy to my story I thought he would be part of some solution. Instead when I contacted him six weeks later, he said (in not exactly in these words), “Sorry, this is not my problem. There is nothing I can do.”

Years later I am on leave from my PhD. I am using Web 2.0 to share more of the research which I know is useful. In the process of struggle to save my PhD I worked with a graduate student in conflict resolution, I consulted with Deans and Assistant Deans, with the ombudsman, with former professors, with Union representatives both in the university and in the public service, student unions. I wrote to the President of the University. Former students wrote to the President of the University. I was given several small considerations including hardship scholarships of several thousand dollars over a couple of years. But it was too late and never enough. The administrative work involved in each request was humiliating and time-consuming. I had been working to support myself while completing courses graduate studies in high standing since 1992. I completed an MA part-time in less time than some of my full-time classmates. Yet after ten years of this, my PhD was in jeopardy because I had accepted advice to remain registered as a full-time student while successfully completing a presigious challenging pilot project in a difficult post. Effectively the university has turned me into a ghost. My emails are not returned. I think they are afraid of a law suit. Perhaps not. It is quite possible that they have simply forgotten me. I no longer exist.

One of the students from that course ended up getting his MA from Harvard because that one course in Sociology with a focus on human rights, allowed him to finish the one missing course from his BA. He was able to stay in Nunavut thereby keeping his high profile Nunavut government position. The Inuit and Northern students, friends and aquaintances, the entire Nunavut experience, completely unsettled everything I had learned at Carleton University, the University of Ottawa, the National Gallery of Canada, reading decades of the Inuit Studies magazine, the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, National Archives of Canada.

Canada’s nasty secrets revealed to OECD: Child Poverty in Rich Countries

Child poverty in Canada is almost six time that of Denmark. Overall poverty rates are also high. 10 % of Canadians live in poverty – a stark contrast to Denmark’s 4.3 % and Sweden’s 5.3. (Rothman, Laurel. 2006. “Report of a Standing Committee on Finance,” www.campaign2000.ca) Recommendations: minimum wage $10 per hour; Employment Insurance reform.

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CBC, 2006. Aboriginal children face terrible poverty in Canada: report: B.C. and Newfoundland have highest rates; Alberta and P.E.I. have lowest rates. Last Updated: Friday, November 24, 2006 | 2:04 PM ET, Accessed November 24, 2006 11:19 PT.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/11/24/child-poverty.html?ref=rss

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2006. “Canada’s nasty secrets revealed to OECD: Child Poverty in Rich Countries,” last updated November 24, 2006 11:05 am. papergirls.wordpress.com, accessed (YY/MM/DD) https://papergirls.wordpress.com/2006/11/25/canadas-nasty-secrets-
revealed-to-oecd-child-poverty-in-rich-countries

Laurel Rothman, Laura. 2006. “Reducing Child & Family Poverty in a Time of Prosperity: The Roles of Tax Benefits, Public Investments and the Labour Market Submission to Standing Committee on Finance Pre-Budget Consultation,” http://www.campaign2000.ca/rc/rc06/06_C2000NationalReportCard.pdf Last updated YY/MM/DD Accessed November 24, 2006.

Campaign 2000

Selected webliography on Status of Women Canada generated from my Endnote bibliography, compiled from (1992?-present)

Dion-Stout, Madeleine & Kipling, Gregory D. (1998) Aboriginal Women in Canada: Strategic Research Directions for Policy Development. http://www.swc-cfc.gc.c/publish/research/abwom-ehtml

Dion Stout, Madeleine & Kipling, Gregory D. (1998) Aboriginal Women in Canada: Strategic Research Directions for Policy Development. Ottawa, ON, Status of Women Canada. http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/pubs/0662634314/199803_0662634314_e.pdf

Frulla, Liza (2005) Statement of Canada. United Nations Commission on the Status of Women 10-year Review of the Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action. http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/newsroom/news2005/0302_e.html

Gender Equality, Aboriginal Women (2000) Roundtable Report. Ottawa, Aboriginal Women’s Roundtable on Gender Equality. http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/publish/table/010914-e.pdf

Jenson, Jane (2004) A Decade of Challenges; A Decade of Choices: Consequences for Canadian Women. Montréal, Canadian Policy Research Network-Family Network. http://www.cprn.com/en/doc.cfm?doc=558

Kenny, Carolyn, Faries, Emily, Fiske, Jo-Anne & Voyageur, Cora (2004) A Holistic Framework for Aboriginal Policy Research. http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/pubs/0662379594/200410_0662379594_1_e.html

Kipling, Dion-Stout and Gregory D. (1998) Aboriginal Women in Canada: Strategic Research directions for Policy Development. http://www.swc-cfc.gc.c/publish/research/abwom-ehtml

Lindsay, Colin, Almey, Marcia & Statistics Canada (2004) A Quarter Century of Change: Young Women in Canada in the 1970s and Today. Ottawa, Status of Women Canada (SWC) Policy Research Fund. http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/pubs/0662388976/200412_0662388976_1_e.html

Press Release (1998) Fry welcomes gender breakthrough in APEC. Manilla, Phillipines. http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/newsroom/news1998/1019-2_e.html

SWC (1995) Setting the Stage for the Next Century: The Federal Plan for Gender Equality. Status of Women Canada

SWC (1998) Human Rights for All. http://www.pch.gc.ca/progs/pdp-hrp/docs/cedaw5/nt_e.cfm?nav=2

SWC (1999) Highlights of Federal Government Initiatives to Address Violence Against Women: Legislative Reforms That Assist in Addressing Violence Against Women in 1999: Bill C-79. Status of Women Canada. http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca

Voyer, Jean-Pierre (2003) Introduction: Social Capital: A Useful Tool for Public Policy? in Initiative, Policy Research Horizons. Public Works and Government Services Canada. http://policyresearch.gc.ca/v6n3_e.pdf

Friedman: social responsibility of business is to increase its profits (1970)

In a June 27, 2017 article entitled “Is the Problem With Tech Companies That They’re Companies?: A Stanford professor argues that a profit imperative is in tension with the needs of a democratic society” published in The Atlantic , Rebecca J. Rosen reported on the Aspen Ideas Festival co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. One of the speakers, Stanford professor Rob Reich, argued that “a profit imperative is in tension with the needs of a democratic society”. Reich Reich referred to the economist Milton Friedman’s 1970 article in The New York Times Magazine called “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” These “ideas have contributed to a libertarian ‘background ethos’ in Silicon Valley, where people believe that ‘you can have your social responsibility as a philanthropist, and in the meantime make sure you are responding to your shareholders by maximizing profit.'”

Economist Milton Friedman, propagated 18th century values in the Post-WWII global economy. Like Adam Smith he preached the gospel of minimal government, laissez-faire. The triad, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962) pit economic efficiency against social justice.

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Footnotes

I compiled this digitized collage, inspired by Deborah Barndt’s Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail on November 16, 2006. I used a Google earth generated globe to situate as a kind of circumtomato globe. I developed the concept of John Elkington’s Cannibals with Forks for the image of a world being devoured by those who choose to make decisions based on only one bottom line.

See also speechless.wordpress.com

Barndt, Deborah (2001) Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail, Aurora, ON, Garamond Press.

Davis, Ian. 2005. “The biggest contract: By building social issues into strategy, big business can recast the debate about its role, argues Ian Davis.” The Economist. May 28.

“The great, long-running debate about business’s role in society is currently caught between two contrasting, and tired, ideological positions. On one side of the current debate are those who argue that (to borrow Milton Friedman’s phrase) the “business of business is business”. This belief is most established in Anglo-Saxon economies. On this view, social issues are peripheral to the challenges of corporate management. The sole legitimate purpose of business is to create shareholder value. On the other side are the proponents of “Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR), a rapidly growing, rather fuzzy movement encompassing both companies which claim already to practise CSR and sceptical campaign groups arguing they need to go further in mitigating their social impacts. As other regions f the world—parts of continental and central Europe, for example— move towards the Anglo-Saxon shareholder-value model, debate between these sides has increasingly taken on global significance. That is a pity. Both perspectives obscure in different ways the significance of social issues to business success. They also caricature unhelpfully the contribution of business to social welfare. It is time for CEOs of big companies to recast this debate and recapture the intellectual and moral high ground from their critics. Large companies need to build social issues into strategy in a way which reflects their actual business importance. They need to articulate business’s social contribution and define its ultimate purpose in a way that has more subtlety than “the business of business is business” worldview and is less defensive than most current CSR approaches. It can help to view the relationship between big business and society in this respect as an implicit “social contract”: Rousseau adapted for the corporate world, you might say. This contract has obligations, opportunities and mutual advantage for both sides.” See The Economist premium content.

Elkington, John (1997) Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business, New Society Publishers, Limited.

Elkington, John (2003) Chrysalis Economy: How Citizen CEOs and Corporations Can Fuse Values and Value Creation, Wiley, John and Sons, Incorporated.

CBC, 2006. “In Depth: Wealth Canada’s super-rich,” CBC News, Last Updated December 4, 2006, accessed December 12, 2006.

Canadian Business magazine lists 1. the Ken Thomson family (media) $24.4 Billion Cdn or 19.6 Billion US); 2. Galen Weston (groceries) $7.1 $24.4 Billion Cdn; 3. The Irving family (oil) $5.45 Billion Cdn; 4. Ted Rogers Jr. (media) $4.54 Billion Cdn; 5. Paul Desmarais Sr. (Power Corp.) $4.41 Billion Cdn; 6. Jimmy Pattison (entrepreneur) $4.35 Billion Cdn; 7. Jeff Skoll (eBay) $3.93 $4.41 Billion Cdn; 8. Barry Sherman (Apotex drugs) $3.23 Billion Cdn; 9. David Azrieli (real estate) $2.44 Billion Cdn; Fred and Ron Mannix (mining) $2.38 Billion Cdn as ten of the 22 Canadian families who are part of the uber wealthy group of 793 billionaires who control $2.6 trillion US of the world’s wealth. Others include Alexander Schnaider (steel) baron, Calvin Ayre (online gambling), John MacBain (classified ads), Guy Laliberté (Cirque du Soleil) 1 Billion Cdn. of this group of 22 billionaires their money came from pharmaceuticals, media, oil and gas, food retailing, printing, money management, construction and the BlackBerry. Five of the 22 are in their forties.

Danko, William D. The Millionaire Next Door

Danko, William D. Richer Than A Millionaire

Drummond, Don, Tulk, David. 2006. “Lifestyles of the Rich and Unequal: an Investigation into Wealth Inequality in Canada.” Special Report. TD Bank Financial Group. December 13, 2006. Accessed December 14, 2006.

Drummond explains how the wealthier quintile of the Canadian population will continue to become wealthier while the middle quintiles will suffer with lower wage gains intensifying wealth disparities. The assets of of the lowest quintile fell by 9. 1% since 1999. This is the group which includes single women, Canada’s children who live in poverty and seniors.

What is also interesting is that there is a significant amount of inequality within the highest wealth quintile of Canadians. One can get an appreciation of this fact by noting the pronounced difference between the mean and median asset holdings. While median net worth for the top 20% is $862,900, the average stands at $1,264,200 suggesting a significant skew towards the extremely wealthy. This difference is even more pronounced when holdings of individual assets are compared for those who hold them within the highest quintile. The largest source of the skew towards the wealthy comes from the holdings of bonds which has a mean-median ratio of 7.9 (the larger the ratio, the greater the share of the asset is held by the top segment of the wealthy). The nebulous category of “other non-financial assets” also has a significant concentration in the super-wealthy. Included within this category are such items as the contents of the residence, valuables, collectables, as well as such high value and sparsely-held items as copyrights and patents. […] Within this category, the share of employer-sponsored pension plans (18.5%) is twice as large as individual pension assets (10.5%) such as Registered Retirement Savings Plans (RRSPs), Registered Retirement Income Funds (RRIFs), and Locked-in Retirement Accounts (LIRAs). Holdings of non-pension financial assets (10.4%) and equity in business (10.5%) each represent a comparatively smaller portion of total asset holdings.

Morissette, René, Zhang, Xuelin. 2006. “Revisiting wealth inequality: Perspectives on Wealth and Income,” Statistics Canada. http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/75-001-XIE/11206/high-1.htm
Vol. 7, no. 12. December 13, 2006. Accessed December 14, 2006.

“When all families are considered, real average wealth rose 70% from [1999 to 2005] however wealth inequity increased as well. Real average wealth increased between 51% to 70% reflecting large increases for the wealthiest 10% of Canadians who held 58% of the wealth, a percentage that continues to rise as it has since 1984. For fifteen years prior to the deep cuts made in the post-1984 period of deficit panic wealth inequity fell then plateaued. Canadian families will continue to become more at-risk to social exclusion as their debts increase, equities are reduced and they face little or no wage increase.Morissette and Zhang (2006) reveal how challenging it is to estimate the share of total wealth controlled by the upper quintile, particularly the UHNW. See also Davies (1993). While 10% may control 58% of Canadian wealth less than 1% of Canadian families may in effect hold up to 46% of the wealth.While Morissette and Zhang (2006) claim that elderly unattached individuals saw their median wealth double, from roughly $48,000 in 1984 to $100,000 in 2005, they did not qualify that the extremes of wealth and poverty skew the statistics. See the article on the large number of senior Canadians who live below the poverty line.While the wealthiest quintile, particularly the top 1% benefited since 1984, the lowest quintile, mainly female lone-parent families remain as by far the most financially vulnerable. “In all years, more than 40% of persons in these families were in low income and would have stayed in that state even after liquidating their financial assets.” This is where Canada’s children who live in poverty in a rich country live. Lower quintile included those with median wealth no higher than $7,000, families with no assets at their disposal to lessen the impact of unexpected expenses or earnings disruptions. The average wealth of the most vulnerable families fell to -$1000 between 1999 and 2005 from zero assets/debt ratio through the 1980s to negative (about -$1,000) in both 1999 and 2005. The value of their real estate, for those who did have a modest home, did not rise. “it fell substantially among those in which the major income recipient was aged 25 to 34. In 2005, these families had median wealth of $13,400 (in 2005 dollars), much lower than the $27,000 and $17,400 registered in 1984 and 1999 respectively.” While in the middle quintile there was a modest rise of average wealth rose of about $19,000, families in the most wealthy quintile experienced a substantial increase in the value of their real estate. They allocated more of their financial assets to RRSPs and LIRA holdings. They sharply increased their investments in RRSPs between 1986 and 2003. “Median wealth more than doubled between 1970 and 2005, having grown by c.20-25% since 1984. While the median wealth of young families fell by half between 1984 and 2005, it rose by almost 40% for those in which the major income recipient was a university graduate aged 35 to 54.”

Stenner, Thane, Bower, Rod, Currie, John, O.Connor, Rory. 2006. “True Wealth Report: Values and Views of Ultra-Affluent Individuals,” http://www.truewealthreport.com/downloads/2006_TWR_low.pdf.

Researchers for the True Wealth report surveyed 165 Ultra High Net Worth (UHNW) individuals, those whose assets are over $10.