Canada’s current income assistance programs are not doing enough to support Canadians. If the goal of temporary assistance is to help those in need, these programs must have better, broader coverage.
William Ruto addresses his supporters during a campaign rally in Thika, Kenya, in August 2022.
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Early childhood development centres in South Africa, particularly in low-income communities, provide services which many of these children and their families wouldn’t cope without.
Head porters from the northern part of Ghana are victims of institutional weakness.
Quami/Wikimedia Commons
Unresolved historical injustices, deepened in new forms, undermined compliance with Ghana’s COVID lockdown.
Low employment rates, coupled with limited government support, made Canadians with disabilities more vulnerable to adverse events from the pandemic.
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Emergency relief measures were operational for six months and are due to end soon. But the impacts of COVID-19 will be felt long after.
Justin Trudeau’s government initiated the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit to help people who lost their jobs during the pandemic. Why not make such a program permanent?
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
Mauritius preserved its social welfare system even during structural reforms in the 1970s. It is now better prepared than most nations for the health and economic impact of COVID-19.
Health of society depends on a decent social welfare system, absence of extreme poverty and inequality.
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COVID-19 has brought to the fore the interdependency of business and society. It’s time for amendments to the social contract that underlies societal support for business.
Automated algorithms – not humans – are increasingly making decisions about who’s eligible for welfare benefits.
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States are increasingly turning to machine learning and algorithms to detect fraud in food stamps, Medicaid and other welfare programs – despite little evidence of actual fraud.
Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott.
University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf1-00008, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library/Bernard Hoffman, photographer
Long before Chasten Buttigieg became a ‘not-so-secret weapon’ in his husband Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, another same-sex couple profoundly reshaped American social policy.
There’s a hue and cry about Doug Ford’s scrapping of Ontario’s basic income project. But the project was a failing experiment with a dearth of high-quality data.
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Ontario’s basic income project was deeply flawed and cursed by a lack of quality data. It needs a major overhaul.
Lisa MacLeod, Ontario’s minister of children, community and social services, announces an end to the province’s basic income pilot project on July 31, 2018.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
Research shows that guaranteed basic income programs spur economies and improve mental and physical health. That’s why Ontario’s decision to scrap the province’s pilot project is such a bad idea.
Almost 1,500 immigrant boys, aged 10 to 17, were separated from their parents and brought to stay at Casa Padre in Brownsville, Texas.
Department of Health and Human Services
There are strong parallels between the Trump administration’s policy on immigrant families and the 19th century’s ‘New’ Poor Laws of England, whose cruelty was illuminated by writer Charles Dickens.
Struggling to make ends meet.
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