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Transferring income to families with children has long been a basic Canadian social policy. Though motivated by a range of goals, a central expectation has been that higher family income will lead to better child outcomes, especially in low-income families. This paper presents a synthesis of Canadian research estimating the effect of household income on measures of child development and well-being. While child outcomes and socioeconomic status (SES) are highly correlated, the effect of income on child outcomes, controlling for other SES factors, is found to be statistically significant but of much smaller magnitude than correlation alone indicates. The paper also discusses key theoretical and methodological issues in this area of research, identifies areas for future research, and draws implications for public policy design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work by Aschauer (1989) triggered a debate in the United States on the role played by public capital in determining productivity and growth; more recently, infrastructure has become an issue in the Canadian public policy debate. This paper sheds some light on this debate by addressing three questions: (i) How large is the stock of public infrastructure in Canada? (ii) What are the main components of that infrastructure? (iii) How has that infrastructure evolved over the last 40 years? The paper also examines the impact of public infrastructure on Canada's standard of living and on the performance of the business sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much research points to the importance of a range of welfare state policies to reduce inequalities in health, the growing literature in this field is full of mixed and contradictory results. In this paper, we provide a brief discussion about the different conceptual and methodological approaches used in comparative research on the relationship between welfare policies and health. Against a theoretical discussion of possible linkages among one central welfare policy, unemployment benefit schemes, and health, we also provide examples of findings on how two central dimensions of such schemes--coverage and replacement rates--are linked to health and health inequalities across Europe. These examples indicate not only that welfare state programs can contribute to smaller health inequalities but also that their effectiveness in this respect depends on their institutional set-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, many Western countries have implemented restrictions on immigrants' access to welfare programs, thereby creating new lines of exclusion between immigrants and the native-born. Canada is commonly seen to have resisted this trend. This view overlooks, however, that exclusion can come in different forms. In addition to direct formal exclusion from welfare programs, immigrants can also have more limited access because of indirect or informal mechanisms of differentiation. Reviewing five core welfare programs, this paper shows that direct, indirect, and informal types of exclusion exist in the Canadian welfare state, albeit with different consequences for different categories of newcomers. While this conclusion is not meant to suggest that immigrants face as much exclusion as they do in some other Western countries, it does demonstrate the need to avoid the complacency regarding immigrants' social rights in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Residents of Ontario aged 65 years and older are covered by a provincially funded prescription drug program. The aim of this paper is to assess the extent of inequity in prescription drug use for people eligible for Ontario Drug Benefit coverage, and to explore the different possible explanations for inequities. The analyses draw on the Canadian Community Health Survey from 2005, which is linked to pharmacy and Ontario Health Insurance Plan claims data. We model the number of therapeutically different prescription drugs and the total expenditures on medications on a set of health, demographic, and socioeconomic indicators, and we calculate the concentration index of income-related inequality in medicine use. The results show that low-income individuals who have enrolled in the reduced cost-sharing program on average use more medications than those with higher income, even after adjusting for a comprehensive set of health and demographic variables. While Ontario's public drug program appears to have ensured access to medications for low-income seniors, the results of this study raise concerns about the potential inappropriateness of medication use and point to a gap in drug policy in Ontario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a decade or so starting in the early 1990s, Canada's major income support programs underwent substantial reform. Meanwhile, the economy first lingered in a deep recession and then recovered with a period of strong growth. This paper focuses on how the distributional impact of Employment Insurance (EI) evolved during this period. We find that EI was strongly redistributive throughout the whole period with respect to the earnings of individuals, and somewhat less so for family income. But we also show that the distribution of benefits and contributions changed substantially over time, becoming less redistributive. Somewhat counter-intuitively, both the benefit and contribution sides of the program are shown to be redistributive, even though the contribution structure is regressive. These findings are relevant in the current context, as the economy struggles with a combination of high unemployment and fiscal pressures on government spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends analyses of the declining social assistance participation rate in Canada since the mid-1990s using rich Manitoba administrative data for the period since 1999. We examine trends in Manitoba to mid-2008, separately analyze the entry and continuation rates, and include for the first time information about the growing number of adults with a disability on social assistance. Our results show that the declining participation rate is due entirely to a declining entry rate and that the continuation rate has actually risen since 1999, mainly because of the dramatic growth in the number of adults with a disability on social assistance but also because of the rising duration of spells on assistance by those without a disability. Our results raise questions about the policy, pursued in all jurisdictions in Canada, that keeps social assistance benefits low to discourage welfare use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the perceived difficulties in making changes to the retirement income system as a whole. We focus on public system reforms and observe some of the changes that have taken place in Canada and in a number of OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. Reforming social institutions is never easy. We examine some of the preconceived notions or "myths" that create public resistance to reform. Further, the complexity of the retirement income system in Canada makes consensus difficult to achieve. Nonetheless, we argue that pension reforms can and should be made to ensure the delivery of promised benefits, and we demonstrate the efficacy of smaller-scale reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of labour law on union certification dynamics in Ontario during the period 1983 to 2006. Results reveal the independent, significant effects of the Progressive Conservative government's Bill 31 reforms and the recent Liberal government's Bill 144 upon certification success rates and aggregate volumes of new organizing, in expected directions. Results also reveal a massive decline in unfair labour practice complaints following the Bill 7 reforms in 1995, exacerbated by Bill 31, and which remains unaltered by Bill 144. Overall, the results suggest that labour law still has a significant effect upon union organizing over time, despite economic internationalization and/or shifts in industrial structure, and contradict the recent claim that a "pre-1990 equilibrium" in Ontario labour relations policy was recently restored. Rather, the current regime remains, both in formal legal terms and concrete effects, more restrictive of union growth than its pre-1990 form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La Loi sur la concurrence est sans contredit l'une des lois les plus sophistiquées d'un point de vue économique jamais mises en vigueur au Canada. Ainsi a-t-on soutenu que l'ultime objectif des dispositions de la Loi sur la concurrence en matière de fusionnement serait de promouvoir l'efficacité éonomique de l'économie canadienne. Cet article élabore une proposition logique basée sur les interprétations juridiques des dispositions de fusionnement de la Loi sur la concurrence selon laquelle l'objectif normatif sous-tendant la loi s'oppose à la redistribution de la richesse causée par un accroissement du pouvoir de marché par rapport à l'allocation économique établie (c.-à-d. le statu quo). Cette analyse positive implique que l'objectif de bien-être social sous-jacent à la loi antitrust canadienne ne concorde pas avec la perspective nsuelle sur le rôle des institutions publiques en matière de politique de la concurrence au Canada. The Competition Act is arguably one of the most economically sophisticated legal statutes ever enacted in Canada. As such, it has been argued that the paramount objective of the merger provisions of the Competition Act should be the promotion of economic efficiency. This paper examines the underlying normative objective of Canadian merger law from a positive perspective by looking at the legal framework established in Canadian jurisprudence. An argument is developed that demonstrates the existence of distributional objections to wealth redistribution caused by an increase in market power with respect to the status quo allocation of economic resources. This social welfare objective is inconsistent with the commonly held view of the functions of competition policy institutions in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]