Search

In Canada, in the early 2000s, the decriminalization of cannabis for recreational use seemed imminent. Between 2003 and 2005, three government decriminalization bills were introduced in the Canadian House of Commons, but none were adopted, and decriminalization efforts were abandoned. Subsequently, Canada went beyond decriminalization and legalized recreational cannabis in 2018. This paper examines why the Canadian decriminalization efforts failed, using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and ACF policy change theory. Three ACF-based hypotheses to explain the failed reform attempts are developed and investigated, but none are empirically supported. A fourth hypothesis is developed using information processing insights from Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) but adapted to the ACF. This hypothesis is empirically supported showing that Canada's decriminalization efforts failed, despite a supportive advocacy coalition, favourable conditions in the cannabis policy subsystem and favourable conditions in the Canadian political system, because its systemic advocates did not give it priority relative to other issues from other subsystems. This finding has implications for ACF policy change theory, identifying a necessary condition for major policy change that has been potentially overlooked, and illustrates the potential for cross-fertilization between PET and ACF theories of policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature on international health partnerships is largely normative, with an evaluative interest in their impacts in terms of learning and knowledge transfer. Rarely has research attended to how learning and knowledge transfer transpire in practice. This paper addresses this gap with a case study of a partnership between two hospitals in Canada and China. Conceptually, drawing on Actor Network Theory, it posits learning and knowledge transfer as a process of translation. Empirically, it traces the assembling of the programme, and identifies the pedagogical features at nodes of associations. It reveals that health professionals in both countries have expanded their clinical and medical knowledge and practices, and professional senses and sensitivities, which were subsequently amplified, deferred or diminished within their respective practices. It argues that the capacity of individuals to translate learning into practice is contingent on institutional and cultural differences that constitute the ecology of work for health professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence that immigrants tend to be underserved by the health-care system in the hosting country is well documented. While the impacts of im/migration on health-care utilisation patterns have been addressed to some extent in the existing literature, the conventional approach tends to homogenise the experience of racialised and White immigrants, and the intersecting power axes of racialisation, immigration and old age have been largely overlooked. This paper aims to consolidate three macro theories of health/behaviours, including Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory, the World Health Organization's paradigm of social determinants of health and Andersen's Behavioral Model of Health Service Use, to develop and validate an integrated multilevel framework of health-care access tailored for racialised older immigrants. Guided by this framework, a narrative review of 35 Canadian studies was conducted. Findings reveal that racial minority immigrants' vulnerability in accessing health services are intrinsically linked to a complex interplay between racial-nativity status with numerous markers of power differences. These multilevel parameters range from socio-economic challenges, cross-cultural differences, labour and capital adequacy in the health sector, organisational accessibility and sensitivity, inter-sectoral policies, to societal values and ideology as forms of oppression. This review suggests that, counteracting a prevailing discourse of personal and cultural barriers to care, the multilevel framework is useful to inform upstream structural solutions to address power imbalances and to empower racialised immigrants in later life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Determining the threshold separating poor from non-poor populations is one of the most influential choices when measuring poverty. Commonly used selection criteria leave considerable room for discretion or are not appropriate as academic standards. This vacuum in academic guidance leads to arbitrary and/or ideologically driven choices. This can greatly influence the measurement of a societal phenomenon, and thus research and public policy decisions over a period that extends well beyond the mandate of those making that threshold decision. This paper sets out an empirical validation method that contributes to reducing the range of thresholds and thereby aids decision-makers in making that normative decision. Our method uses an absolute concept of empirical validity and requires that the microdata for measuring poverty hold additional information closely associated with poverty. The method builds on insights from theory on measurement error that, for any given threshold, some persons are wrongly identified as poor (false positives) and others are wrongly identified as not poor (false negatives), and that the reduction of one error can only be attained by increasing the other. Our method uses the additional microdata to disaggregate the population into (likely) false positives and (likely) false negatives and analyzes marginal changes in this composition as the poverty threshold becomes stricter. Using Canadian data, we show that this approach substantially narrows the range of thresholds for two unidimensional poverty indicators, namely a material deprivation and an income poverty indicator. The underlying principle of the method extends to other (unidimensional) social indicators. The analysis itself can also serve other purposes, such as deepening our understanding of poverty and the cost-effectiveness of policies to reduce it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are some cities more compact than others? We argue that riskier housing markets have a costlier real option; developers would require greater compensation to build now—thus, developers are being incentivized to delay, giving rise to more compact cities. We test this hypothesis cross‐sectionally for Canada's 11 largest census metropolitan areas. We interpret satellite imageries and estimate a hierarchical spatial autoregressive model to account for both the hierarchical and the spatial structure of our data. Our results show that, on average, a one‐percentage‐point increase in price risk reduces urban land coverage in the fringe by about 0.7 percentage point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]