A new report suggests the economic impact of the pandemic led to a massive increase in federal aid to Canada’s oil patch.
But the annual inventory of fossil fuel subsidies published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development also highlights that almost all of the direct aid was paid out in two programs to protect jobs and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
It raises further questions about how to define fossil fuel subsidies, an issue Canada has not solved despite promising to eliminate “inefficient” ones for more than a decade now.
“The problematic aspect is how do we make sure they’re not supporting for future fossil fuel production,” said Vanessa Corkal, a policy analyst at the IISD and author of the report.
Her report notes that it makes no sense for Canada to both provide direct funding to help fossil fuel producers and charge a price on the pollution fossil fuels create, likening it to “trying to bail water out of a leaky boat.”
During the pandemic, Canadians have been asked to stay home to stay safe, yet thousands of youth are facing homelessness. Each year in Ontario, 800-1,000 youth age out of the child welfare system.
In the early months of the pandemic, the Ontario Children’s Advancement Coalition (OCAC) and allied partners lobbied the Ontario government to stop the practice requiring youth to leave their care placements when they turn 18. In June 2020, the Ontario government placed a moratorium on this policy until March 31, 2021. Yet the pandemic continues and the clock is running out.
We research policy and work with youth and adults who are ensnared in the Canadian criminal justice system — many of whom have had contact with the child welfare system.
“Too many young people ‘age out’ to poverty, to homelessness. It’s a pipeline to the criminal justice system for some. And it exacerbates mental health conditions,” says Ratnam, co-founder of the non-profit Ontario Children’s Advancement Coalition (OCAC). https://t.co/MzP7WgHkj7
Children who are deemed by child protective services (CPS) as experiencing abuse or neglect may be removed from their caregivers and placed under the guardianship of the state. Based on 2011 census data, there are 11,375 children in the child welfare system in Ontario. Black and Indigenous children are highly represented, with Indigenous children comprising 30 per cent of kids in care in Ontario.
Many children and youth under state guardianship report moving among multiple homes and sometimes cities. Youth reported to us that they can count on having at least one move for every year that they’re in the child welfare system, and some move multiple times in a year. Frequent moves can disrupt education, resulting in low rates of high school completion. Youth who don’t complete high school face challenges and are more likely to experience poverty and rely on government assistance.
This instability can create low levels of attachment, trust and relationship-building. Many youth contend with mental-health challenges, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, that have an impact on their mental, emotional, social, spiritual, physical and occupational wellness and development. It’s unsurprising that many youth describe feeling vulnerable and angry in these circumstances. Often youth are labelled oppositional and criminalized due to the way they behave, but this is in response to trauma and their circumstances.
From a youth we interviewed:
“[Being in the child welfare system] really changed my character. It really just changed who I was as a person.… I’ve been in [at least] 20 different places and you know, it’s just so much [stuff]. And that’s the thing. Like all this stuff, people don’t realize … for somebody like me, I’ve been so thrown around, like [basically] tossed around, like here, there, everywhere.”
A CTV Report on aging out of foster care from March 2020.
Emerging adulthood
When youth under guardianship of the state turn 18, they are required to leave their foster care or group home placements. Some young people may continue to receive financial support after they turn 18 through the Continued Care and Support for Youth (CCYS) program. This financial support stops abruptly when they turn 21.
Psychologist Jeffrey Arnette’s theory of emerging adulthood recognizes a period of prolonged transition between late adolescence and fully independent adulthood. Emerging adulthood helps to explain shifting societal trends in recent decades.
Many emerging adults rely on their families for financial, housing and social support longer than in the past, often well into their 20s. More young people seek post-secondary education, face higher rates of unemployment and rising housing costs, and marry and have children at a later age, on average.
Despite these broader societal trends, currently youth in the child welfare system are required to leave their placements when they turn 18. While other young adults are able to gradually transition to independent adulthood, young people leaving care are abruptly forced into adulthood.
When asked how prepared they were for “independence,” one young person shared: “We all got like a Tupperware container, or a tub full of pots and pans and dishes and stuff like that. But yeah, there wasn’t really any preparation.”
Another added: “I just had to learn how to be a human on my own. Like, I had to learn everything that like a mom or like a parent or guardian is supposed to teach a kid from young.”
After the moratorium
Once the moratorium lifts on March 31, 2021, there will be a flood of young people leaving their homes and heading into a decimated housing and employment market.
Heather O’Keefe, executive director at StepStones for Youth, says:
“The devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have created further vulnerability for youth from the child welfare system with the lack of safe housing options, the loss of jobs, the inability to make rental payments and purchase essential items, and increased isolation and seclusion. The toll on the mental health of these youth has been exacerbated with the closure of libraries and schools, reduced services for people living in poverty, fewer opportunities to meet with counsellors and psychotherapists in person, and increased anxiety and suicide ideation.”
Our work with these young people underscores that the moratorium should be extended indefinitely. Rather than maintaining arbitrary age cut-offs for support, the provincial government should implement a readiness model.
This approach would work with every young person from the minute they enter the child welfare system to encourage better outcomes once they decide they are ready to be fully independent rather than being forced to leave care once they turn 18.
Youth leaving state guardianship have always been vulnerable. And with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, youth aging out of care will be in a much more vulnerable position, with potentially more severe impacts.
Cheyanne Ratnam co-authored this article. Cheyanne is the co-founder and executive lead of the OCAC, and an expert in the area of child welfare, homelessness and interconnected systems. Cheyanne also grew up in the child welfare system, experienced youth homelessness and was briefly engaged with the youth justice system.
“Success in a pandemic is not waiting for a vaccine,” says Bar-Yam.
“It’s about using an arsenal of tools, including vaccines, to defeat the
virus while we have the chance.”
Going to zero therefore means a serious five to seven-week lockdown that brings numbers down exponentially.
It means financially supporting struggling small businesses and their workers during that lockdown.
It means changing our testing programs from
passive systems that wait for symptomatic citizens to show up, to an
active approach that brings tests to the most at-risk communities and
workplaces.
EDMONTON, Alberta — The premier of Canada’s western province of Alberta said he will not punish members of his government for vacationing outside Canada despite government guidelines urging people to avoid nonessential travel.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said he learned this week of travel abroad by a “few” legislature members, senior staff and officials with the United Conservative government, including his municipal affairs minister and his chief of staff.
Kenney said he made an error by not issuing a clear directive earlier urging them to remain in the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He said those in public positions should be held to a higher standard in their personal conduct but said he won’t sanction them.
David Climenhaga, in his article yesterday, said it was a “slap in the face to ordinary citizens who can’t travel, visit their loved ones, or take part in activities they enjoy because of pandemic restrictions.”
On Twitter, @Blurg5 is keeping a list of all the MLAs that have travelled outside the province for non-essential reasons. Here is the list so far.
Tracy Allard (UCP cabinet member, MLA Grande Prairie – confirmed, Hawaii) Jeremy Nixon (UCP cabinet member, MLA Calgary-Klein – confirmed, Hawaii) Pat Rehn (UCP MLA, Lesser Slave Lake – confirmed, Mexico) Jason Stephan (UCP MLA, Red Deer-South – confirmed, Arizona) Tanya Fir (UCP MLA, Calgary Peigan – confirmed, Las Vegas) Matt Wolf (UCP Political Staff – confirmed, Saskatchewan) Michael Forian (UCP Political Staff – confirmed, Hawaii) Eliza Snider (UCP Political Staff – confirmed, Hawaii) Jamie Huckabay (UCP Political Staff – confirmed, United Kingdom) Ron Liepert (CPC MP, Calgary Signal Hill – confirmed, California) Nathan Neudorf (UCP MLA Lethbridge-East – rumoured) Tyler Shandro (UCP Cabinet member, MLA Calgary Acadia – rumoured) Roger Reid (UCP MLA Livingstone-Macleod – rumoured) Sheena Hughes (St. Albert City Councillor – rumoured)
Governments based on capitalism may have been designed to be unfair. The government and those who are well off enough to hire people to work for them in factories and businesses, would make up the first tier. Everyone else is lumped into the proletariat, the social class of wage-earners, hence the second tier.
The Capitalist Manifesto is a 1958 book by Louis O. Kelso, a lawyer-economist and Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) inventor, and Mortimer J. Adler, a neo-Thomist philosopher. Kelso and Adler detail the three principles of economic justice, Participation, Distribution, and Limitation. These principles laid the foundation for what eventually came to be called “binary economics.” The term “binary” comes from attributing all production (participation) and just distribution of income to two factors, the human, classified as labor, and the non-human, classified as capital. In the preface, Adler acknowledged Kelso as the originator of the theory.
The base principal appearing as early as page seventeen, claims:
We are initially addressing ourselves to Americans –– to men who feel well-off –– and not to the starving, downtrodden victims of injustice and oppression. We cannot exhort them to engage in violence, and to do so without fear because they have nothing to lose but their chains. We must persuade them, in much calmer tones than that, to act rationally, with insight and prudence, because they do have something to lose––their freedom––which an abundance of creature comforts may have lulled them into forgetting.
Men who think they already have all the liberty and justice they can expect, in addition to plenty of material goods, cannot be emotionally exhorted to take radical measures for the improvement of their society. They can only be asked to think again.
The only difference between 1950 and today is that those who rule or govern in North America don’t try to hide their flagrant differences from the masses. They seem to relish the fact that those who have, and those who have not, don’t follow the same rules.
Whether you support or oppose Jason Kenney’s policy decisions, as an Albertan you should be concerned about his government’s dishonesty, secretiveness, lack of ethics, unrepresentative decisions and wastefulness. These five areas of abuse violate international democratic standards for good government.
There will be no need and no justification to complete the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion or the Keystone XL pipeline if Canada makes any effort at all to strengthen its climate policies, according to the more ambitious of two fossil demand scenarios in an analysis published yesterday by the Canada Energy Regulator (CER).
Early news reports yesterday focused on the main scenario in the CER’s annual Energy Futures report, which concluded that Trans Mountain, Keystone, and Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline will be the last three the country ever needs. The Globe and Mail had the report projecting a “hefty” 12% reduction in oil and gas consumption by 2030, rising to 35% by 2050, with renewable and nuclear energy growing 31% by mid-century.
“Under the status quo scenario, the regulator projects the three pipelines under construction — Keystone XL, Trans Mountain, and Enbridge Line 3—will be the last ones needed to handle future growth in crude oil production,” CP writes. “Under the evolving scenario, crude production still grows about 18% before peaking in 2039, but the report says Line 3 alone is enough added capacity to handle that increase.”
For more than a year, the Trudeau government has been promising a pathway to net-zero emissions by 2050, beginning with a more ambitious carbon reduction target for 2030. One of the main criticisms of the federal climate accountability legislation released last week was that it didn’t include those details, but the general understanding before and since has been that the full plan is on the way.
A new report suggests the economic impact of the pandemic led to a massive increase in federal aid to Canada’s oil patch.
