CCSD President & CEO, Peggy Taillon, spoke at the Liberal Biennial Convention this past weekend as part of the Advancing Equality, Cohesion, and Social Cohesion delegate sessions. The session focused on government's role in promoting safe and strong communities, investing in people, and lifting barriers that limit full participation of all Canadians in soceity.

You can read Peggy's speech which is available here. (PDF)

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We are fortunate to have one of the best Human Rights Lawyers in the Country, Paul Champ, lead this challenge at a fraction of the fees he should have charged. Help us recognise his commitment to social justice, donate today.

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Report of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal People (PDF)

Excerpt from report Introduction:

First Nations education is in crisis. In some First Nations communities a staggering 7 out of 10 First Nations students  will not graduate from high school this year. In far too many others, countless First Nations children will never attend a school equipped with libraries, science and technology labs or athletic facilities.  And incredibly, in a country as rich as ours, some First Nations children will never set foot in a proper school.

BY: Dana Flavelle, TheStar.com

Globalization and technology are intensifying the growing income gap between the rich and poor in Canada, economists say.

And government policies aren’t doing enough to bridge the difference.

The result is a chasm between the haves and have-nots that is only getting larger, they said in response to an international wage gap report Monday.

“Across the entire advanced world, we’re seeing widening income disparity,” Craig Alexander, chief economist with TD Bank Financial Group said in an interview. “I think a couple of things are contributing to that, the impact of globalization and the impact of the information technology revolution.”

BY: Tavia Grant, Globe and Mail

If Canada is to morph into a knowledge-based economy, its citizens need better access to reliable, unbiased information.

With that in mind, Statistics Canada will make all of its standard data available for free on its website, starting next year. As of Feb. 1, all data known as Canadian Socio-Economic Information Management System (or CANSIM) will be posted freely on the agency’s website. Census and geography data will also become free.

BY: Carl Meyer, Embassy Magazine, November 24, 2011

All of Statistics Canada’s standard online products, including the census, socioeconomic and geographic data, will be offered to the public for free starting February 2012, Embassy has learned.

In 2010, the agency was rocked when the government dropped the mandatory long-form census, and its chief statistician resigned in protest. Immigration experts slammed the decision for jeopardizing the targeted delivery of services like languages training and job-search workshops.

Now, the agency will not charge for the information it gathered during the 2011 census. Instead, as it releases the first set of census data this February, it will also announce that it will be free—as well as the rest of its online, readily-available data.

While Statistics Canada has been working towards opening up more of its data for several years, it still currently charges for a portion of its online data, including, for example, some data sets inside its Canadian Socioeconomic Information Management System, what the agency calls its “key socioeconomic database.”

By Alan Broadbent, Maytree Opinion, November 2011

The Occupy Wall Street movement has puzzled many people. The lack of organization, elaborated message, or visible leaders has left some people asking for more, and the presence of young people with no clear political or social agenda in the tent parks has left others wondering if it is just a dropped-out caravan.

The simple message of the 99% facing off against the 1%, the vast majority against the very rich who have corralled the bulk of the wealth created in the last quarter century, seems pretty clear, but is portrayed as not enough of an analysis.

But the data doesn’t lie. The gap between the richest and the poorest has been growing, as has the gap between the richest and the rest. And in the developed world the middle class has been disappearing.