Public Policy

  • Legalizing Theft

    A Short Guide to Tax Havens

    By Alain Deneault  Translated by Catherine Browne     April 2018

    When our infrastructures deteriorate, when social benefits are frozen, when our living conditions are precarious, it is because of tax havens. A source of growing inequalities and colossal tax losses, the use of tax havens by large corporations and wealthy individuals explains austerity policies. Moreover, states have legalized these offshore schemes that contravene the very principle of taxation.

  • Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists

    The Origins of the Women’s Shelter Movement in Canada

    By Margo Goodhand     September 2017

    In the supposedly enlightened ’60s and ’70s, violence against women didn’t make the news. It didn’t exist. Yet in 1973 — with no statistics, no money and little public support — five disparate groups of Canadian women quietly opened the country’s first battered women’s shelters. Today, there are well over 600.

  • About Canada: Public-Private Partnerships

    By Heather Whiteside     August 2016

    P3s fundamentally transform public infrastructure, public services, labour relations, public sectors and the everyday lives of Canadians. While contracting out services is supposed to save money, P3s often cost more in the long run and are host to poor working conditions and confidentiality and accountability issues. And in the end, it is us, the public, who foots the bill for these increasing costs, essentially subsidizing corporate investments for services that our governments used to provide.

  • About Canada: Health Care, 2nd Edition

    By Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong     April 2016

    This second edition of About Canada: Health Care is an accessible, up-to-date introduction to how the Canadian health care system works, how it is changing and what can be done to make it better.

  • Megacity Malaise

    Neoliberalism, Public Services and Labour in Toronto

    By Carlo Fanelli     April 2016

    This study is among the first in Canada to document the transformation of municipal governance and public services from Keynesian to neoliberal public policy at the urban scale.

  • About Canada: Women’s Rights

    By Penni Mitchell     July 2015

    A foundational look at Canada’s history of women’s rights and the contributions and accomplishments women have made in Canada.

  • Academia, Inc.

    How Corporatization Is Transforming Canadian Universities

    By Jamie Brownlee     April 2015

    The first book to address the negative consequences of corporatization of higher education.

  • About Canada: Poverty

    By Jim Silver     October 2014

    For a country as wealthy as Canada, poverty is utterly unnecessary. In About Canada: Poverty, Jim Silver illustrates that poverty is about more than a shortage of money: it is complex and multifaceted and can profoundly damage the human spirit. At the centre of this analysis are Canada’s neoliberal economic policies, which have created conditions that make a growing number of people vulnerable to low income, vanishing public services and poor physical health.

  • Critical Inquiries

    A Reader in Studies of Canada

    Edited by Lynn Caldwell, Darryl Leroux and Carrianne Leung     April 2013

    This book takes a bold, critical approach to Canadian studies, framing Canada as an ongoing colonial project. The contributors assess how policy programs, such as multiculturalism and national arts funding and cultural monuments and symbols, such as the Famous Five Monument, the Tunnels of Moose Jaw and Saskatchewan’s Centennial, are all shaped within this colonial matrix.

  • Failure to Protect

    Moving Beyond Gendered Responses

    Edited by Rosemary Carlton, Julia Krane, Simon Lapierre, Cathy Richardson and Susan Strega     January 2013

    Failure-to-protect policies and practices are intended to better ensure the safety and protection of children. But as this book demonstrates, these policies actually increase danger for children – and for their mothers.