Regina City Council has voted to proceed with a 30-year public-private partnership (P3) in which a private company would design, build, finance, operate and maintain the city’s new waste water treatment facility. The municipal administration’s rationale has been that, although a P3 will be more expensive than traditional public financing, it is required to access [...]

Statistics Canada reported today that inflation collapsed to just 0.4% in April. The Bank of Canada’s core inflation rate, which excludes volatile items, fell to 1.1%. Continued low inflation does not provide a rationale to raise interest rates. Perhaps for that reason, Canadian monetary hawks have shifted their rationale for higher interest rates. In 2011, [...]

Based on the past twelve years, another four under the BC Liberals does not bode well for public education. But that all depends. There is no question that the BC Liberal record has been dismal. Underfunding, privatization, larger classes, fewer services, contract stripping, school business companies, standardized tests, the list goes on. But there are more factors at play than simply who governs. There is also the response and political pressure by the governed. An equally big problem of...

My op-ed in today’s Saskatoon StarPhoenix (page A11): Privatizing ISC is a poor deal for Saskatchewan The provincial government estimates that selling 60 per cent of the Information Services Corporation will raise up to $120 million for infrastructure investment. Is that a good deal for the people of Saskatchewan? Last year, ISC generated $20 million [...]

Once the disappointment over the BC election isn’t so painful, there’s something that needs to be talked about regarding polling.  This is a quick, stream-of-consciousness post, and I plan on writing more later. While Mario Canseco of Angus Reid said, this morning, that it’s not a “methodology” problem, I think it is. Forum Research, while [...]

Here we are: only hours to go until the polls close. What will be the next BC government? What are your hopes, fears, dreams, goals? This page will refresh every 15 seconds, or you can manually reload it. Please add in your comments below What are your seat predictions? What do you think will be [...]People who read this page, also read:Why does ArcelorMittal hate Bosnia?Cunt: Never An Appropriate Descriptor for a 9 Year Old ChildRalph Sultan: Poverty is a “Single Mom”...

The following is a guest post by Nick Fillmore. National business journalists and columnists have bought into Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s demeaning view that folks in the Atlantic region are backward and have a defeatist attitude. Framed in contemptuous language, they’re promoting untested economic ideas that, if adopted, would seriously damage the economy – and [...]

We are currently working on growth and change as an inquiry focus.  I have selected materials that we have found in nature as well as some science items like worms, frogs, chicken embryos, and grasshoppers for the children to examine.  We have studied some of them using our KWL chart—becoming researchers and looking in books, [...]

The real unemployment rate for Canadians over 25 was 8.8% in April. Not great, for sure, but slightly better than it was in 2009. For youth 15-24, it was up from last April – to 20.9% – so more than 1 in 5 youth are looking for work and can’t find it. In Ontario, it’s closer to [...]

This morning, Statistics Canada reported an apparently decent month of data for April, with a modest increase in employment, all full-time and all in paid positions rather than self-employment. Despite this seemingly good news, the total number of Canadians participating in the labour force edged down. As a result, the participation rate declined to 66.5 [...]

The story of child poverty in Canada is very much an urban story. One out of every 10 children living in urban areas was poor in 2010, compared to one in 20 children living in non-urban areas. Three quarters (or 76%) of all poor children in Canada lived in one of the urban centres shown [...]

At an SFU Public Square event on child poverty tonight, BC Liberal candidate Ralph Sultan evoked boos from the audience when he described the matter as a “single mom” issue. He later defended himself, saying he was only quoting “facts” as an economist. Liberal Ralph Sultan says kids living in poverty because of single moms, [...]People who read this page, also read:Is Withholding Sex Now Sex Abuse?Cunt: Never An Appropriate Descriptor for a 9 Year Old ChildDid Earth Day...

In continuation with our beautiful stuff project, the children used real wood piece to create home, buildings, bridges and other various structures.  The children created, draw their designs, labelled some parts, glued and painted their designs.  It was a great and fun experience.     This student independently drew a picture of his neighbourhood when [...]

Since I was a graduate student in the last millennium, I’ve been fascinated by the role of the cotton textile industry in recent economic history, beginning with that momentous event still being heard around the world, the First Industrial Revolution. It just caught fire in Bengladesh. There are books about cotton as a staple – [...]

As others have noted, last week’s Ontario budget combined modest social investments in areas requested by the NDP with austerity for overall expenditures. Ontario program spending, already the lowest per capita of any province, will be subject to ongoing cuts relative to inflation. This paradox on the expenditure side of the ledger reflects a vacuum [...]

As I discussed in an earlier post, Niall Ferguson, the Harvard historian and author of numerous bad books about economics, is prone to writing and saying completely ignorant things, making one wonder about the intellectual heft of so-called academic “stars” who populate our institutions of higher learning. The latest bit of idiocy uttered by Ferguson [...]

  1. He’s Number Two: Stephen Poloz was widely acknowledged in economic and political circles as the second-best choice for the top job at the Bank of Canada. So the surprise was not that he was chosen. The surprise was, Why Not Tiff Macklem? Will someone please find out and tell the rest of us? 2. [...]

Here is a great, free resource entitled Natural Curiosity  http://naturalcuriosity.ca/pdf/NaturalCuriosityManual.pdf It gives details and research round building inquiry from nature and the world around children!  The full website is http://naturalcuriosity.ca/

This is a great chart that shows how a read aloud (high support) is used to eventually become an Independent Resource (low support) for students to read on their own or at home. http://earlylearningcentral.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/literacy-and-the-young-child-GRR-p64-65.pdf One is done with a poem and the other is a Big Book that is repetative, and is simple to follow (level [...]

 This is a great little read about how to keep track of assessment that is very quick and easy.  Below are some ideas from the Guide to Combined Grades http://earlylearningcentral.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/Learning-Together-commercial-print-craft-final-copy-195.pdf Keep a clipboard handy for assessment possibly by subject or learning area–mark it as such–create a class list and produce a 3 column chart with [...]