Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Trish Hennessy discusses the connection between child care deserts and child poverty, while pointing out the importance of eradicating both:

While the evidence shows the importance of greater learning and socialization opportunities in the early years, it also shows that Canada is home to extremely high child care fees—which is a barrier to low- and middle-income families. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) documents how some families pay child care fees the size of a monthly mortgage payment.

Some families simply don’t have child care options: the CCPA estimates 776,000 children (44 per cent of all non-school-aged children) live in what it calls child care deserts—a notion similar to food deserts, where some communities lack access to licensed child care spaces.
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Back in 1999, the now-defunct National Council of Welfare put the importance of child care this way in its Preschool Children: Promises to Keep report: “Many social programs support families, but child care is the backbone of them all.”

What if Canada replaced its child care desert with an adequately funded national, universal, public child care program that is both high quality and affordable?

Mothers of young children would take up paying work, contributing to the family’s economic bottom line while ensuring their children have access to great socialization opportunities.

- Meanwhile, Jeffrey Sachs points out the numerous revenue tools available to ensure that funding is available to meet social needs. Melanie McFarland notes that the tax evasion and avoidance documented in the Panama Papers has direct consequences for everybody. And PressProgress exposes the offshoring connections of some of the big-money funders of British Columbia's anti-electoral reform campaign.

- Ken Kimmell and Brenda Ekwurzel write that Donald Trump's attempt to suppress and deny facts about our climate breakdown can't change the reality of a planet on the brink. And Fiona Harvey reports on a new UN report showing a need to triple even what's been promised to rein in greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid a catastrophic outcome.

- Meanwhile, Climate Justice Saskatoon studies the concerns of communities who currently rely on coal as a major economic driver, and notes how it's possible to achieve a just transition by taking into account the people affected by changes in energy sources.

- Finally, Christo Aivalis discusses how the Trudeau Libs have chosen to trample on labour rights in their pursuit of corporate convenience.