Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Kate McInturff puts forward some big long-term goals which deserve to be discussed as we elect our next federal government. And Leah McLaren discusses how a lack of child care affects every Canadian:

The single most shocking thing to me about becoming a mother was the lack of affordable child care, both in Canada and in Britain (where I was living when my son was born). It was an issue I had heard responsible people around me banging on about for years, but one that had sort of floated above my comprehension, like the sound of the grown-ups talking in the animated Charlie Brown.

Like car insurance or taxes, I expected organizing child care to be a pain – one of those annoying but ultimately surmountable aspects of grown-up life. What I did not expect it to be was a financially crippling, life-paralyzing quagmire.

In Canada (as in Britain), I was shocked to find little or no access to affordable child care during my son’s first years of life. Like most families, we shouldered the heavy financial burden of full-time child care all on our own with no help from the government or extended family (everyone lives out of town). It was either that or one of us quit working. Not a pretty choice, or a realistic one for most parents, either.

...

Child care is not a women’s issue. It’s not even a family issue. Like health care or education, it’s an all-of-us-in-it-together issue. And yet it’s also something many of us don’t think about until we are hard up against it, confronting the impossible life choices that materialize when you live in a society with a lack of affordable daycare – a society that sentimentalizes children but not the act of actually caring for them.

- Lindsay Tedds discusses how the Cons' tax giveaways for resource exploration represent all that's wrong with public policy which serves only to enrich investors rather than serving the public interest. And David Dayen highlights how mortgage foreclosure fraud continues in the U.S. even after being publicly exposed.

- Derek Seidman notes that in addition to improving conditions in specific workplaces, the push for a $15 minimum wage is also serving as a rallying point for the labour movement as a whole. And Unifor highlights the importance of an improved Canada Pension Plan as another means of ensuring financial security regardless of one's immediate employer. 

- Finally, Terry Glavin follows up on Alan Kurdi's tragic story with some suggestions as to what can be done next - though it's worth noting that the convention he points to as a barrier to the Kurdis' effort to seek refuge does nothing to prevent a country from doing more than the bare minimum.  Ratna Omidvar, Joseph Yu and Kai Wong make the case to bring 1,000 refugees to the GTA alone. And Aaron Wherry takes a broader look at our options in dealing with refugees and other displaced persons, while Karl Nerenberg and Michael Harris are particularly pointed in criticizing the Cons' callousness.