Fair and open competitive bidding for construction contracts could save Toronto hundreds of millions of dollars.

Significant parts of the story of Danielle Smith's Alberta victory are being misunderstood on the national stage according to Cardus Executive Vice President Ray Pennings.

"Here in Canada, the risk is...creeping statism that gradually erodes the family’s role in political and social life," writes Daniel Zekveld in C2C Journal.

"The promotion of $10-a-day child care as economic policy illustrates the problem with Canadian family policy, which is that we don’t have one," writes Peter Jon Mitchell, Family Program Director at Cardus and author of the report Envisioning a Federal Family-Formation Policy Framework for Canada.

Adding bureaucracy just makes things more expensive for Canadians, argues Matthew Lau in the Financial Post. To support his argument, he cites Cardus Senior Fellow Andrea Mrozek's work in The Hub detailing the bureaucratic bloat that comes with child care spending in Ontario.

In Toronto, an estimated $1.65 billion in construction is reserved for companies whose workers belong to a group of favoured unions. A 21 percent discount in Toronto would mean the city would have $347 million dollars more available to invest in police, mental health, and housing.

"New research from Cardus shows the City of Toronto could save $347 million by opening up bidding on its public projects," reports the Daily Commercial News. "Toronto currently has collective agreements with 10 building trades that limits bids on projects to contractors affiliated with those unions, shutting out alternative unions and their contractors, such as the Progressive Contractors Association of Canada (PCA)."

"The complexity of a national childcare plan comes with millions of dollars for expenditures outside of actual childcare provision," writes Cardus senior fellow Andrea Mrozek in The Hub. "In Ontario, that happens at all three levels of government. The details of that spending deserve much greater scrutiny than they’ve received so far."

Toronto's cushy deals with some construction unions mean the city is paying too much for its construction projects. If it opened up those contracts to fair and open competitive bidding, it could save an estimated $347 million dollars. That's enough to fund 400 new police officers, two new police stations, 400 mental health managers, and a doubling of the city's homelessness and shelter construction budget, write Cardus's Brian Dijkema and Renze Nauta in the Toronto Sun.