Media Coverage

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.

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"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)."

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"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. 

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"When we use the term education system, we shouldn’t think about a single network of schools (government-run or otherwise) where 'private' ones lie outside that space," Ray Pennings, Executive Vice-President of Cardus, writes in Christianity Today. "Instead, we need to see all schools as participating in the development of the next generation of workers, neighbors, and voters who will together build a flourishing society."

"I think it's important to have our monarch having even someone above him, that being God, that he also has to report to—someone that is a higher authority than even him," says Andrew Bennett, faith communities program director for Cardus, in this CBC News story about the Canadian government's quiet decision to drop our monarch’s 16th-century religious title.

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The International Journal of Educational Development has published a peer reviewed journal article based on Future Ready, a book by ACSI and Cardus exploring how Christian schools are innovating new structural, financial, and operational models.  

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"Politicians who say they support reproductive choice need to better support young Canadians who want the choice to have children, or more of them," writes National Post columnist Sabrina Maddeaux.

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"The school choice debate is not a binary 'either/or,'” write David Hunt, education program director at Cardus, and Erik Ellefsen, a Cardus senior fellow. "Parents are increasingly choosing between a wider array of options, such as public-charter schools, open-enrollment public schools, virtual schools (of all kinds), micro schools, religious schools, and non-religious independent schools."

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Are Canadians warming up to discussing the sensitive topic of fertility? Andrea Mrozek, a Cardus senior fellow, joins podcaster and journalist Tara Henley to analyse the issue from a personal, thoughtful, and research-based perspective.

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"Mischaracterizing all religious independent schools as bastions of abuse and intolerance that don’t prepare students for post-secondary education is false," writes David Hunt, education program director at Cardus. "Robust social science research confirms religious independent schools produce civic-minded graduates ready to contribute to society."

"The fact that anyone with a B.Ed. is qualified to teach high school math but someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics isn’t, is absurd," Catharine Kavanagh, our Alberta liaison officer, and David Hunt, our education program director, write in the Calgary Herald. Subject matter experts can be teachers too.

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Rev. Dr. Andrew Bennett, our faith communities program director, joins journalist Althia Raj on It's Political, her Toronto Star podcast. He explains the findings of our research brief on religious hate crimes in Canada and helps explain why religious Canadians have a role to play in politics and other spheres of life.

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"Faith and religion have a public dimension," writes Ray Pennings, executive vice-president of Cardus. "They are not just personal and private. Canadians may be pleasantly surprised to learn that faith and faith communities are a much more significant part of our social fabric than they realize." 

"Even as new charter schools open and existing schools expand, demand is outstripping supply by a huge margin," writes Catharine Kavanagh, our Alberta liaison officer. "So why are so many children and families stuck in educational limbo, crossing their fingers and hoping they’ll get one of the highly-coveted spots in these schools?"

"Many factors influence Canadian women to have fewer children than they desire, but the most influential factors from our survey relate to the ideas that children are burdensome, that parenting is intensive and time-consuming, and that women want to finish self-development and exploration before having children," writes Lyman Stone, a Cardus senior fellow and demographer.

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"Gambling, now not only allowed, is encouraged, and heavily marketed," writes guest author Wayne Poole in the Hamilton Spectator. "According to the non-partisan think tank, Cardus, OLG spends 4.5 times as much on marketing to encourage gambling as it does on problem gambling prevention and treatment."

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"The sudden trend among Canadian authorities to make contraceptives free reflects...an embarrassingly narrow focus on just one small slice of that wellbeing," writes Lyman Stone, a Cardus senior fellow and demographer. "That narrow focus rests on an extremely thin evidentiary base alongside a feckless disregard of such evidence as does exist."  

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“As Christians, we have a particular duty to speak out against hatred against Jews,” Andrew Bennett, faith communities program director for Cardus, tells the Winnipeg Free Press. “When they get targeted, we should be the first to stand up for them.” His comments come following a Cardus report on the rise of religious hate crimes in Canada.

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“We don’t yet see a full suite of policy proposals that meet the needs of that working class,” Brian Dijkema, vice-president of external affairs at Cardus, tells The Hill Times in this story about how political leaders should respond to the demands of working-class Canadians.

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Rev. Dr. Andrew Bennett, faith communities program director at Cardus, is calling on leaders at all levels to do more to reduce hate crimes against Canada’s religious communities. He took that message to The Mike Farwell Show on City News 570 in Kitchener, ON. 

Religious hate crimes annually reported to Canadian police more than doubled between 2009 and 2021, according to a Cardus research brief. Brian Dijkema, vice-president of external affairs at Cardus, tells AM640 in Toronto it's time for leaders to take a stronger stand.

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"Nearly one in five Canadian children witness the separation or dissolution of their parents’ relationship by age 18," writes Peter Jon Mitchell, family program director at Cardus. "Despite this high percentage, little public attention is given to family structure and child well-being as a result of family breakdown."  

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"It took a recent controversy in the Cowichan First Nation to expose the serious, fundamental problems with the [Community Benefits Agreement]," writes Renze Nauta, work and economics program director at Cardus. "The program has not only failed to meet its stated objectives, but that the objectives themselves are fundamentally misaligned against the public interest."

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