Our Research

Prolonged school closures has sparked debate about the intention, necessity, and efficacy of halting in-person education as an effective policy tool.

We take a closer look at the human costs of Canadians with disabilities’ exclusion from work and identify some of the key questions standing in the way of positive policy reform.

Pour lire le rapport au complet en ligne, visitez https://www.cardus.ca/research/work-economics/reports/breaking-down-work-barriers-for-people-with-disabilities/.

Freedom of religion is one of the fundamental freedoms enumerated in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Advocacy of religious freedom is often misunderstood as calling for positions that would be difficult for anyone to reasonably accept.

The purpose of this backgrounder is to provide context for conversations at Cardus on the advantages, challenges, and potential reforms needed to improve Canada’s parental-leave benefits policies.

Are students in public schools receiving the necessary formation that will support their participation in a society that is becoming increasingly diverse in religious expression? Instructing the next generations not in a religion but about religion should be a key element of Canadian education.

This paper traces this conversation from its Greco-Roman and early Christian roots to the present—looking at how the Christian notion has shifted our conception of excellence in important ways, but how we have perhaps lost a fully rounded vision of it in our late modern world.

In this report we describe the first study that has assessed the value of a religious “good fit” in education. Using US data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), the study estimated a religious match effect, which is the difference in standardized test scores for students paired to schools of their same religion, after controlling for other variables.

A Cardus Research Brief

The Christian tradition possesses the tools to aid the Christian community in asking the right questions regarding the cultivation of a healthy participation of children in public life

Twenty years marks an important milestone for Cardus

A Cardus Family Policy Brief


Conscience, though inherently individual, is vital to the common good. Using current case studies from Canada that engage freedom of conscience, this paper offers concrete recommendations as to how this human right can be robustly protected at home and abroad.

This study presents the hypothetical economic costs of funding Ontario’s independent schools, if the province were to fully fund the sector or apply any of the existing partial-funding models in Canada.

This report explores how learning continued in Ontario’s independent schools during the continuous and disruptive school closures of the 2020–21 school year. It also investigates the financial, promotional, and business impact of these disruptions.

Our results show that the removal of restrictions enabled the Region of Waterloo to “bounce back” toward its original competitive state. The removal of restrictions led to a greater numbers of bids, more bidders, more unique firms bidding, and decreased bid gaps indicating downward pressure on municipal construction costs.

As Canada emerges from the COVID-19 crisis and accompanying recession, governments, the construction sector, and communities alike look to massive infrastructure spending to reignite the economy and promote lasting community benefits across the country. This report addresses, from the perspective of the builders’ community, the concept of community benefits agreements (CBAs)—an often poorly understood and ill-defined concept that is gaining prominence in Canada and other Western democracies.

The heart of democratic education lies in preparing the next generation to join the community of citizens. Indeed, state-funded public education developed out of the imperative to inculcate the civic knowledge, skills, and attachment necessary for democratic governance.
But what is the role of independent schools in the process of civic formation and social cohesion? Do they help or hinder the development of democratic citizenship? What oversight should governments exercise over them? And should governments fund such schools as part of public education writ large?

A Cardus research brief highlighting unpartnered young adults and the decline of fertility in Canada.

Imagine Canada like a car: we’ve just had the rare experience of smashing our economy, culture, and society into a brick wall at high speed—whether through the disease itself or our response to it. And like crash-test engineers, we now have to perform the analysis.
What did we learn? How did we fare? What performed better than expected, and what worse? And, most importantly, where do we go from here?

The social, emotional, academic, and economic implications of the global COVID-19 pandemic will be studied for years to come. This paper reports how these schools pivoted from offering face-to-face education to remote learning from March to June 2020.

Dr. Beth Green delivered the following remarks on October 6, 2017 at the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning’s conference “Christian Teaching and Learning: Pathways and Possibilities,” at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The text has been lightly adapted to appear in print.

Building financial security for all Canadians, but especially for the most vulnerable, is widely recognized as an important policy priority. Governments have a unique opportunity to kick gambling addiction to work for, not against, low-income households.