PPF Blog

Access to more settlement services, easier family reunification and safety are among the myriad reasons refugees tend to stay where they settle in the Maritimes, writes Kelly Toughill

Some employers and advocates want Canada to recruit refugees to fill local labour shortages, Kelly Toughill reports. Others worry that would dilute the humanitarian mission of resettling the world’s most vulnerable citizens.

The application period for the 2019/2020 Action Canada Fellowship is now open. Interested individuals have until March 15 at 5 p.m. PST to apply.

We're pleased to announce all five of our honourees for our 2019 Testimonial Dinner honourees, for their dedication to public service and strengthening our democracy and its institutions.

Rapid change in how we work can stoke fears of a jobless future, but these key policy changes can help turn anxiety into opportunity.

What's your wonk score? From 12 months of PPF policy events and projects, we've come up with 12 questions to challenge you. Take our Holiday Quiz.

The question of how, or whether, to demarcate who qualifies as a journalist has returned in louder, more insistent terms with the federal government’s pledge to introduce a tax credit rebating an unspecified percentage of the labour costs of newsrooms. Let's define journalists by what they do: "A definition does not infringe on anyone’s right to report and publish; it simply provides some with the advantage of a shield law or tax credit."

Atlantic Canada faces profound demographic changes that challenge its future prosperity and economic sustainability. With a new email newsletter, the Public Policy Forum will keep you up to date on our three-year research project on immigrant retention and labour market revitalization in the region and share other timely research and articles.

More than 3,000 job offers had been made through the program by the end of October 2018, but only 1,202 workers, spouses and children were granted permanent residency through the program in the same period. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is trying to speed up the pace of permanent residency admissions.

The disappearance of Bhutanese from Halifax is discouraging to those who believe the future of Atlantic Canada is tied to increased immigration, but it is also an opportunity to look at the factors that encourage newcomers to take root – and the factors that lead them away.

Cultural food security is key to how and whether immigrants take root in their new home. In Halifax, Common Roots Urban Farm was the only source of some traditional foods for newcomers, but the community garden was shut down and no one knows where – or if – it will rise again.

Welcome aboard to five new directors on the Public Policy Forum board: Neil Desai, Christiane Fox, Eric Axford, Kathy Kinloch and Dominic Barton.

The rise of harmful speech online is a threat to Canada’s democracy. This report outlines how governments and digital platform companies can better address hate and harassment, including the creation of a Moderation Standards Council.

After six tornadoes ripped through the Ottawa region, there will likely be a review of how authorities responded to this event. The aim of such exercises is to identify the “lessons learned” from the incident in order to improve response and resilience in the future. Unfortunately, “lessons learned” is one of the most misused terms in emergency management.

In 2017, the Public Policy Forum dedicated its annual Prime Ministers of Canada Fellowship to the idea of governance in the digital age. The goal was to explore and explain how the world is changing and how governments are responding. Kent Aitken won that Fellowship and wrote a report that practitioners can use as a resource as they contemplate the pressures of change on governance systems. Governance in the Digital Age is the result of a year of research, surveys and interviews with about 300 government practitioners and stakeholders in Canada and around the world.