Browsing by Author "Blake, Raymond B."

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Open Access
SIPP Public Policy Papers 22
(Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy, 2004-01) Blake, Raymond B.; Diaz, Polo; Piwowar, Joe; Polanyi, Michael; Robinson, Reid; Whyte, John D.; Wilson, Malcolm
When Canada’s Minister of the Environment, David Anderson, notified the United Nations (UN) on 17 December 2002 that Canada would ratify the UN Framework Agreement on Climate Change, known best as the Kyoto Protocol, Canada joined nearly 100 countries to do so. Together, these countries represented about 40 per cent of the 1990 emissions, still some distance from the 55 per cent threshold necessary for the UN Agreement to come into effect. A day earlier, then Prime Minister Jean Chretien had signed the 1997 treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions at a ceremony in Ottawa after the House of Commons had approved the treaty. Because the United States, which is responsible for more than 36 per cent of all emissions, had rejected the treaty, there was great hope that Russia would soon ratify the protocol. Once Russia became a signatory to the agreement, it and all other signatories would have committed themselves to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to six per cent below 1990 rates by 2012. In Canada, that necessitated a reduction of 20 to 30 per cent from current levels. However, Russia, like the United States and Australia, has not yet ratified the Kyoto Protocol and, without Russia, which accounts for 17.4 per cent of emissions, the Protocol may be in serious trouble.
Open Access
SIPP Public Policy Papers 25
(Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy, 2004-06) Blake, Raymond B.
‘Canada, quite simply, is not a country in search of an identity, contrary to the polemics of poets, pundits and professors,’ Erin Anderssen and Michael Valpy wrote in the Globe and Mail on Canada Day 2003. ‘It’s not a country continually on the verge of something but never quite there,’ they remarked, reporting on a major survey from the Centre for Research and Information (CRIC) on Canada and the Toronto Globe and Mail in what the newspaper called The New Canada Series. ‘Canadians are not a people who have nothing in common except their diversity. They have remarkably similar values.... [and] they have attitudes and an approach to life that markedly distinguish them from young Americans and young Europeans.’ There is considerable evidence to suggest that Canadians consider themselves more Canadian than ever, and Matthew Mendelsohn, one of Canada’s foremost scholars on public opinion surveys, has concluded from his review of dozens of surveys that ‘the Canadian is stronger than the provincial in all provinces except Quebec.’
Open Access
SIPP Public Policy Papers 28
(Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy, 2004-12) Stokes, Janice; Peach, Ian; Blake, Raymond B.
According to Section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867, the federal government has jurisdiction over “Indians and Lands reserved for Indians”. Nonetheless, as the cost of providing social programs to Aboriginal peoples has increased, and as more Aboriginal peoples have left reserves, the federal government has come to limit access to social programs primarily to reserve residents. As the percentage of the Aboriginal population living in urban centres has grown rapidly, from 7 per cent in the 1950s to about 50 per cent today, this has become a significant issue for both Aboriginal people and provincial governments.