Our Research

Too much political influence increases the distance between unions and workers at the shop level, causing workers to see the state, not unions, as the primary advocate for the protection of their rights. And this is a disease, maybe even the death knell, for the labour movement.

A spate of media articles has caused Ontario parents real concern. Here’s what happened and where parents should—and should not—be concerned.

Because of historical, cultural, and governmental differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada, we have considered responses from Quebec high school graduates separately from the primary Cardus Education Survey 2016 report. This research brief reports the findings from Quebec, where it seems that schools may be choosing between an emphasis on faith formation or academic and civic formation.

The City Soul Explorer Toolkit offers four modules and practical tools to facilitate communication and closer collaboration between city planning and faith-based organizations. The Toolkit outlines a way in which the often distinct worlds of city planners and administrators and community-serving religious organizations can be bridged and brought closer together to build the social capacity of cities, towns, and neighbourhoods.

Robyn Benson’s charge to her members over the payroll debacle is at the heart of why unions in Canada are in decline.

Popular communication and even academic research have tended to think it proper to overlook the contribution of religion to the social and cultural goods of the city even where evidence has suggested that it exists in substance and extent, both historically and at present.

In this, the first of a three-part series, we ask: How are we advancing the understanding of the socio-cultural good of religion—especially Christianity as a dominant faith in North America? How does religion contribute to the well-being of cities? What form do these religious public goods take? What are their shortcomings that would be valuable to address?

Read the other reports:

This report is the first chapter of a dissertation project that examines how one might better understand the social infrastructure of our communities. The difficulties of measuring intangible social structures require ongoing experimental projects. Some of these experiments will lead to insight, others will identify dead ends. This current effort builds on existing work and proposes how that work could be applied in new ways.

Measuring phenomena as intricate and difficult as those arising from human interactions at neighbourhood scales requires careful methodological and conceptual framing. A strategy that balances directive progress with permissive exploration is needed. Around and through this open approach to exploration, novel methodologies such as the relationship between social capital and spatial use in urban areas can be considered for their potential to assist urban planners in understanding and evaluating the social impact of past, present, and future plans as a means of increasing the sophistication and effectiveness of urban planning strategies and evaluations.

As the City of Toronto puts forward an expensive and expansive daycare space creation plan, new data reveal increasing daycare space vacancy rates

This critical paper on religious freedom and its relationship to the State by Professor Brett Scharffs of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University poses an important question: why should anyone care about religious freedom? The question here, though, is specifically directed towards those who are indifferent or hostile to, or uninformed about religious freedom.

Prof. Scharffs proceeds to examine a number of the crucial debates around freedom of religion and conscience through both an historical prism and by reviewing recent American jurisprudence dealing with this foundational, or as he terms it a "root" freedom. The arguments made by Prof. Scharffs are particularly cogent. Firstly, he articulates why religious freedom is a distinct freedom with deep historical and philosophical roots, distinct from freedom of speech, association, and assembly yet inextricably bound to them and they to it. He cautions against direct or indirect attempts to sever fundamental freedoms from the root of religious freedom—an act which would result in the withering of these related freedoms.

Secondly, in his examination of the role of the State vis-a-vis the guarantee of religious freedom he offers a valuable and timely distinction between what he terms monist and dualist views. Prof. Scharffs cautions against both secular and religious monism in which religious freedom and other freedoms are viewed as gifts of the State to citizens which can likewise be taken back by the State. He advocates for a dualism in which the State acknowledges the core principle that human rights are understood to be born by all human beings and derived from our inherent characteristics of reason and conscience and our ability to have empathy and compassion for our fellows. Prof. Scharffs raises grave concern about what he perceives to be "an erosion of the strong commitment to dualism that underlies not just the human rights worldview but most of Western history."

There’s been so much daycare talk in the news since the federal budget was released on March 22, 2017. That said, there’s even more daycare-related news that wasn’t reported.

Back in 2014, Cardus published a paper on the tendering situation in Toronto and noted that "the structural framework for bidding on major municipal projects in is analogous to those which were present in Quebec that all parties suggest led to the culture of corruption traced in the Charbonneau report."

Over at my other day-job, Comment magazine, I have written a review of Samuel Bowles’ recent book The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens. You can find it here.

Building on research released last fall by Cardus Family on the importance of emotional relationships to physical well being, program director Andrea Mrozek sat down with Dr. Sue Johnson to learn about a cutting-edge approach at the Ottawa Heart Institute. Healing Hearts Together is based on data demonstrating that strong family life can play a vital part in helping cardiac patients regain their health.

This paper by Professor Douglas Farrow of McGill University is both a timely and forthright contribution to the growing discussion on the impact of the autonomy doctrine on a broad range of concepts, beliefs, and our understanding of truth itself.

The powerful criticism of this doctrine offered here is insightful. The paper offers a very helpful summary of the development of the autonomy doctrine philosophically and historically. In his arguments Prof. Farrow asserts that the increasingly widely held belief in the radical autonomy of the individual is having and will have a severely constraining effect on religious freedom. For Prof. Farrow the world is being fundamentally reordered in such a way around the individual that there is no longer any room for counter claims founded upon conscience and religious faith except insofar as they may be an aspect of a given person's individuality. Under the autonomy doctrine such claims must be assessed for what damage they might cause to another person's autonomy. The paper goes on to argue that under this conception of autonomy the human individual is no longer viewed as an accountable moral agent but rather a self-creating, self-measuring, and self-terminating being and no form of perceived religious intolerance must be permitted to infringe on this new conceptualisation of the social contract.

For Prof. Farrow, this development is a disturbing one. He examines how this idea has taken root in Canada not simply as broadly-held opinion but institutionally through legislation and regulation. Finally, Prof. Farrow assesses this increasing entrenchment of the autonomy doctrine particularly in how this doctrine misunderstands the human body and how ultimately certain fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of religion and conscience, will become subservient to this self-same doctrine.

Do we know what Canadians think about women's issues and how they connect to politics, culture and family? Angus Reid Forum asked questions about these subjects. If one theme emerges it is diversity. Neither men nor women are easily categorized on a host of issues facing women in Canada in 2017. Some of these questions address current events. Others step back and examine the bigger picture. Either way, Canadians cannot be put in one easy box.

Who are you going to serve? A supplementary to theological writings on money from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and a recent Theology of Money produced by the Anglican Church of Canada.

The Ontario government’s Putting Consumers First Act (Bill 59) takes some positive steps on payday loans, but also leaves out several important measures that could help consumers. While it is good to see that Bill 59 tries to reduce repeat borrowing from payday lenders and ease repayment of loans with usurious interest rates, the bill is too focused on regulation. Brian Dijkema, Work & Economics Program Director at public policy think tank Cardus, told a legislative committee that consumers attracted to payday loans need alternative options.

Professor Tom Farr's clearly written paper traces for the reader the development of the idea of religious freedom in the American context from the founding days of the republic during the Enlightenment through to our times in which the very acceptance of religious freedom as a core principle in our society is under threat.

Farr argues persuasively that the United States' founding fathers created a system of religious freedom based on the free exercise principle that was genuinely new. This system recognized a public faith, one that reflected the interior faith lives of citizens in how they conducted themselves religiously in the public space. This was possible due to the conception held by the vast majority of Americans that they were a religious people, yet this historic understanding has shifted fundamentally. Farr buttresses this civic understanding of religious freedom with the Catholic understanding of religious freedom and its insistence on human dignity and conscience leading to an exploration of how religious freedom is exercised by faithful individuals and those self-same individuals existing as and operating within communities of faith.

Farr offers a clear warning around the growing intolerance for religious freedom in the United States in the face of non-discrimination laws and a rejection of religious freedom as being intrinsically bound up in the common good. This state of affairs has led to a collective forgetting of what religious freedom means. It is an amnesia that is hindering the United States' ability to engage religion when it confronts it in the world of international affairs.

Economics is too important to put in a place of ultimate importance.

Jonathan Schwarz and David Sikkink investigate if high schools in the United States foster behavior, attitudes, and identities that support volunteering and giving among their graduates.

The effort to repeal Section 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada is not evidence-based policy-making.

It makes sense that most of our public debate about infrastructure spending focuses on revenue. Where will we get the money? Who will pay? How? Which tax structures will be needed to build our bridges? Should we borrow to pay for our water treatment plants and subway lines? If so, how much?

But too heavy a focus on revenue can lead us to neglect sound public policy focused on cost containment.

This paper is intended as a reminder and a spur. A reminder of the practices and data that allow governments to invest responsibly and in the public interest. And a spur to government, industry, labour, and others to consider that fair, open, and competitive tendering lightens that burden on this generation and the next.

In examining the impact of recent judicial rulings on cases under Section 2a of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that enshrines freedom of conscience and religion, Faisal Bhabha draws our attention to how individuals' religious expression has been and is being accommodated within Canadian jurisprudence. Bhabha argues that the Supreme Court of Canada is striving in its decisions to reflect the multicultural nature of Canadian society by striking a balance between competing interests. In so doing, Bhabha posits, the Court is shifting from a posture of strong rights articulation to a weak rights application. The paper also highlights the emerging challenge of 'faithism'—a new form of discrimination increasingly manifested by public sceptics who ascribe negative characteristics or flawed values to people who profess a religious faith—and the impact that such discrimination can have on Canada's multicultural and multi-faith reality.