The Canadian Community Economic Development Network suggests 4 key actions to stimulate prosperity.
1. Create a Social Enterprise Capital
2. Implement an RRSP eligible CED tax credit
3. Support local procurement policies
4. Create an enabling environment for co-operatives and social enterprise growth
As mentioned before, I am hoping to share as many social innovations as possible to show how easy it is to implement sustainable development, using creativity and integration. I am hoping that 2013 will be about unprecedented adoption of new innovations, particularly, new governance models, for sustainable development.
January 4th, 2013
September 28th, 2012
Janine Brodie, a Trudeau Fellow, gave a thought-provoking ‘big thinking’ lecture at the 2012 Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences in Waterloo, entitled, Social Literacy and Social Justice in Times of Crisis. Her lecture was a brilliant political analysis of the current trends affecting Canadian society, with a rich history of critical role of the social sciences.
The ability to do work for man depends on the energy quality and quantity, and this is measureable by the amount of energy of a lower quality grade required to develop the higher grade. The scale of energy goes from dilute sunlight up to plant matter to coal, from coal to electricity and up to the high quality efforts of computer and human information processing. (Odum, 1973)
Richard Branson is using his purchase of British bank Northern Rock to offer small loans to the poor and urged Wall Street bankers to use their bonuses to help repair the economic damage they caused. His book, Screw Business as Usual, urges companies to not only focus on profit, but also on doing good for the world. "Microcredit has worked in Africa and India, maybe it could even work in somewhere like the United Kingdom". Microfinance traditionally targets women and, anlaysts say, has default rates of just a few per cent.
Fuel exports and GDP, what does this graph mean for Canada’s future vitality, especially given scenarios of peak oil and our dependence upon non-renewable resources? With our economic well-being so tied to the export of fuel, and the increasing world-wide demand of newly industrialized countries (NICs), such as China and India, what does this mean for our own energy security, and sovereignty, especially given the increasing investment by China in the Alberta Tar Sands? And yet, this country’s economy is so very reliant on natural resources; a good society asks, 'at what cost?'
I read an interesting article in the latest edition of Maclean's last night, entitled Building a better city. If you look at how an ecosystem works, it spends as much time on maintaining itself as growing, unlike human systems. Our infrastructure deficit is continuing, making the cost of replacement greater every year we keep sticking our heads in the sand. The infrastructure deficit is estimated at $123 billion in 2007, up exponentially from $12 billion in 1985 and $60 billion in 2003.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has many supporters and of course, many detractors. What I find interesting is that there are so many well-educated young people involved. Clearly, this demonstrates a deep structural problem that is not being addressed, why are so many young well educated people under or unemployed in today's society? Another disturbing trend is the chart below showing that even though GDP has increased, so has inequality. What does this mean for the good society and what questions should we be asking?