Stasis Amidst Change: Canadian Pension Reform in an Age of Retrenchment

Faced with aging populations and especially heightened fiscal constraints, large scale pension reforms were implemented in many affluent democracies during the 1990s. Canadian reforms, by contrast, were quite modest and old age security benefits emerged largely unscathed. Drawing on the comparative experience of other OECD nations, we highlight four characteristics of the Canadian pension system and the policy environment to account for this relative stability:(1) the comparatively modest scale of Canadian public sector pension expenditures; (2) relatively greater reliance on general revenue as opposed to payroll taxes to finance these expenditures; (3) the availability of other expenditure targets, notably health care, post-secondary education and social assistance, that could be cut with less political backlash; and (4) a pension design that allocates the public sector share disproportionately to the bottom end of the income distribution, precluding the emergence of the oppositional politics that fueled public debate elsewhere.aging population; pension reform

The Politics of Protest Avoidance: Policy Windows, Labor Mobilization, and Pension Reform in France

According to Paul Pierson and R. Kent Weaver, the "new politics of the welfare state" is about escaping the popular blame generated by cutbacks affecting a significant portion of the population. Although the concept of blame avoidance helps to explain the political logic of welfare state retrenchment, one can argue that a careful analysis of social policy reform should take into account a largely understudied phenomenon: protest avoidance. Especially present in countries with single party governments and politically active labor unions, protest avoidance is analytically distinct from blame avoidance because it occurs when policy-makers, facing direct and nearly inescapable blame, attempt to reduce the scope of social mobilization triggered by unpopular reforms. In recent decades, successive French governments have successfully introduced major--and unpopular--reforms in the field of pensions, despite the difficulties to frame blame avoidance strategies in the context of France's strong concentration of state power. Focusing on the 1993, 1995, and 2003 pension reform episodes, this paper seeks to demonstrate that right wing governments have generally tried to avoid protest rather than escape blame. We claim that the key element has been avoiding disruptive strike activities by the labor movement, which are highly political in France. We argue that right wing governments have attempted to divide the fragmented labor movement and overload the reform agenda while enacting its most controversial reforms during the summer holiday season. Protest avoidance thus represents a key political variable worthy of study in the literature on welfare state retrenchment. In the future, the concept of protest avoidance could be applied to other countries and policy areas in which elected officials attempt to impose unpopular reforms that trigger social mobilization.protest avoidance; pension reform

Health and Individual and Community Characteristics: A Research Protocol

Population health policies tend to target communities to enhance the health status of individuals. However, little is known about the effects of community or socio-economic environmental variables on individual health characteristics and behaviour patterns. This paper outlines procedures designed to examine the contribution of context in producing health.health policy

PTTI applications at Hydro-Quebec

As a power utility, Hydro-Quebec used the PTTI techniques. The time dissemination system in the Hydro-Quebec Network (11th PTTI) is now installed in several points. A portable clock was built using a rubidium standard and associated circuitry which are necessary for the measurements. The apparatus and the experimental results obtained are described. The use of GOES synchronized clocks for making precise voltage angle measurement on the Hydro-Quebec Network is discussed. Some modifications were made on a commercial unit. Applications and results are presented

The New Politics of US Health Care Prices: Institutional Reconfiguration and the Emergence of All-Payer Claims Databases

Prices are a significant driver of health care cost in the United States. Existing research on the politics of health system reform has emphasized the limited nature of policy entrepreneurs’ efforts at solving the problem of rising prices through direct regulation at the state level. Yet this literature fails to account for how change agents in the states gradually reconfigured the politics of prices, forging new, transparency-based policy instruments called all-payer claims databases (APCDs), which are designed to empower consumers, purchasers, and states to make informed market and policy choices. Drawing on pragmatist institutional theory, this article shows how APCDs emerged as the dominant model for reforming health care prices. While APCD advocates faced significant institutional barriers to policy change, we show how they reconfigured existing ideas, tactical repertoires, and legal-technical infrastructures to develop a politically and technologically robust reform. Our analysis has important implications for theories of how change agents overcome structural barriers to health reform

Alien Registration- Beland, Amanda (Sanford, York County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/3723/thumbnail.jp

Ash Decline: An Opportunity for Young Forest Wildlife

The overall decline of ash tree health presents an opportunity for landowners to salvage dying trees, thus contributing to state and federal efforts to create young forest habitat for a wide variety of wildlife species, in addition to benefitting from the financial and recreational opportunities that come following salvage operations. This case study examines the results of a decision made by the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC, Hartford, CT) to conduct a timber salvage operation on its public water supply watershed land to remove dying white ash (Fraxinus americana) trees and at the same time meet the goals of the State of Connecticut and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) for creating habitat for the New England cottontail (NEC; Sylvilagus transitionalis) and other wildlife dependent on young forests. Bird surveys conducted in the area by a wildlife biologist from 2009 to 2016, overlapping with the timber harvest, suggested that the young forest regenerated after the harvest may have been instrumental in attracting dozens of bird species that had not been recorded there in the past. The young forest created is expected to support New England cottontails, though they have not yet been observed there by the monitoring program

Alien Registration- Beland, Virginia (Lewiston, Androscoggin County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/26895/thumbnail.jp

Under Democratic governors, Blacks are more likely to work, decreasing their earnings gap with whites.

In recent years, inequality has come to the forefront as a political concern. In new research, Louis-Philippe Beland examines how the party affiliation of state governors affects the earnings gap between black and white workers. Using labor market and election data, he finds that under Democratic governors, blacks are more likely to participate in the labor market and work more intensively, narrowing the earnings gap between blacks and whites