The Ontario Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Individual Privacy Act: an analysis of its application to school boards

In Canada freedom of information must be viewed in the context of governing -- how do you deal with an abundance of information while balancing a diversity of competing interests? How can you ensure people are informed enough to participate in crucial decision-making, yet willing enough to let some administrative matters be dealt with in camera without their involvement in every detail. In an age when taxpayers' coalition groups are on the rise, and the government is encouraging the establishment of Parent Council groups for schools, the issues and challenges presented by access to information and protection of privacy legislation are real ones. The province of Ontario's decision to extend freedom of information legislation to local governments does not ensure, or equate to, full public disclosure of all facts or necessarily guarantee complete public comprehension of an issue. The mere fact that local governments, like school boards, decide to collect, assemble or record some information and not to collect other information implies that a prior decision was made by "someone" on what was important to record or keep. That in itself means that not all the facts are going to be disclosed, regardless of the presence of legislation. The resulting lack of information can lead to public mistrust and lack of confidence in those who govern. This is completely contrary to the spirit of the legislation which was to provide interested members of the community with facts so that values like political accountability and trust could be ensured and meaningful criticism and input obtained on matters affecting the whole community. This thesis first reviews the historical reasons for adopting freedom of information legislation, reasons which are rooted in our parliamentary system of government. However, the same reasoning for enacting such legislation cannot be applied carte blanche to the municipal level of government in Ontario, or - ii - more specifially to the programs, policies or operations of a school board. The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, 1989 (MFIPPA) was a neccessary step to ensure greater openness from school boards. Based on a review of the Orders made by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner/Ontario, it also assesses how successfully freedom of information legislation has been implemented at the municipal level of government. The Orders provide an opportunity to review what problems school boards have encountered, and what guidance the Commissioner has offered. Reference is made to a value framework as an administrative tool in critically analyzing the suitability of MFIPPA to school boards. The conclusion is drawn that MFIPPA appears to have inhibited rather than facilitated openness in local government. This may be attributed to several factors inclusive of the general uncertainty, confusion and discretion in interpreting various provisions and exemptions in the Act. Some of the uncertainty is due to the fact that an insufficient number of school board staff are familiar with the Act. The complexity of the Act and its legalistic procedures have over-formalized the processes of exchanging information. In addition there appears to be a concern among municipal officials that granting any access to information may be violating personal privacy rights of others. These concerns translate into indecision and extreme caution in responding to inquiries. The result is delay in responding to information requests and lack of uniformity in the responses given. However, the mandatory review of the legislation does afford an opportunity to address some of these problems and to make this complex Act more suitable for application to school boards. In order for the Act to function more efficiently and effectively legislative changes must be made to MFIPPA. It is important that the recommendations for improving the Act be adopted before the government extends this legislation to any other public entities.

Cardiovascular health risk profiling of Niagara Region grade 9 students : implications for elementary curriculum /

The purpose of this study was to determine if Ontario's health and physical education curriculum contributes sufficiently to ensure the health of our children and young adults. To determine the curriculum effect, the health risk profile of Niagara Region's grade 9 students was compared to Canada's adolescent population. All subjects completed a "Heart Health Lifestyle" survey and were measured for height, weight, percent body fat, blood pressure, and total cholesterol and performed the 20-metre shuttle run test as part of their physical and health education classes. The Niagara Region grade 9 population had a healthy risk profile. Aerobic power was inversely related, and cholesterol levels were positively associated to body mass index and percent body fat in the whole group analysis. These results indicate that physical education can offer unique and essential aspects allowing individuals a means to learn and control body movements and keep physically fit while providing protection against modern disease. Ontario's health and physical education curriculum does contribute to the health of our children and adolescents; however, there is a need to implement a stronger mandate for daily vigorous physical activity.

Mentorships and co-op placements as a means of heightening the need for a secondary school diploma to the education of at-risk students.--

Both educators and politicians appear to be quite concerned about a dropout rate in Ontario's public schools of some 30 percent. With the basic understanding that a high dropout rate is costly both in economic terms and in human terms, something quite obviously needs to be done to reduce the dropout rate in Ontario schools and, in doing so, ensuring Ontario and its graduates an active role in a growing global economy. This study is an exploratory pilot study in that it examined mentoring and the role that mentoring can play in assisting a student in staying in school and graduating from secondary school. Also incorporated in this is co-operative education and the role it can play, through mentoring, in making students aware of lifestyle level of employment, and of the skills necessary to obtain gainful, meaningful employment. In order to gain information on student attitudes, needs and expectations of a mentoring situation, a series of three questionnaires was used. Also, a questionnaire was distributed to the various co-operative education employers. The intent of this questionnaire was to probe the attitudes, needs and expectations of a mentoring situation from the perspective of an employer. The findings of this study indicated that co-operative education and mentoring are a very valuable and useful component in education. There exist certain factors in a co-operative education setting that serve to enhance and to augment the traditional or "theoretical" setting of the classroom. In addition, a mentoring situation tends to add a sense of relevance to education that students seem to require. Also, an opportunity is offered that allows a student to practice and further refine the skills that have been taught over the course of the student's academic life. Results from this study suggested that a mentoring situation, occurring through a co-operative education situation, adds relevance and a sense of "application" to the traditional or classroom schooling situation. The whole idea of mentoring bodes well for the future of education and of the student. Many advantages are identified in a mentoring situation. One of the advantages is that the schools are able to work quite closely with the community and business in order to stay current and informed on the needs and expected needs of the business community. Co-operative education has now gone beyond being an "experimental" mode of education. All students can benefit from being involved in the program. Certainly at-risk students are aided with staying in school. Those students who are said to be not at-risk can also benefit from being enrolled in the program by gaining hands-on work experience and some of the necessary skills to ensure a place in a growing world economy.

Openness and privacy in Ontario: an evaluation of the implementation of FIPPA : (The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, 1987, Chapter 25 and Ontario Regulation 532/87) /

Since the early 1970's, Canadians have expressed many concerns about the growth of government and its impact on their daily lives. The public has requested increased access to government documents and improved protection of the personal information which is held in government files and data banks. At the same time, both academics and practitioners in the field of public administration have become more interested in the values that public servants bring to their decisions and recommendations. Certain administrative values, such as accountability and integrity, have taken on greater relative importance. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the implementation of Ontario's access and privacy law. It centres on the question of whether or not the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, 1987, (FIPPA) has answered the demand for open access to government while at the same time protecting the personal privacy of individual citizens. It also assesses the extent to which this relatively new piece of legislation has made a difference to the people of Ontario. The thesis presents an overview of the issues of freedom of information and protection of privacy in Ontario. It begins with the evolution of the legislation and a description of the law itself. It focuses on the structures and processes which have been established to meet the procedural and administrative demands of the Act. These structures and processes are evaluated in two ways. First, the thesis evaluates how open the Ontario government has become and, second, it determines how Ill carefully the privacy rights of individuals are safeguarded. An analytical framework of administrative values is used to evaluate the overall performance of the government in these two areas. The conclusion is drawn that, overall, the Ontario government has effectively implemented the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, particularly by providing access to most government-held documents. The protection of individual privacy has proved to be not only more difficult to achieve, but more difficult to evaluate. However, the administrative culture of the Ontario bureaucracy is shown to be committed to ensuring that the access and privacy rights of citizens are respected.

Letters from the Secretary of War to the Committee of Ways and Means, in relation to the number of Militia called into the public service in 1813, to a provision for paying the bounties and premiums to soldiers lately authorized, and to the strength of the army.--

At head of title: [78].

A Foucaultian analysis of power relations in child protection case work with youth and families

This thesis takes some steps in examining the child protection system from a position that is rarely discussed. Specifically, I explore how Foucault's concept of disciplinary power can be used to demonstrate how power operates within the client/worker relationship. This relationship is shown to be quite complex with power flowing bidirectionally, rather than hierarchically. Instead of viewing power imbalances as a function of state control, I show how the client/worker relationship is constituted by the worker, the client, the organization and the social body. A postmodern auto ethnography is used to document my journey as I expose the disciplinary practices and instruments that I was subject to and used with my clients. 2 Given that the child protection system is constantly shifting and changing in order to improve its ability to safeguard children a greater emphasis is required to examine how workers operate within this complex, overwhelming and multi-dimensional world. This thesis has shown that by engaging in a reflexive examination of my position of power different approaches to making intervention beneficial to all involved become available. This is important if child protection work aims to work with clients rather than on clients.

Scales, networks and uncertainty : an examination of environmental policy-making in Ontario

Through a case-study analysis of Ontario's ethanol policy, this thesis addresses a number of themes that are consequential to policy and policy-making: spatiality, democracy and uncertainty. First, I address the 'spatial debate' in Geography pertaining to the relevance and affordances of a 'scalar' versus a 'flat' ontoepistemology. I argue that policy is guided by prior arrangements, but is by no means inevitable or predetermined. As such, scale and network are pragmatic geographical concepts that can effectively address the issue of the spatiality of policy and policy-making. Second, I discuss the democratic nature of policy-making in Ontario through an examination of the spaces of engagement that facilitate deliberative democracy. I analyze to what extent these spaces fit into Ontario's environmental policy-making process, and to what extent they were used by various stakeholders. Last, I take seriously the fact that uncertainty and unavoidable injustice are central to policy, and examine the ways in which this uncertainty shaped the specifics of Ontario's ethanol policy. Ultimately, this thesis is an exercise in understanding sub-national environmental policy-making in Canada, with an emphasis on how policy-makers tackle the issues they are faced with in the context of environmental change, political-economic integration, local priorities, individual goals, and irreducible uncertainty.

Determinants of bankruptcy protection duration for Canadian firms

The present thesis examines the determinants of the bankruptcy protection duration for Canadian firms. Using a sample of Canadian firms that filed for bankruptcy protection between the calendar years 1992 and 2009, we fmd that the firm age, the industry adjusted operating margin, the default spread, the industrial production growth rate or the interest rate are influential factors on determining the length of the protection period. Older firms tend to stay longer under protection from creditors. As older firms have more complicated structures and issues to settle, the risk of exiting soon the protection (the hazard rate) is small. We also find that firms that perform better than their benchmark as measured by the industry they belong to, tend to leave quickly the bankruptcy protection state. We conclude that the fate of relatively successful companies is determined faster. Moreover, we report that it takes less time to achieve a final solution to firms under bankrupt~y when the default spread is low or when the appetite for risk is high. Conversely, during periods of high default spreads and flight for quality, it takes longer time to resolve the bankruptcy issue. This last finding may suggest that troubled firms should place themselves under protection when spreads are low. However, this ignores the endogeneity issue: high default spread may cause and incidentally reflect higher bankruptcy rates in the economy. Indeed, we find that bankruptcy protection is longer during economic downturns. We explain this relation by the natural increase in default rate among firms (and individuals) during economically troubled times. Default spreads are usually larger during these harsh periods as investors become more risk averse since their wealth shrinks. Using a Log-logistic hazard model, we also fmd that firms that file under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) protection spend longer time restructuring than firms that filed under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (BIA). As BIA is more statutory and less flexible, solutions can be reached faster by court orders.

Regulation of Systemic Acquired Resistance through the Interaction of Arabidopsis thaliana Transcription factors TGAI and TGA2 with NPRI

Arabidopsis thaliana is an established model plant system for studying plantpathogen interactions. The knowledge garnered from examining the mechanism of induced disease resistance in this model system can be applied to eliminate the cost and danger associated with current means of crop protection. A specific defense pathway, known as systemic acquired resistance (SAR), involves whole plant protection from a wide variety of bacterial, viral and fungal pathogens and remains induced weeks to months after being triggered. The ability of Arabidopsis to mount SAR depends on the accumulation of salicylic acid (SA), the NPRI (non-expressor of pathogenesis related gene 1) protein and the expression of a subset of pathogenesis related (PR) genes. NPRI exerts its effect in this pathway through interaction with a closely related class of bZIP transcription factors known as TGA factors, which are named for their recognition of the cognate DNA motif TGACG. We have discovered that one of these transcription factors, TGA2, behaves as a repressor in unchallenged Arabidopsis and acts to repress NPRI-dependent activation of PRJ. TGA1, which bears moderate sequence similarity to TGA2, acts as a transcriptional activator in unchallenged Arabidopsis, however the significance of this activity is J unclear. Once SAR has been induced, TGAI and TGA2 interact with NPRI to form complexes that are capable of activating transcription. Curiously, although TGAI is capable of transactivating, the ability of the TGAI-NPRI complex to activate transcription results from a novel transactivation domain in NPRI. This transactivation domain, which depends on the oxidation of cysteines 521 and 529, is also responsible for the transactivation ability of the TGA2-NPRI complex. Although the exact mechanism preventing TGA2-NPRI interaction in unchallenged Arabidopsis is unclear, the regulation of TGAI-NPRI interaction is based on the redox status of cysteines 260 and 266 in TGAl. We determined that a glutaredoxin, which is an enzyme capable of regulating a protein's redox status, interacts with the reduced form of TGAI and this interaction results .in the glutathionylation of TGAI and a loss of interaction with NPRl. Taken together, these results expand our understanding of how TGA transcription factors and NPRI behave to regulate events and gene expression during SAR. Furthermore, the regulation of the behavior of both TGAI and NPRI by their redox status and the involvement of a glutaredoxin in modulating TGAI-NPRI interaction suggests the redox regulation of proteins is a general mechanism implemented in SAR.

Letter from the Chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means to the Secretary of the Treasurer on the subject of a system of revenue to revive and maintain unimpaired the public credit, with the answer of the Secretary thereto. (1814)

October 18, 1814. Read, and committed to the Committee of the whole House on the report of the Committee of Ways and Means on so much of the President's message as relates to the finances of the United States.

The Political Economy of St. Catharines' Illicit Taxi Trade

The global restructuring of production has led to increasingly precarious working conditions around the world. Post-industrial work is characterized by poor working conditions, low wages, a lack of social protection and political representation and little job security. Unregulated forms of work that are defined as “irregular” or “illegal”, or in some cases “criminal,” are connected to sweeping transformations within the broader regulated (formal) economy. The connection between the formal and informal sectors can more accurately be described as co-optation and, as a subordinate integration of the informal to the formal. The city of St. Catharines within Niagara, along with much of Ontario’s industrial heartland, has been hard hit by deindustrialization. The rise of this illegal service is thus viewed against the backdrop of heavy economic restructuring, as opportunities for work in the manufacturing sector have become sparse. In addition, this research also explores the paradoxical co-optation of the growing illicit taxi economy and consequences for racialized and foreign credentialed labour in the taxi industry. The overall objective of this research is to explore the illicit cab industry as not only inseparable from the formal economy, but dialectically, how it is as an integrated and productive element of the public and private transportation industry. Furthermore the research examines what this co-optation means in the context of a labour market that is split by race.