In Toronto, an estimated $1.65 billion in construction is reserved for companies whose workers belong to a group of favoured unions. A 21 percent discount in Toronto would mean the city would have $347 million dollars more available to invest in police, mental health, and housing.

"New research from Cardus shows the City of Toronto could save $347 million by opening up bidding on its public projects," reports the Daily Commercial News. "Toronto currently has collective agreements with 10 building trades that limits bids on projects to contractors affiliated with those unions, shutting out alternative unions and their contractors, such as the Progressive Contractors Association of Canada (PCA)."

"The complexity of a national childcare plan comes with millions of dollars for expenditures outside of actual childcare provision," writes Cardus senior fellow Andrea Mrozek in The Hub. "In Ontario, that happens at all three levels of government. The details of that spending deserve much greater scrutiny than they’ve received so far."

Toronto's cushy deals with some construction unions mean the city is paying too much for its construction projects. If it opened up those contracts to fair and open competitive bidding, it could save an estimated $347 million dollars. That's enough to fund 400 new police officers, two new police stations, 400 mental health managers, and a doubling of the city's homelessness and shelter construction budget, write Cardus's Brian Dijkema and Renze Nauta in the Toronto Sun.

"When we use the term education system, we shouldn’t think about a single network of schools (government-run or otherwise) where 'private' ones lie outside that space," Ray Pennings, Executive Vice-President of Cardus, writes in Christianity Today. "Instead, we need to see all schools as participating in the development of the next generation of workers, neighbors, and voters who will together build a flourishing society."

"I think it's important to have our monarch having even someone above him, that being God, that he also has to report to—someone that is a higher authority than even him," says Andrew Bennett, faith communities program director for Cardus, in this CBC News story about the Canadian government's quiet decision to drop our monarch’s 16th-century religious title.

The International Journal of Educational Development has published a peer reviewed journal article based on Future Ready, a book by ACSI and Cardus exploring how Christian schools are innovating new structural, financial, and operational models.  

"Politicians who say they support reproductive choice need to better support young Canadians who want the choice to have children, or more of them," writes National Post columnist Sabrina Maddeaux.

"The school choice debate is not a binary 'either/or',” write David Hunt, education program director at Cardus, and Erik Ellefsen, a Cardus senior fellow. "Parents are increasingly choosing between a wider array of options, such as public-charter schools, open-enrollment public schools, virtual schools (of all kinds), micro schools, religious schools, and non-religious independent schools." Photo by Muhammad Rizwan on Unsplash