Jerry P. White

Does Postsecondary Education Benefit Aboriginal Canadians? An Examination of Earnings and Employment Outcomes for Recent Aboriginal Graduates

The labour market outcomes of Aboriginal postsecondary graduates have received very little attention in the research literature. The purpose of this paper is to build on the existing research in the area by investigating the early earnings and employment outcomes of male and female Aboriginals with various postsecondary credentials (i.e., trades, college, and university), and compare their outcomes with those of visible minorities and the rest of the population. The results of this study show that visible-minority postsecondary graduates earn more than do Aboriginals and non-minorities. However, when controlling for socio-demographic characteristics and type of postsecondary attainment (i.e., level of schooling and field of study), Aboriginals earn more than both non-minorities and visible minorities. The extent of these earnings differences depends on both gender and level of schooling. Despite their relatively favourable earnings outcomes, Aboriginal postsecondary graduates generally experience poorer employment prospects. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Everyday experiences of implicit rationing : comparing the voices of nurses in California and British Columbia

Managed Care in the U.S. is one of the more controversial strategies to implicitly ration health care. It has also been creeping into Canada where care is similarly being managed albeit in a different socio-political environment, Based on nine group interviews with 35 RNs in California and 10 group interviews with 39 RNs in British Columbia, we find that the price to be paid for the promise of cheaper, more efficient health care through managerial strategies is borne largely by nurses and other health care providers. The data reveal that nurses in British Columbia and California share similar experiences with how the amount of care is rationed at the bedside - through care pathways, early discharge policies and reduced staffing - while the rationing of access to care differs because of the socio-political contexts of their respective health care systems. In both cases, the implicit rationing of care through managerial strategies fails to deliver on its promises.

Changing Labour Process and the Nursing Crisis in Canadian Hospitals

Few issues have sparked such multi-disciplinary interest as the crisis in nursing. Health care is seen as a social good in Canada, and we have come to expect a high quality, low consumer cost service. Today, such a service is threatened and a number of fingers point to a shortage of nurses as the cause.

Modeling Educational Success of First Nations Students in Canada: Community Level Perspectives

Canadian assessments of First Nation and Aboriginal education lack any real modelling of reasons for the particular patterns of attainment — it is this void that we wish to fill. This paper examines educational attainment in First Nations communities using combined data from the 1996 Census and Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Education Survey for the school year 1995/1996, aggregated to the band level, for registered and non-registered Indian and Inuit students who live on reserve in Canada. Multiple sequential regression analysis is used to model the educational success of grade 12 and 13 students with community level characteristics, including an isolation variable, school type variable, demographic variables, economic variables, and human capital variables. We use three measures of educational success: the age appropriate rate, graduate rate, and withdrawal rate. It is shown that the community level variables are similar in their explanatory power of educational success; however, the effects of variables within blocks on measures of educational success differ. The demography and human capital blocks play a particularly important role for all three measures of educational success. Additional analysis includes an examination of standardized regression weights. The paper discusses research and policy implications and articulates future avenues for research.

AT FIRST YOU WILL NOT SUCCEED: NEGOTIATING FOR CARE IN THE CONTEXT OF HEALTH REFORM

In the majority of the literature on the social organization of care work, care is often defined in more traditional terms to refer to work on or directly related to the body. In this paper, we would like to venture beyond the body to elaborate upon a particular type of care work – negotiating care – that involves negotiations and sometimes petitions for the purpose of securing care. It is a concept that was salient in a comparative study of the experiences of health care providers with the increasing management of health care in Canada and the United States. For physicians and nurses in both settings we find a sense of the increasing burden of negotiating for care for patients – particularly textually mediated negotiations – as the access to and amount of care is increasingly limited through managed care policies. Moreover, the contexts for these negotiations are continually in flux exacerbating the time devoted to negotiate care. It is in the U.S. context, however, that textual negotiation of care is most extensive and differs in terms of audience – insurers as opposed to providers – and purpose – securing payment and not just care.

Earnings Implications of Person Years Lost Life Expectancy Among Canada's Aboriginal Peoples

Overall, Canada has one of the world’s highest national life expectancies. This benefit is not shared by Canada’s aboriginal population, however, which has a life expectancy approximately seven years less than the general population. The Aboriginal population also differs in that it has a higher fertility rate and higher mortality rates among infants and young adults. One of the consequences of the mortality differential is that the number of person years of lost life (PYLL) expectancy is large for the Aboriginal community in comparison to the general population. While several studies have focused on the causes of differential mortality, this study examines some of the socio-economic consequences of differences in PYLL. Examining wage labor income, for example, we determine that the PYLL differential translates into an expected wage and salary loss of approximately

Keynote Address for Western Journal Day

1.56 billion.

Developing Ethical Research Practices Between Institutional and Community Partners: A Look at the Current Base of Literature Surrounding Memorandums of Understanding in Canada

Today, I want to look at three interconnected things. The first is the importance of open access and what it really means. The second is the role of Scholarship@Western in supporting our open access journals from the perspective of the International Indigenous Policy Journal (IIPJ). Lastly, we want to talk about some of the actions that we have taken to enhance our journal’s readership and rankings.

More Research Needed

Few institutionalized examples exist wherein Indigenous communities have participated in the co-development of ethics initiatives. This article explores one such process—the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). A MOU is a document created between institutional and community research partners to outline project guidelines. Based on Canadian MOUs developed between 1980 and 2016, this research has four objectives; (a) to describe current trends of MOU use and recognition in research; (b) to describe the challenges of collaborative research and how MOUs might mitigate them; (c) to understand if a standard MOU is feasible; and (d) to offer policy suggesting for implementing MOUs. Local MOUs mark a way for engaging in good research practices that actually benefit the involved community.

Junked Mail: The Politics and Consequences of Privatization

We feel it is important to identify research areas that are understudied. Certainly, the impact of economic development on or near Indigenous lands is one such area. In this issue, we have three feature articles that approach the issue of economic development in terms of policies, impacts, and benefits. What is clear is that we need a much better understanding of the benefits and perils that come with development. We also need better cooperation between governments, corporations, and Indigenous communities in order to develop effective legislation and fair land use and resource agreements. IIPJ wishes to encourage those who have studied development issues to submit their work. We will shortly be announcing our intent to create an international database of quality research across a wide range of important subjects. The purpose will be to create an ever expanding, open-access source of research. This database may also contain examples of agreements and rigorous assessments of the projects in order to advance our understanding of the challenges that come with economic development.