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This chapter provides an overview of approaches to collaboration in Ontario and then focuses in particular on the experiences of the Norway–Canada (NORCAN) programme involving nine schools across Alberta and Ontario (Canada) and Norway from 2014 to 2018. NORCAN was established through collaboration by the teachers’ unions in Alberta (Alberta Teachers’ Association), Norway (Utdanningsforbundet), and Ontario (Ontario Teachers’ Federation) and the Ontario Ministry of Education. A central guiding question was co-developed to inform the work of NORCAN: ‘How can an international network of schools and educators committed to mindful leadership help to identify obstacles to students’ mathematics learning and develop strategies for attaining success?’ With funding support, school teams involving school leaders, teachers, and students had opportunities to collaborate at NORCAN-facilitated events, school visits in each jurisdiction, through an online platform, and ongoing communication. The following important features of NORCAN are identified: the development of collaborative structures, processes, relationships, and trust; student voice, agency, and leadership; professional learning and agency; and sharing knowledge and de-privatizing practices. Four lessons for policy and practice are proposed: 1. school-to-school collaboration benefits from adequate resources of time, funding and a support infrastructure; 2. the intentional cultivation of mutually respectful and trusting relationships is essential; 3. bringing together educators and students as co-learners is powerful and beneficial; and 4. mobilizing knowledge and de-privatizing practices needs to be central to the purpose and operation of collaboration.

This study looks at board governance in Ontario hospitals.

We conducted a research of the hospitals’ websites and a survey of board directors to study the board structure and examine governance practice in Ontario hospitals.

The findings suggest that the board structure and process in Ontario hospitals are in compliance with Accreditation Canada’s Governance Standards, and such administrative controls are appropriate. Ontario hospital boards, in general, have fulfilled their key functions of governance in terms of working as an effective board; developing a clear direction; supporting the organization to achieve its mandate; maintaining positive relationships with external stakeholders; and being accountable and achieving sustainable results. Building knowledge through information is an area where improvement is needed.

Ontario hospitals have implemented appropriate administrative controls in terms of board composition and committee structure. The results of a survey of 99 board directors from over 25 hospitals suggest that directors, in general, have a good understanding of their governance role and relationship with senior management as well as the government. The findings are also supportive of good governance practice where executives manage and nonexecutive directors monitor the performance of the executives. According to the respondents, Ontario’s hospital boards are actively involved in setting the mission, strategic goals and objectives of their organizations, and they take appropriate steps to ensure that risk management, client safety, and quality improvements are incorporated in their governance and strategic planning process. In order to discharge their fiduciary duty effectively, respondents would like to have more information from different sources. This is an area where management accounting professionals can become involved such that relevant information from a variety of sources, especially external sources, are provided to board directors for decision making.

Ontario’s hospital sector has undertaken initiatives through research and publications to promote good governance practice. Such leadership is critical to ensure that directors have the competence and skills to discharge their duties and responsibilities diligently. Hospital boards should focus on renewal while ensuring that board directors are equipped for the challenging task of governing through professional development and continuing education.

Limitations related to the use of questionnaire applies to this research study. Self-selection bias and low response rate limit the generalizability of the findings. Future research can examine the behavior of directors in the boardroom and the impact of governance variables on hospital performance, such as quality of care and patient safety.

This chapter focuses on Guided Entry into New Teaching and Learning Experiences (GENTLE), a reception centre designed to welcome student refugees and facilitate their early integration into schools in the Thames Valley District School Board in Ontario, Canada. Our examination focuses on the values and policies that guided leaders’ decision-making, the practices educators employed, as well as the allocation and use of resources to ensure Syrian refugee students were integrated successfully; each issue constitutes a noted gap in the related academic literature. This chapters draws from direct accounts of the eight education leaders, working at each level of Ontario’s educational governance structure, who played a role in the integration of Syrian student refugees in Ontario. The case underscores that fulfilling humanitarian visions, such as welcoming and integrating thousands of refugees, requires a nimble, well-coordinated, strategic and adequately resourced response; the response must be grounded in a wide range of evidence, including local/anecdotal insights, to achieve an inclusive vision for education. Aspirations to fulfil such a vision must be nurtured, learned, shared and collectively earned by educators operating at all levels of the system, which remains a perpetual work in progress. Implications for leader practitioners and researchers include the need to critically interrogate educational programming for refugees offered at all levels of the school system, inspire educators of varying perspectives to commit to a particular vision of inclusion for newcomers and manage resources morally, strategically, sustainably and flexibly.

This research studied the integration of Ontario midwives into the hospital system, through analysis of 15 semi-structured interviews with midwives throughout the Canadian province. In 1994, following activism from parents and families who wanted “alternative” choices for childbearing, Ontario became the first Canadian province to legislate and publicly fund midwives. This followed nearly a century in which midwifery had all but disappeared in Canada, in part due to deliberate campaigns to discredit woman-centered health care and knowledge. The findings from this research were considered through the lens of Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge, to identify the ways in which medicalized norms have been privileged in Ontario birth care, and to demonstrate how pregnant people¹ and midwives have struggled against the power/knowledge of hospital environments. This research looked at the ways that midwifery, as a social movement born of feminist and countercultural activism, offers possibilities for resisting disciplinary power. Midwives in Ontario offer an alternative to medicalized childbirth which recognizes that a birth caregiver’s role is not only the physical care of parents and babies, but guidance for families during a liminal experience – the birth of a new child, which changes a family permanently and profoundly.

This paper seeks to present a longitudinal case study of Ontario Hydro – an industrial organization that used sustainable development as the basis for a strategy of social and organizational transformation.

The paper describes the complex factors that influenced the formulation and implementation of this strategy.

The findings indicate the advanced ambition and authenticity of Ontario Hydro's strategy, even though it was formulated some ten years ago. The study suggests that the strategy was abandoned for reasons that include the gap between the processes identified in the strategy and the processes followed in practice, the absence of platforms to discuss and agree the meaning and practice of sustainable development within the company and its wider system, and the scarcity of skills to facilitate sustainable development as a process of multi‐actor innovation. Consequently, the concept of sustainable development was not translated into practices that had shared meaning for the many actors involved in the energy system of Ontario. While based on a case study of one organization, the findings appear to speak to more general issues of sustainable development as the management of organizational and contextual change.

The paper indicates much about the process of organizational change to effect more sustainable practices within a company and its social context.

No other organization has pursued a strategy for sustainable development with the same claim to authenticity as that of Ontario Hydro, where the strategy was cross‐referenced to Agenda 21 and developed with input from some of the main architects of Agenda 21. Moreover, few studies of sustainable development in the literature span a period as long as this case.

The authors developed and validated an algorithm using health administrative data to identify patients who are attached or uncertainly attached to a primary care provider (PCP) using patient responses to a survey conducted in Ontario, Canada.

The authors conducted a validation study using as a reference standard respondents to a community-based survey who indicated they did or did not have a PCP. The authors developed and tested health administrative algorithms against this reference standard. The authors calculated the sensitivity, specificity positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) on the final patient attachment algorithm. The authors then applied the attachment algorithm to the 2017 Ontario population.

The patient attachment algorithm had an excellent sensitivity (90.5%) and PPV (96.8%), though modest specificity (46.1%) and a low NPV (21.3%). This means that the algorithm assigned survey respondents as being attached to a PCP and when in fact they said they had a PCP, yet a significant proportion of those found to be uncertainly attached had indicated they did have a PCP. In 2017, most people in Ontario, Canada (85.4%) were attached to a PCP but 14.6% were uncertainly attached.

Administrative data for nurse practitioner's encounters and other interprofessional care providers are not currently available. The authors also cannot separately identify primary care visits conducted in walk in clinics using our health administrative data. Finally, the definition of hospital-based healthcare use did not include outpatient specialty care.

Uncertain attachment to a primary health care provider is a recurrent problem that results in inequitable access in health services delivery. Providing annual reports on uncertainly attached patients can help evaluate primary care system changes developed to improve access. This algorithm can be used by health care planners and policy makers to examine the geographic variability and time trends of the uncertainly attached population to inform the development of programs to improve primary care access.

As primary care is an essential component of a person's medical home, identifying regions or high need populations that have higher levels of uncertainly attached patients will help target programs to support their primary care access and needs. Furthermore, this approach will be useful in future research to determine the health impacts of uncertain attachment to primary care, especially in view of a growing body of the literature highlighting the importance of primary care continuity.

This patient attachment algorithm is the first to use existing health administrative data validated with responses from a patient survey. Using patient surveys alone to assess attachment levels is expensive and time consuming to complete. They can also be subject to poor response rates and recall bias. Utilizing existing health administrative data provides more accurate, timely estimates of patient attachment for everyone in the population.

Ontario is the most ethnically diverse province in Canada. School educators cannot disregard the reality of diversity in all its senses. The question that directs the focus of this paper is: to what extent are leaders in Ontario formally prepared to lead schools that support the students of today? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper results from a document analysis of publicly available documents to investigate the current context in Ontario, Canada regarding the educational and social situation of new immigrants, immigration, refugees, and ethno-culturally diverse students. It includes an exploration of the training and information available for principals and vice principals in Ontario to support them in leading schools which serve increasingly diverse student bodies. This paper is also informed by interviews with 59 educational leaders from Ontario and the USA. Interviews centred around their experiences engaging in practices to support their diverse student populations.

Results of the data analysis regarding the supports and training available to assist educational leaders in supporting the learning needs of diverse student populations demonstrate a serious lack of support. Very few actual resources exist for leaders, and most of those that do exist are connected to agencies outside of the education system, such as Settlement services.

Recent research investigating the relationship between identities and educational experience and teaching points to the importance of in-depth and targeted approaches to teacher preparation, and leadership preparation to help provide teachers and leaders with the knowledge, dispositions, and skills required to support all students in their academic and social development (Cochran Smith et al., 2009). This study confirms such findings. Given the current situation in Ontario and much of North America, there is a great need for leadership preparation programming, and school-level resources that provide educational leaders with the knowledge and skills to support all students in their academic and social development, but also in helping educational leaders to understand and address the systemic nature and forms of discrimination which their students face daily.

With very few school boards requiring leaders to have a Masters’ degree in Education, and none having stipulations regarding course content. This leaves educational leaders unprepared to deal with the reality of their situations, leading to the perpetuation of inequities in Ontario schools.

Although sparse, previous research into the state of support and preparation for administrators and educators with regard to diverse student populations in Ontario revealed that little to no preparation or support exists (see e.g. Price, 2002). This study helps to fill that gap in existing research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate structural changes in the elasticity of demand for wine in the Province of Ontario and in Canada as a whole. It will provide academic researchers and practitioners with a better understanding about structural changes in the levels of wine demand elasticities over time. It will also help the relevant governments and wine business establishments in developing taxation policy and business decisions.

The Kalman filter method, in conjunction with the Chow test, is applied to investigate structural changes in the elasticity of demand for wine. The Chow test is used for primary investigations of structural changes in the elasticity of demand for wine over time, whereas the Kalman filter method provides information about the behavior of the elasticity coefficients over time.

The Chow test reveals that structural changes in wine demand for Ontario are more pronounced than those for Canada as a whole. The Kalman filter results indicate that increased (decreased) government taxation could be an effective tool for discouraging (encouraging) consumption of wine. The analysis of own‐price elasticity suggests that the effects of increased government taxation on wine consumption be totally unexpected. Cross‐price elasticity coefficients change their signs over time, suggesting that some of the goods that are considered to be complements may become substitutes. Income and unemployment levels have different effects on wine consumption in Ontario and in Canada as a whole.

There may be variation in results by wine color (red or white), country of origin (imported or domestic), or price (premium or non‐premium).

Understanding changes in the elasticity of demand structure for wine over time would help policy makers at the provincial and federal levels come up with effective tools for controlling consumption of wine over time, including their taxation policies. For the wine business establishments, the information on consumer response is important for pricing purposes.

The Kalman filter has not previously been used to examine structural changes in the demand for wine in Canada.

Describes economic benefits of Ontario public libraries. These benefits include services and information for businesses, lifelong learners and job seekers. Ontario public libraries create work including short‐term construction work and longer‐term information infrastructure work. Provides job multiplier models for library building capital and information infrastructure capital with examples. Ontario public libraries have a direct and indirect impact on the Ontario economy, measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). Suggests a framework to help public libraries promote their economic impact in a time of economic restraint and funding cutbacks. This framework includes an analysis of library jobs, direct and indirect library impact on the GDP, a promotion of public electronic access to information, generation of economic‐oriented patron anecdotes, economic impact surveys and development of an entrepreneurial spirit in public libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the degree of consumer interest in an eco‐labeling program for the Ontario wine industry and determine whether there is a willingness‐to‐pay a premium for eco‐labeled Ontario wines.

The study was a quantitative survey of 401 wine consumers in Ontario, collected at Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) retail stores and winery retail stores. Results were analyzed using quantitative non‐parametric statistical analyses.

It was revealed that while most Ontario wine consumers do not presently purchase eco‐labeled wine regularly, the majority (90 per cent) are at least somewhat interested in purchasing eco‐labeled wine and that the majority would be willing to pay a premium of $0.51 or more (65 per cent). Consumers also indicated a preference for a seal of approval style label with multiple levels that contained a website from which they could obtain detailed information on certification.

These results provide valuable insights into wine consumers' purchasing behaviours and purchasing preferences with regards to environmentally friendly products. This information can be useful to those involved in implementing the Ontario wine industry's sustainability initiative, Sustainable Winemaking Ontario (SWO), and to wineries and winegrowers who are interested in promoting their actions taken to improve sustainability.

There is presently no published research investigating the potential role for an eco‐labeling and certification program for the Ontario wine industry, or any other Canadian wine industry. There is also a limited research on willingness‐to‐pay within the food and beverage sector.