Despite the best efforts, persistent educational gaps remain between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children when they begin school. This evaluation explores the impact of the Abecedarian Approach for early education on the language development of First Nations and non-First Nations children, living in a low-resource, urban neighborhood in Canada. A treatment group received the Abecedarian Approach in a child care center, supplemented by home visiting, and comprised 20 families with 41 children of whom 51% were First Nations. The control group comprised 27 families with 39 children of whom 46% were First Nations. The analyses presented explore child language outcomes at the end of the second year of participation and take account of child and family characteristics, as well as the baseline language scores. Results indicate that children in the treatment group had stronger language outcomes than the control group. While First Nations children in the treatment group had lower levels of language development than non-First Nations children, at baseline, both groups progressed at about the same rate. While the findings do not guarantee that achievement gaps would close during the school years, improved language development in the years before school is likely to be associated with better achievement during school. Keywords Abecedarian • Early childhood education • Language outcomes • Indigenous population • First Nations • Canada Résumé Malgré les efforts déployés, des écarts relatifs à l'éducation persistent entre enfants indigènes et non indigènes en début de scolarité. Cette évaluation explore l'impact de l'Abecedarian Approach pour l'éducation des jeunes enfants sur le développement du

There is renewed discussion of a basic or guaranteed income at both the federal and the provincial levels in Canada, but counterarguments about the cost, work disincentives, and electoral appeal of such schemes remain challenging. In this article, we argue that a grand plan for a basic or guaranteed income is unnecessary because self-financing redesign of existing tax credits to be refundable can better target benefits to low-income families while improving tax equity. Using 2015 tax and transfer parameters and estimates of income and population, we assess the federal transfer system as a source of universal income security, identify the revenues that can be raised through the elimination of selected federal tax credits, present four options that could be financed within that budget constraint, assess their performance, and select our preferred universal basic guaranteed income (UGBI) option. We then provide a more detailed assessment of the impact of our preferred UGBI design and discuss the extension of that design to provincial tax and transfer systems. We estimate that the combined federal and provincial UGBI that we propose would effectively target benefits to low-income households and virtually eliminate poverty for all but single non-elderly individuals at a modest efficiency cost in terms of work disincentives.

Recent quantitative analyses of deforestation have concentrated on highlighting relatively straightforward correlations between rates of deforestation and its direct and indirectdomestic causes, ignoring complex linkages. We argue that deforestation is part of a structural transformation determined in part by North-South relations through global markets. Besides domestic factors, the global pressures of demand for wood from the tropics also explain the pattern and rate of deforestation. Thus, deforestation is due to circular causation, which cannot be captured by standard linear econometric techniques. Les analyses quantitatives n!centes de fa deforestation se sont attachees de preference aux correlations elementaires entre Ia deforestation et ses causes nationales directes et indirectes. Les auteurs avancent que Ia deforestation s'inscrit plut6t dans 1me transformation structurelle determinee en partie par le jeu des relations Nord-Sud sur les marches mondiaux. Outre les facteurs nationaux, fa croissance de Ia demande mondiale pour les bois tropicaux explique les tendances et le rythme de deforestation. Ainsi, Ia deforestation est attribuable a un enchainement de boucles de causalite que les techniques econometriques lineaires sont impuissantes a saisir. We are grateful to Margot Wilson-Moore and two anonymous referees of this journal for their constructive comments on an earlier versiOn.

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A new Offshore Floating Nuclear Plant (OFNP) concept with high potential for attractive economics and an unprecedented level of safety is presented, along with an overview of work done in the area of security. The OFNP creatively combines state-of-the-art Light Water Reactors (LWRs) with floating platforms such as those used in offshore oil/gas operations, both of which are well-established technologies which can allow implementation on a time scale consistent with combating climate change in the near future. OFNP is a plant that can be entirely built within a floating platform in a shipyard, transferred to the site. OFNP eliminates earthquakes and tsunamis as accident precursors; its ocean-based passive safety systems eliminate the loss of ultimate heat sink accident by design. The defense of an OFNP poses new security opportunities and challenges compared to land-based plants. Such a plant can be more easily defended by virtue of the clear 360 degree lines of sight and the relative ease of identifying surface threats. Conversely the offshore plant is potentially vulnerable to underwater approaches by mini-submarines and divers. We investigate security considerations of the OFNP applicable to two potential plant options, an OFNP-300 with a 300 MWe reactor, and an OFNP-1100 with an 1100 MWe reactor. Three innovative security system approaches could be combined for the offshore plant. The first is a comprehensive detection system which integrates radar, sonar and unmanned vehicles for a long distance overview of the vicinity of the plant. The second approach is the use of passive physical barriers about 100 meters from the plant, which will force a fast-moving power boat to lose speed or stop at the barrier allowing the plant security force more time to respond. The third approach takes advantage of the offshore plant siting and the monthly or biweekly rotation of crew to reduce the total on-plant and onshore security force by using the off-duty security force on the plant as a reserve force. Through the use of these approaches, the OFNP-300 should be able to achieve a similar security cost (on a per Megawatt basis) as land-based plants of similar or somewhat larger power rating. Due to non-linear scaling of cost, the security cost of the OFNP-1100 has the potential to be reduced significantly compared to its land-based equivalents.