Dr. Paul Kershaw is a farmer morning and night. By day, he is an academic, public speaker, media contributor and volunteer.
In these latter roles, he is one of Canada’s leading thinkers on family policy, receiving two national prizes from the Canadian Political Science Association for his research.
“Armed with a laptop and a raft of statistics,” The Vancouver Province described Kershaw as “a one-man road show trying to change B.C. one talk at a time.”
He believes change is necessary because B.C.’s middle-class struggles are having harmful consequences for the next generation of children. Statistics indicate 30 per cent of the province’s children arrive at kindergarten developmentally vulnerable, and most are not poor.
Kershaw will be the key speaker at a breakfast presentation Friday morning (7:30 to 9 a.m.) at the Best Western Vernon Lodge to discuss the benefits of investing in smart family policy.
He argues that to do so would eliminate avoidable vulnerability in families with young children, which will save the B.C. business community a billion dollars per year by reducing employee absenteeism, recruitment/retraining costs and employee benefit expenditures.
Because children who are not school-ready when they start kindergarten are less likely to be job-ready when the graduate, the long-term returns to smart family policy investments are enormous, growing the B.C. economy by 20 per cent and paying down the provincial and federal debt before children in kindergarten today will graduate.
Kershaw adds these economic benefits support the long list of social reasons to invest in smart family policy, including crime reduction, gender equality, health promotion and inter-generational justice.
An advocate of policy change, Kershaw devotes time to liaise with leaders in government, the business community and not-for-profit sector. He does not shy away from tough issues. On radio he has been labeled a “boomer hater” because he speaks about inter-generational inequities between baby boomers and the generations that follow.
A self-proclaimed feminist, he chides the personal and policy decisions by which many men evade their share of caregiving work, and subsequently miss out on the joys that come with caring.
He is also a critic of the Canadian medical system, saying it shows more of a disease fetish than an aspiration to promote health by investing in families with young kids.
E-mail coordinator@noecdcoalition.ca, or call 250-549-9178 for further information or to register for the event.
