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Welcome to the EconomicsCanada web site. We hope that what we develop here will make it easy for you to improve your personal level of economic and financial literacy.
Over the last number of years, the Canadian Foundation for Economic Education (CFEE) has been collaborating with Departments/Ministries of Education and a broad cross-section of Canadians to establish what we call an Economic Capabilities Guideline. The purpose of this effort was to identify what was important — in terms of knowledge, attitudes, aptitudes, and skills — to enable Canadians to undertake their economic decisions and actions with confidence and competence. Having developed a consensus Guideline, we then undertook consultations to identify those that were considered "most important." We took what was "most important" and organized two "model courses."
One course, Economics for Everyday Living, focuses on personal financial planning and skills as well as work/employment/career exploration and development. The other course, Economic Citizenship, focuses on our roles as Canadian citizens and as global citizens and on the impact/relationship that our decisions and actions will have on the environment and future generations.
Our goal is to develop an engaging interactive learning site that will enable you — on your own as an independent learner — to cover the material in these two model courses to the degree that you want and at the pace that you want. The emphasis will be on material that is relevant to your day-to-day life and the economic decisions and circumstances you face.
But we aren't ready yet. We are looking to create this interactive learning site over the next year and a half so that by January 2003 this site will be ready to support your personal learning interests. Below is an overview of the content that will be covered by these two self-help courses.
Currently, we are seeking one or more sponsors who will work with us to develop the self-instructional site, along with a self-instructional site designed for youth. If you have any questions or suggestions, please use the Contact Us button on the left to reach us.
In the meantime, CFEE has many resources available to help you develop a better understanding of the economy and the world of money and personal finance. Please visit CFEE's main web site [www.cfee.org] to explore what we have available. For example, if you click on Programs & Resources and then CFEE Resources, you can download a copy of The Canadian Economy: The Big Picture, a 24-page booklet that describes how Canada's economic system works. Or you can access Money and Youth, which has been very popular with high school and college/university youth — and with adults as well. The latter is also accessible via a web site CFEE developed to complement the publication [www.moneyandyouth.cfee.org].
Thank you for your interest in CFEE, the EconomicsCanada site, and the efforts to improve the level of economic and financial literacy of Canadians. We hope that some of our resources can help you now, and we look forward to being able to provide much more support in the future.
Gary Rabbior |