Hats off to Eclipse Awards, a local small business that was one of the first to seek certification as an official Living Wage Employer. At an awards ceremony last night, Eclipse won the Best Employer award from Small Business BC. Their status as a living wage employer played an important role. Here’s a news release [...]
Entries from February 29th, 2012
Local living wage employer wins best employer award
February 29th, 2012 · Seth Klein · Comments Off · Employment & labour, Poverty, inequality & welfare
Tags: child poverty·living wage
The long term costs of legislating workers back to work
February 25th, 2012 · Seth Klein · 2 Comments · Employment & labour
As the provincial government spends the weekend drafting back-to-work legislation that will impose a contract on BC teachers, I found this opinion piece I wrote back in the year 2000, when the previous BC government legislated CUPE school support workers back to work. Still feels remarkably timely. So, just thought I’d re-post that old piece [...]
Tags: labour rights·unions
The Great Natural Gas Footrace: Where Have We Seen This Before?
February 24th, 2012 · Ben Parfitt · Comments Off · Climate change, Economy, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability
Several weeks ago, some running buddies of mine – two fine chaps working in the provincial civil service – invited me to speak on a panel at the annual Association of BC Forest Professionals meetings in Victoria. I had the good fortune to be joined by Bruce Fraser, former chair of the BC Forest Practices [...]
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The false economy of BC Budget 2012: deficit exaggerated to avoid spending on real problems
February 21st, 2012 · Iglika Ivanova · 20 Comments · Provincial budget & finance
Today’s BC budget was simply titled Budget 2012. It broke with the tradition of ambitious-sounding titles we’ve seen in the last decade (such as 2010’s Building a Prosperous British Columbia budget), but that’s about all the change you’ll notice from the previous administration’s budgets. Despite the fact that this was hailed as the first budget [...]
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How to Destroy a Good Poverty Line
February 17th, 2012 · Seth Klein · 1 Comment · Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
[The following piece was authored by Michael Goldberg, Steve Kerstetter and Seth Klein] More than a decade ago, the federal and provincial governments started work on a new poverty line – the Market Basket Measure (MBM). After decades of distracting and divisive debates about poverty lines, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada crafted a methodology [...]
Tags: child poverty·poverty
“Mass staff replacements” in seniors’ care: impacts and solutions
February 16th, 2012 · Jonathan Chapnick · 1 Comment · Employment & labour, Health care
Deep in the second volume of the BC Ombudsperson’s recently-released second report on seniors’ care, is an interesting and important discussion about large-scale staff replacements and other substantial changes at residential care facilities. Under the current legislative framework governing most care facilities for seniors, a facility operator must notify its regional medical health officer four months [...]
Tax haven based company buys more BC P3s: British Auditor General questions profits in such transactions
February 14th, 2012 · Keith Reynolds · Comments Off · Privatization, P3s & public services
Two of British Columbia’s public private partnership (P3) projects have changed hands again and once again the new owner resides in a European tax haven. In a separate but related development, last Friday Britain’s Auditor General released a report questioning very high level of profits for some British P3 projects partially generated by flipping the [...]
Tags: Auditor General·Bilfinger Berger·Golden Ears·Kicking Horse Canyon·P3·tax haven
Comparing two carbon bombs: LNG plants vs Enbridge pipeline
February 8th, 2012 · Marc Lee · 1 Comment · Climate change, Energy
With the spotlight on the federal government’s aggressive push to export tar sands bitumen via the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline to Kitimat, and from there by tanker on to China, the BC government reclaimed some attention on the energy file when it released its Natural Gas Strategy last week. With lots of glossy pages, but little detailed [...]
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Whatever happened to gender identity and expression?
February 5th, 2012 · Jonathan Chapnick · Comments Off · Human rights, Law & legal issues
A year ago this week, Bill C-389, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (gender identity and gender expression), passed third reading in the House of Commons, receiving support from MPs from all political parties. So whatever happened to it? The private member’s bill, sponsored by former Burnaby-Douglas MP [...]
Tags: gender identity
After Self-Sufficiency — Will the Public or Private Interests be Served?
February 4th, 2012 · Marvin Shaffer · 5 Comments · Economy, Energy
It was, I suppose, too much to expect the government to acknowledge that the self-sufficiency and insurance requirements it had imposed on BC Hydro was a serious mistake. So it was no surprise that they simply stated in their announcement paving the way for the powering of the proposed new LNG plants that the Campbell-era policies [...]
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