BC’s provincial government has said it is committed to ensuring seniors can remain in their homes and “age in place.” Yet, the lack of adequate and affordable housing in BC means many seniors are forced to choose between paying for accommodation or buying food and prescription drugs, accessing transportation or participating in their communities. The [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Housing & homelessness'
BC Office: Fact sheet on affordable housing options for seniors now available.
April 18th, 2013 · Janine Farrell · Comments Off · Health care, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare, Seniors
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Social Housing Reality Check: Government’s own numbers reveal modest investment in new social housing
March 31st, 2013 · Seth Klein · Comments Off · Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
[This post has also appeared on the Tyee here.] One of the more contentious issues regarding the BC government’s record concerns the issue of social housing. To hear Minister Rich Coleman tell it, BC’s record has been above and beyond. For the last few years, barely a week has gone by without a government news [...]
Tags: budget·homelessness·housing
An inadequate appeal process for tenants means a bumpy ride for everyone
January 24th, 2013 · Kendra Milne · 1 Comment · Housing & homelessness, Law & legal issues
(Co-authored by Kendra Milne and Jess Hadley, staff lawyers at the Community Legal Assistance Society) Earlier this week, we read with interest Kathy Tomlinson’s January 21st CBC Go Public story, “Landlords ‘powerless’ as tenants get free ride”, which investigates one family of tenants who have apparently taken advantage of several successive landlords. In her article, [...]
Tags: homelessness·housing
Imbalance in residential tenancy rights enforcement in BC
October 25th, 2012 · Kendra Milne · 3 Comments · Housing & homelessness, Law & legal issues
Yesterday some media outlets reported that the Residential Tenancy Branch has conditionally waived the first (and to my knowledge only) administrative penalty it has issued. BC’s Residential Tenancy Act was amended in 2006 to allow the Branch to issue administrative penalties, essentially monetary fines, against landlords or tenants that contravene the Act or repeatedly ignore [...]
Tags: housing·inequality
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
The Union of BC Municipalities Convention: a potpourri of policy
October 2nd, 2011 · Keith Reynolds · Comments Off · Economy, Employment & labour, Environment, resources & sustainability, Housing & homelessness, Municipalities, Privatization, P3s & public services, Provincial budget & finance, Taxes, Transparency & accountability
For people who follow local policy issues the annual meeting of the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) is always chock-a-block with material. Last week’s meeting in Vancouver, which saw hundreds of mayors and councilors along with most of the Cabinet, much of the BC opposition and dozens of groups selling both items and ideas, was [...]
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Fighting energy poverty
September 28th, 2011 · Marc Lee · Comments Off · Climate change, Economy, Energy, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
Today we released a new Climate Justice Project report, Fighting Energy Poverty in the Transition to Zero-Emission Housing: A Framework for BC, by yours truly, Eugene Kung (a lawyer with the BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre and a steering committee member of the CJP) and Jason Owen (who worked on this project as a student at UBC, now with [...]
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Social Determinants of Health
June 7th, 2011 · Peter Prontzos · Comments Off · Children & youth, Economy, Employment & labour, Health care, Housing & homelessness, Human rights, Poverty, inequality & welfare, Provincial budget & finance, Taxes, Women
It is now clear that economic, and social variables – more than individual behaviour – are the most salient factors in determining people’s well-being. Working and living conditions, the distribution of wealth, and where we live are some of , “the primary factors that shape the health of Canadians” (CCPA Monitor, June 2010). Almost everything [...]
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A Paradigm Shift is Happening
November 21st, 2010 · Peter Prontzos · 2 Comments · Children & youth, Economy, First Nations & Aboriginal, Health care, Housing & homelessness, Human rights, Poverty, inequality & welfare, Women
A “paradigm shift” was the theme of Dr. Marti Glenn, one of the keynote speakers at the 2010 International Congress of The Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology & Health, which took place from November 11-14 at Asilomar, California. Dr. Glenn, who is the Dean of the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, began by saying that, [...]
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Poverty Reduction: Even Alberta?
September 27th, 2010 · Seth Klein · Comments Off · Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
Currently, six provinces have official poverty reduction strategies either in place or (in the case of Manitoba) in development. BC, despite having the highest poverty rates, remains stubbornly in the minority of provinces without a plan (along with Alberta, Saskatchewan and PEI). But now comes news earlier this month that an all-party committee of the [...]
