Back in December, during the Copenhagen negotiations, a group of environmentalists provided BC Premier Gordon Campbell with an award for climate leadership. Based primarily on the creation of a BC carbon tax two years ago, the Premier has gotten a lot of brownie points from the greens – in spite of the fact that there [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Taxes'
About that Copenhagen award
February 5th, 2010 · Marc Lee · 1 Comment · Climate change, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability, Taxes
Corporations are people too
January 31st, 2010 · Blair Redlin · 2 Comments · Electoral reform, Municipalities, Taxes
Advocates of democratic electoral reform are really out of step. Ideas like proportional representation and advertising spending limits are so retro, so 2004.
The fashionable electoral reform idea this year is to give corporations a real say. It’s time for individual citizens to share their electoral democracy with corporations to give meaning to those old legal [...]
Tags: accountability·B.C. government·corporations·democracy·Electoral reform·Municipalities·STV & electoral reform
Scrooge is alive and well
December 29th, 2009 · Adrienne Montani · No Comments · Poverty, inequality & welfare, Taxes, Uncategorized
In a Vancouver Sun article (Market wages would make a difference to city’s taxes, December 28, 2009) Philip Hochstein argues Vancouver civic workers who make a living wage should be made to suffer the fate of those in the private sector whose employers get away with paying under $15 an hour for labouring, or $10-15 an hour [...]
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HST And Family Budgets
December 15th, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · 7 Comments · Poverty, inequality & welfare, Taxes
A recent report from the CCPA national office analyzed the impact of tax harmonization on family budgets in Ontario. Not a Tax Grab After All: A Second Look at Ontario’s HST made a splash with its finding that the introduction of HST will be largely a wash for Ontario families, as most households would be [...]
Tags: HST
Vancouver City Budget Woes: Are the Cuts Really Necessary?
December 3rd, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · 6 Comments · Economy, Municipalities, Taxes
In this round of municipal budgeting, the city of Vancouver finds itself in exactly the same predicament as the federal and provincial governments faced earlier in the year – projected revenues would not be sufficient to meet their rising expenditures. The big difference is that municipal governments are prohibited by law from running a deficit.
This [...]
Property taxes: are major industries suffering?
November 3rd, 2009 · Keith Reynolds · No Comments · Economy, Environment, resources & sustainability, Municipalities, Taxes
Businesses across Canada have been complaining about what they pay in property taxes, well, since there were property taxes.
But the issue in BC came into sharper definition in July when Catalyst Paper hand-delivered cheques to four municipalities that only covered 25% of their property tax bill. Timberwest, Celgar and West Fraser Timber joined Catalyst and [...]
Tags: Castlegar·Catalyst Paper·Celgar·Kitimat·Timberwest·West Fraser Timber
Strengthening the CPP: Maybe the Americans are on to something
October 31st, 2009 · Seth Klein · 1 Comment · Economy, Taxes
As we emerge from the financial crisis, a new and welcome debate is beginning about how we stabilize and strengthen our pension system. The financial crisis provided a rude (and in some cases surprising) reminder to many retirees (and near retirees) that their private pensions are far from secure. Many took a beating on their [...]
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The catch-22 of low-income benefits that are phased out quickly
October 9th, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · 8 Comments · Children & youth, Employment & labour, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare, Provincial budget & finance, Taxes, Women
My friend Emily is a single mom. She works full time for a salary that keeps her and her child above the poverty line but doesn’t allow for much more. Her income is low enough that she qualifies for temporary relief from paying her student loans (which are massive even though she is yet to [...]
HST: Why do the Feds want it so bad?
October 7th, 2009 · Seth Klein · 3 Comments · Economy, Taxes
As the debate rages in BC about the Harmonized Sales Tax, one curious dimension I’ve been puzzling over is this––why do the Feds want the HST implemented so badly that they are willing to fork over $1.6 billion to the province as an enticement?
And it isn’t just the federal Conservatives. Ever since the introduction of [...]
James at the UBCM: A welcome move off revenue-neutrality
October 6th, 2009 · Seth Klein · No Comments · Climate change, Economy, Taxes
In her speech last Thursday to the annual meeting of the Union of BC Municipalities, NDP leader Carole James declared:
“I am calling on the provincial government to cancel the corporate tax cuts that are scheduled to come in over the next two years related to the carbon tax. And let’s put that money into a [...]
