Month: June 2011

With much of the talk on taxes in BC about the HST, we issued a new report today that looks at the bigger context for BC’s tax system (Vancouver Sun oped here, CTV News story here). Iglika Ivanova, Seth Klein and I compare and contrast BC’s tax system after a decade where tax cuts were… View Article

BC Stats put out a release yesterday with the headline “Low Income Cut-Offs (LICOs) are a Poor Measure of Poverty” and author Dan Schrier gets in a dirty hit right in first paragraph: Despite protestations from Statistics Canada that LICOs are not meant to be used as a measure of poverty, there are many groups… View Article

After at 2010 that was one of the warmest years on record, 2011 has shown us astonishing patterns of extreme weather worldwide. It would take a long time to make the full list, but you know what I mean: tornadoes, floods, drought, record cold in some parts, record heat in others, hailstorms (Al Gore does… View Article

A reporter from back East called me yesterday to ask about the B.C. Auditor General’s May report into a Vancouver Coastal Health Authority P3. As Keith Reynolds pointed out, the AG found that the actual costs of the P3 were much higher than what the Coastal Authority and Partnerships BC had said they would be…. View Article

The campaign to save the HST is rather shameless, not to mention bad public policy. We won’t, as HST spin masters would have it, pay less tax with the new and improved HST. The amount of tax we collectively pay depends on the amount of services and support government provides — total government spending– not… View Article

The on-line newsmagazine, The Tyee, recently ran an opinion piece of mine under the headline “The Wild West and Dysfunctional BC Politics: Fracking and sour gas deserve debate, but get cartoon treatment from the Clark government.” My special thanks to Tyee editor David Beers or whoever it was who chose to run the image of… View Article

Statistics Canada released a report today on incomes across Canada in 2009. As First Call BC points out in their news release, key points for BC include: BC’s child poverty rate rose to 12 percent in 2009, the highest child poverty rate of any province for the eighth year in a row. The BC rate… View Article

Anyone wanting to see just how dysfunctional politics in B.C. has become should check out Bob Simpson’s recent Private Members’ statement in the provincial legislature. For seven minutes Simpson, Member of the Legislative Assembly for Cariboo North and one of two Independent MLAs, spoke about why he and fellow Independent Vicki Huntington (Delta South), had… View Article

Last week Premier Christy Clark took the unprecedented step of promising there would be public consultation regarding the Province’s position on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union. If this really happens it would be an important opportunity.  The current government has never allowed the public to have a… View Article

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… View Article