Month: July 2014

The following op-ed was originally published in The Georgia Straight. On June 16, I attended the B.C. government’s Disability Summit, the culmination of a three-month public consultation process on disability in B.C. I watched Minister of Social Development and Social Innovation Don McRae lead the audience through the event. I felt the flurry of excitement… View Article

In June 2014, the BC government reported on its progress towards the 2007 Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act, which calls for a one-third reduction by 2020 in GHG emissions (relative to 2007 levels) and an 80% reduction by 2050. The BC government claimed to have met a key milestone: an interim target of a 6%… View Article

Most of the discussion around the delivery of British Columbia’s public accounts this week has centred on debt (Marvin Shaffer makes excellent points in the previous post on why debt is not always bad) and on how BC got the money to balance its books. Something else worth looking at, however, is British Columbia’s non-debt… View Article

One can only presume that the promise of a debt-free B.C. was never meant to be taken seriously. Christy Clark’s very cynical, albeit effective election slogan was based on two highly qualified guesstimates of the potential taxes that could be generated in the most optimistic possible circumstances from an industry that does not yet exist. Thus… View Article

The Conservative Government’s Minister of Employment and Social Development, Jason Kenney, announced on June 20th 2014 a draft of changes to the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). The program has attracted controversy since at least 2006, most recently when the CBC reported that MacDonald’s outlets in Victoria were favouring temporary foreign workers over Canadians… View Article