Month: November 2014

In a Vancouver Sun opinion piece, Laura Jones of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business warns against minimum wage increases, calling it “Fa-la-la economics”. Perhaps it’s not the season to be so Grinch-like. Jones is right about one thing – the minimum wage is not a magic cure for our economic woes. No one has… View Article

One in five BC children lives in poverty. This is the sobering finding of the 2014 BC Child Poverty Report Card released on November 24th, the 25th anniversary of a unanimous all-party resolution in Canada’s House of Commons to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000. Child poverty is not just a big… View Article

Five years have passed after the end of the Great Recession but both BC and Canada as a whole are very far away from a meaningful recovery in the labour market. Headline unemployment rates are not terrible (6.1% in BC and 6.8% in Canada) but fewer people are looking for work and part-time positions are… View Article

It’s an interesting finding, and perhaps the start of a good trend: the share of income going to Canada’s top 1% has declined (Statscan release here, Globe story here). One great thing Statscan has done in recent years is to make its data freely available, so I went to dig deeper on national, BC and… View Article

A new report from the CCPA takes a closer look at child care fees in Canada’s biggest 22 cities and shows just how unaffordable child care has become everywhere outside of Quebec, the only province in Canada with universal subsidized child care. It’s hardly news that child care is expensive. Indeed, it is pricier than… View Article

It may be the heat here in Baja, and certainly the tequila could be taking its toll on clear, or at least correct thinking, but it seems to me that there is a better policy answer to Kinder Morgan than outright rejection of its pipeline and terminal expansion proposal, and a far better policy approach… View Article