Month: June 2016

Over 100,000 working-age people in Metro Vancouver were working but stuck below the poverty line in 2012, not counting students and young adults living at home with their parents. This is the striking finding of my new report, co-published by the CCPA, the United Way of the Lower Mainland and the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition…. View Article

The most Canadians probably know about the new mayor of London, England is that he is the city’s first Muslim mayor and that one of his first public actions was to scrap with Donald Trump over the Donald’s promise to block Muslims from entering the United States. But there are a lot more interesting things going… View Article

I was excited to see one of the two main political parties in BC — the BC NDP — promise to raise the minimum wage to $15 if elected next spring. This puts the idea of a $15 minimum wage squarely on the political agenda. I’ve long argued for the need to significantly increase BC’s poverty-level minimum wage… View Article

Last year we launched the Corporate Mapping Project, which is investigating the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry in Western Canada. One of the first things we did was hold a series of community meetings with environmental, Indigenous and labour groups to discuss the project. We did this in each of the three… View Article

Christy Clark could be a critical swing vote in shaping the future of the Canada Pension Plan, as federal officials meet with provincial premiers in Vancouver on Monday. If a stable, secure retirement for all Canadians is the aim, our leaders should commit to boldly expanding this bedrock national pension program. Instead, BC’s provincial government… View Article

Toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, barium, cadmium, lithium and lead, are flowing unchecked into the Peace River following a series of unusual landslides that may be linked to natural gas industry fracking operations. The landslides began nearly two years ago and show no sign of stopping. So far, they have killed all fish along several… View Article

There was a fair amount of good news about Freedom of Information rules and a little bit of bad news last month. But the bad news was serious and you really have to wonder why the government would bother with it when the rest of the news was good. First for the good news. That… View Article

A new report from the Fraser Institute declares: “Health care spending by British Columbia’s government is unsustainable.” But watchers of Canadian politics know to take that declaration with generous heap of salt, since we hear cries of “out-of-control health care spending” like clockwork from certain quarters (followed by calls for privatized, for-profit care). In fact,… View Article

In a dramatic show of physician support for deep health care reform in the U.S., more than 2,200 physician leaders have signed a “Physician’s Proposal” calling for sweeping change. The proposal, published May 5 2016 in the American Journal of Public Health, calls for the creation of a publicly financed, single-payer, national health program to… View Article