Month: September 2016

This is International Right to Know Week, a week in honour of the public’s right to information held by their governments. The week is being celebrated in different ways in the 105 countries around the world with right to information laws. Here in British Columbia the City of Penticton is celebrating it in a spectacularly disappointing… View Article

My recent analysis of BC’s education funding crisis made some waves, travelling far and wide in the media and becoming one of our most-read papers of the year at CCPA-BC. Not surprisingly, it also drew critical responses that reflect some persistent myths about the funding crisis. (You can hear my conversation [at 1:41:20] with CBC’s… View Article

Submission to the House of Commons Special Committee on Electoral Reform The debate around electoral reform has largely neglected a central question: what would a change in the electoral system mean for Canada’s constitutional separation of powers? To state the matter briefly, our Westminster system has an inherent tendency toward the concentration of power (into… View Article

On September 1st, British Columbians on disability assistance saw their monthly rates go up for the first time in nine years. Unfortunately, the BC government bundled a significant clawback in transportation benefits with the rate increase, making it a lot less generous as a result. While the provincial government increased financial support for people with… View Article

In the lead up to the last provincial election, British Columbians learned about an economic panacea named LNG – Liquefied Natural Gas. This new industrial sector would take vast amounts of fracked gas pipelined from Northeast BC, and convert it to liquid form for shipment to Asia, where high prices would justify multi-billion dollar investments. BC,… View Article

For decades, the urgent need for climate action was stymied by what came to be known as “climate denialism” (or its more mild cousin, “climate skepticism”). In an effort to create public confusion and stall political progress, the fossil fuel industry poured tens of millions of dollars into the pockets of foundations, think tanks, lobby… View Article

It’s been six months since First Ministers unveiled the Vancouver Declaration on Clean Growth and Climate Change. At the time, the Declaration was somewhat of a disappointment: no new national greenhouse gas reduction target, no consensus on carbon pricing, and a parallel push for pipelines (for a review and analysis, see this post). Basically, Ministers agreed to… View Article

It should be enough to know that it is the right thing to do. We should support foster youth in their transition to adulthood—youth for whom we are collectively responsible—in the same way that families support their own children. But we don’t. Over 60% of 20-24 year olds in BC live in their family homes, benefitting not… View Article

Today, BC’s lowest paid workers get a 40-cent raise. The latest increase of the provincial minimum wage—now $10.85 per hour for most workers isn’t much to celebrate. It works out to an extra $16 per week for someone working full-time – and that doesn’t stretch far in a province with such high cost of living…. View Article

Vancouver is now a “city of millionaires”, according to Environics’ 2016 Wealthscapes report: In B.C., the red-hot real estate market fueled a rise in average net worth, producing Canada’s first “city of millionaires”: Vancouver. In 2015, the average net worth of Vancouver households hit $1,036,202 – an impressive 7.1 percent increase over the previous year. You are forgiven if… View Article