Month: December 2017

British Columbia is experiencing the worst opioid overdose crisis in its history. By October 31st, the BC Coroners Service reported that 1208 people had died from overdose: higher than the next three causes of unnatural deaths combined—suicides, motor vehicle incidents and homicides. The numbers for November and December will be released early next year and… View Article

More than half of nearly 50 dams that fossil fuel companies built in recent years without first obtaining the proper permits had serious structural problems that could have caused many of them to fail. And now, BC’s Oil and Gas Commission (OGC), which appeared to be asleep at the switch in allowing the unlicensed dams… View Article

The CCPA-BC sent the following submission to the BC Government’s How We Vote consultation, which requests feedback on key elements of the upcoming referendum on electoral reform. Written submissions are being accepted from now until February 28, 2018. You can feel free to quote or cite any of the following if you choose to submit comments… View Article

A report released by our National Office this week confirms what many parents already know: BC is one of Canada’s most expensive provinces for child care, especially for younger age groups (infants and toddlers). Cities in the Greater Toronto and Metro Vancouver stand out as the most expensive places in the country to access child… View Article

In May 2014, British Columbia’s then Minister of Natural Gas Development, Rich Coleman, came out swinging when a team of Canadian and American scientists issued a report saying that fossil fuel industry fracking operations could contaminate surface waters and groundwater sources. “The reality is we’ve been doing this for over 50 years, we’ve never had… View Article

It has now been two years since world leaders created the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. At those meetings, the Canadian delegation joined a broad coalition aiming to keep “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above… View Article

This year, the CCPA-BC’s annual Gideon Rosenbluth Memorial lecture featured one of Canada’s leading progressive economists, Armine Yalnizyan, who shared some insights on the changing world of work and the importance of achieving inclusive growth. Making growth inclusive has become a global policy priority backed, at least on paper, by international organizations like the OECD,… View Article

As the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing from 2000 to 2008, Miloon Kothari observed the failure of market-based approaches to addressing housing crises. His 2007 report on Canada called for “a national strategy [for the] large scale building of social housing, and much better tenant protection laws, coordinated strategy on… View Article