Month: August 2018

“If you asked me two weeks ago if this could have happened, I would have said it couldn’t.” Imperial Metals president Brian Kynoch, spoke these words at a news conference on August 5, 2014, the day after the devastating collapse of a tailings dam at one of Imperial’s operations, the Mount Polley copper and gold… View Article

The BC Labour Relations Code is being reviewed for the first time in over 15 years. Since the last comprehensive review, which took place in 2003, workers’ rights under the Code have been continuously eroded. The current review presents an important opportunity to reverse this trend by improving access to unionization for workers across the… View Article

Debunking the claims of proportional representation naysayers This is the fourth post in a series explaining the benefits of proportional representation and debunking myths from the ‘No’ side of BC’s 2018 electoral reform referendum. More from the series is available at policynote.ca/pr4bc. Let’s cut right to the chase: British Columbia needs proportional representation (pro rep)…. View Article

As surely as the seasons pass, each year the Fraser Institute reissues its paint-by-numbers “Consumer Tax Index.” As usual, the latest release tries to create the impression that taxes in Canada are out of control (taxes on the average family are supposedly up 2,112% since 1961, if you can believe it!). This methodological mess of… View Article

Students using 30-year-old textbooks, teachers buying basic supplies, schools permanently on edge of closing—this is the all too common face of public education in British Columbia in 2018. This is despite the past school year seeing the first meaningful injection of funds into BC schools in over a decade. The new money is paying for… View Article

The BC government recently announced that major new public infrastructure projects, such as the Pattullo Bridge, will be subject to a “Community Benefits Agreement.” The agreement requires that public benefits flow not only from the outcome of a project, but also from the process of building it. The move was immediately criticized by some industry… View Article

In the past year, an energy dispute for the ages has played out in Canada, culminating in the federal government announcing that it will buy an aging oil pipeline for $4.5 billion and then twin it with a new high-capacity pipeline that would move massive amounts of diluted bitumen from Alberta to tidewater in British… View Article

The BC government recently released three “intentions papers” on climate policy—transportation, buildings and industry—all wrapped in the term “clean growth.” In fact, the term “clean” appears more than 70 times in just the introduction to the exercise, Towards a Clean Growth Future in BC. Clean growth is not a commonly used term, nor is it… View Article