Month: June 2020

The COVID-19 crisis has caused unprecedented job losses across Canada and BC has not been spared. Between February and May nearly 590,000 BC workers lost their jobs or the majority of their hours—23 per cent of all workers employed in February—with that number reaching its peak of 645,000 in April.  Despite a slight recovery of… View Article

When John Horgan talked about BC’s historic racism, he failed to mention Japanese Canadians. Here’s why it matters. Premier John Horgan began a media conference on June 3 with a statement about racism and the “blemishes” on BC’s history. Horgan mentioned the head tax used to restrict immigration from China and the Komagata Maru incident that highlighted Canada’s discriminatory… View Article

Federal government would do well to resist call by Mosaic Forest Management, before opportunities to process wood in province are further compromised British Columbia’s forest industry was in trouble long before anyone had heard the name of the virus now seared into our brains.  Months before COVID-19 appeared, forest companies had curtailed operations in response… View Article

2020 has been a year like no other in the political economy of energy and climate change. As the new year broke, wildfires spiked by higher temperatures scorched Australia. In Canada, a different fire took hold as a BC gas pipeline sparked a cross-country Indigenous-led uprising. By mid-March, economies around the world were shutting down… View Article

COVID-19 has shone a light on serious problems in our seniors’ care system resulting from years of underfunding, privatization and precarious working conditions. These problems are not isolated to long-term care, however. New research published today looks specifically at the state of assisted living here in BC, and concludes a review by the province’s Seniors… View Article

The death and disruption wrought by COVID-19 is calamitous. The bad news is that climate change will be worse. It is easy to forget that 2020 began with Australia burning in a brutal wildfire season. Like the current pandemic, Australia’s disaster was predicted years in advance by ecological science. As we slowly emerge from the… View Article

If anything is clear in this pandemic, Canada needs a wealth tax on the super rich to rein in extreme inequality and contribute to crucial public investments in the wake of COVID-19. A wealth tax is economically and technically feasible, but it requires breaking with a status quo that often too narrowly serves Bay Street… View Article

COVID-19 has decimated tourism and business travel, posing huge costs onto workers in those industries, but a fascinating side effect has been a more balanced rental market for Vancouver’s long-term renters. Asking rents for vacated units in Vancouver fell by 9 per cent in April compared to a year earlier, and 7 per cent drop… View Article

The BC government is holding its annual public consultation on Budget 2021 this June, inviting British Columbians to share their priorities for government investment next year. BC Budget 2021 will have to tackle the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis—the full extent of which are still largely unknown. It is hard to predict where we as… View Article

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is angered and outraged by ongoing police violence and brutality against Black citizens and protestors across the continent. And while much of the current media attention is focused on the United States, these same problems are painfully alive and present across Canada, including in every province where CCPA offices… View Article