Month: April 2021

Instead of playing a crucial role to help Canada achieve its Paris Agreement targets, Canada’s “Big Five” banks are actually hindering Canada’s progress on climate change. The Big Five  banks—RBC, TD Bank, Scotiabank, BMO and CIBC—are among the most powerful corporate entities in Canada, certainly among the largest and most profitable. They‘ve been called a… View Article

Earlier this year, Vancouver city council considered a motion encouraging the city to look into the issue of “social impact bonds” (and more broadly “social impact investing”), which is a warm and fuzzy sounding term that actually refers to a type of privatization. I spoke to city council to help demystify the rhetoric around social… View Article

The BC government tabled a surprisingly stay-the-course budget today, making some improvements on the margins but missing the opportunity to shift BC towards a more inclusive and sustainable economy. While it appropriately includes large sums of time-limited spending relating to the pandemic (and indeed BC has led other provinces on pandemic spending), it is scarce… View Article

BC Budget 2021 will be tabled on April 20th, in the middle of the COVID-19 third wave. It is an opportunity for the new provincial government to not only support people and businesses through this phase of the pandemic—but also to shape a transition to a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable economy.  The COVID-19 crisis… View Article

One year into the COVID-19 pandemic that has upended the lives of millions of people in this country, Canadian billionaires have increased their wealth by $78 billion. Data from Forbes’ “real-time billionaires” listing on April 7 compared with a snapshot provided by their annual billionaires report last year shows this massive increase in wealth. Together,… View Article

As UK’s Drax makes play for BC’s wood pellet mills, questions grow about wood-fired electricity With its six massive 660-megawatt power units, the Drax power station in North Yorkshire is the United Kingdom’s largest thermal electricity plant. When it opened in the mid 1970s, the giant facility burned coal. Today, however, Drax burns something else:… View Article