BC Budget 2017 fails to fill the hole we’ve dug for children, youth and families

Mar 9, 2017
What’s the purpose of digging a hole and then re-filling it halfway or even all the way 15 years later? Child and youth services providers and families are asking this question as they review the “new” dollars for child-serving ministries in the 2017 BC budget. Over the last 15 years provincial child-serving ministries, school districts,… View Article

5.2 million reasons the fossil fuel industry has the BC government’s ear

Mar 8, 2017
The problem of corporate influence in politics and government is heating up in BC as we head towards the May election. 2017 kicked off with an explosive story in the New York Times, aptly titled “British Columbia: The Wild West of Canadian Political Cash.” The story drew widespread attention to the complete absence of limits… View Article

Precarious work a reality across employment sectors in BC

Mar 5, 2017
Across the world, one of the features of contemporary labour markets is the rising level of precarious employment. We know that labour markets look quite different from place to place for a variety of reasons – institutional, legal, technological, sectoral mix, education, immigration, and other factors that all contribute to geographic differences in precarity. Many… View Article

How one company’s “value-added” plans are opening the door to more log exports and fewer forest industry jobs

Feb 27, 2017
Second of Two Parts For many years, TimberWest has exported more raw logs from British Columbia than all of its competitors save one. And a new move afoot by the company has both forest industry workers and environmental activists convinced that the company is laying the groundwork for even more exports in the years to… View Article

The Great Log Export Drain: BC government pursues elusive LNG dreams as more than 3,600 forest industry jobs lost to raw log exports

Feb 27, 2017
First of Two Parts Its members include the most powerful players in the province’s forest industry, companies that do the vast majority of all logging on British Columbia’s coast. Its website boasts of “innovative, high-tech” companies whose workers turn out “a growing array of forest and wood products.” But in truth, members of the Coast Forest… View Article

Highlights from BC Budget 2017

Feb 21, 2017
The 2017 BC Budget was just released; here’s our analysis so far: MSP goes down for families with income under $120,000 MSP premiums are going to be cut in half for families with incomes under $120,000 as of January 2018. Essentially, BC Budget 2017 reverses the MSP increases this government implemented over the last 15… View Article

What you need to know about the provincial debt

Feb 21, 2017
One of the more memorable promises Premier Clark made in the last election was the one of a debt-free BC (in 20 years or so). So it’s understandable that people are interested in what has happened to BC’s debt since then. Provincial debt has increased from $60.7 billion in 2013/2014 to an estimated $69.8 billion… View Article

Tax fairness in BC? Hardly

Feb 16, 2017
Tax cuts disproportionately benefitted the richest 1% of British Columbians, write @IglikaIvanova & @1alexhemingway: https://t.co/iZbcztdPem pic.twitter.com/BavNnT2WWp — The CCPA–BC (@CCPA_BC) February 16, 2017 As we wait to hear more about the tax cuts coming in BC Budget 2017, it is important to remember what has happened to our provincial tax system over the past 16… View Article

The problem with tax cuts: The promise doesn’t match the reality

Feb 15, 2017
The big news item in yesterday’s BC throne speech was that the Premier’s plan to relieve affordability pressures for families will include tax cuts of some sort. The problem with this plan: the inevitable flip side of tax cuts is lost public revenues. And while most governments—including Clark’s—promise that tax cuts won’t affect public services, the reality… View Article

The rise and fall of climate action in BC

Feb 13, 2017
It was a decade ago, in the February 13, 2007 Speech from the Throne, when the BC government launched into a frenzy of climate action never before seen in the province. Almost all of the BC government’s current “climate leadership” claims – so heavily promoted in a pre-election advertising spree – came out of a… View Article

BC’s natural gas giveaway: Production soars, revenues plummet

Feb 9, 2017
Not long ago, BC received huge annual royalty revenues from its growing natural gas sector. The revenues were often billed as paying for essential public services like health care and education, and were appealing politically as they meant governments did not have to raise taxes to do so. The provincial government claimed that new production… View Article

Adult education in BC: A Canadian outlier

Feb 6, 2017
Thankfully for their residents, not every province handles adult education like BC where the government has eroded access to high-school level courses for adults while other provinces are making basic education more accessible. In mid January, the Province of Ontario announced policy changes to make adult education more affordable and to ensure that low and… View Article

Canada cannot have it both ways on climate and fossil fuel expansion

Jan 25, 2017
With great fanfare and a claim that “Canada is back,” Prime Minister Trudeau helped usher in the Paris Agreement on climate change in December 2015. Since then, however, the federal government has pushed to expand fossil fuel production through new bitumen pipelines and LNG terminals. This contradiction points to a loophole in the Paris Agreement,… View Article

Taking stock of BC’s new (affordable?) housing policies

Jan 11, 2017
In 2016, the BC government set out several new actions intended to address housing affordability. But as 2017 begins, Metro Vancouver continues to have a massive problem – in both home ownership affordability and rental markets. This threatens to undermine the region’s long-term prosperity by driving out young people and making it harder to attract… View Article

Trump and Trudeau are gunning to massively privatize infrastructure – and it’s going to cost you

Jan 10, 2017
As with most of Donald Trump’s policy ideas, details are still sparse on his plan for rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure. But two main pillars of the plan, outlined during the election campaign, stand out. First, he’s talking a big game – a proposed $1 trillion in infrastructure investment to be “spurred” over 10 years. Second—and… View Article

A bleak jobs picture outside BC’s big cities

Jan 8, 2017
We hear a lot about BC’s strong jobs performance – it’s mentioned in every speech and media appearance by our Premier and members of her government. On the surface, it sounds like a good news story with over 73,000 new jobs created in 2016 while many provinces actually lost jobs. But what the Premier doesn’t… View Article

When LNG plants get a special deal on Hydro rates, who pays?

Dec 20, 2016
It’s always telling to see who in our province is able to win special treatment from the BC government. The BC Utilities Commission is currently reviewing residential BC Hydro rates, something they do periodically. As part of that process, the BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre (BCPIAC), on behalf of numerous organizations representing low-income British Columbians… View Article

Most and least expensive cities for child care: 4 key takeaways for BC

Dec 15, 2016
A new CCPA report reveals staggering disparities in parents’ experiences with child care across the country. Prices are highest in Toronto and lowest in cities in Quebec where child care is heavily subsidized by the provincial government. Cities in Manitoba and PEI, the other two provinces in Canada that set child care fees and fund… View Article

The crumbling case for two-tiered health care

Dec 15, 2016
Brian Day has put Canadian universal health care on trial in BC Supreme Court, seeking to swing the doors open to privatization by challenging foundational laws that underpin our public health system. Yet ironically, at the same time, the public policy case for privatized health care is increasingly in tatters. As I recently discussed, the… View Article

A critical guide to the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change

Dec 14, 2016
After working on climate and energy issues intensively for the past nine years, I would love to scream from the rooftops about how Canada now has a real climate framework, and how as a nation we are proudly, if belatedly, walking the talk. Instead, I feel immensely disappointed by last week’s First Ministers’ Meeting on… View Article