Archive
BC Budget 2017: $600 million in tax breaks for business
Mar 17, 2017
Does the BC business sector need a tax cut? Not so much. But Budget 2017 promises to give business over $600 million in additional annual tax breaks nonetheless. That’s more than half a billion dollars annually that won’t be invested in creating affordable high-quality child care spaces, building affordable housing (as opposed to a one-off… View Article
Affordable housing and jobs: Now is the time to build
Mar 16, 2017
The BC government is spending millions on advertising to promote its actions on affordable housing. In Metro Vancouver, however, where the crisis is most acute, there is no sign that housing is going to be within reach of ordinary middle-class households any time soon. .@MarcLeeCCPA takes a look at how BC can build the affordable… View Article
Fixing the carbon tax: A closer look at the BC NDP’s climate plan
Mar 14, 2017
The BC NDP unveiled its climate plan in early February, and its key plank is to increase the BC carbon tax from its current $30 per tonne to $50 per tonne by 2022, in line with the new federal floor price on carbon. The carbon tax increase under the BC NDP plan would be phased… View Article
From disenfranchised to revitalized: Ten proposals to set our forests and BC’s rural communities on a new course
Mar 13, 2017
Fort Nelson and Merritt lie at two geographical extremes, the former perched in the northeast corner near some of British Columbia’s biggest natural gas plays, the latter located deep in the province’s southwest, near rolling dry hills that are home to BC’s biggest ranches. It takes nearly 15 hours by car to cover the distance… View Article
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