New protections for BC platform workers entrench racism

Dec 13, 2023
In November 2023, the BC Ministry of Labour announced new employment standards that claim to “bring fairness” to the estimated 40,000 ride-hail and food-delivery workers in BC. The move comes after a year of public engagement with platform workers, platform companies and labour experts, which brought to the fore the precarious working conditions of platform… View Article

Growing toll of COVID-19 on hospitals & population health should concern us

Dec 5, 2023
New data from Statistics Canada and the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) paint a troubling picture of the growing toll of COVID-19 on population health and provincial health systems. These findings come as public health authorities and governments have rolled back most measures that reduce SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) transmission, even as… View Article

Time to end information hide-and-seek games: Public deserves more prompt government disclosure of basic data

Nov 16, 2023
No one should be told to file a Freedom of Information request simply to learn who works for them. Government must give members of the public access to up-to-date and useful information on who is there to serve them and quit obfuscating and abusing access to information laws, Ben Parfitt writes…. View Article

Affordability crisis will persist until we get a handle on runaway housing costs

Nov 15, 2023
Although inflation has come down from the historic highs recorded in 2022, the cost of living in Metro Vancouver continues to increase rapidly.  It now takes an hourly wage of $25.68 in Metro Vancouver for two parents each working full-time to support a family of four. This is the 2023 living wage for Metro Vancouver,… View Article

Raising the bar: Our recommendations for equitable gig work in BC

Nov 2, 2023
Platform companies like Uber, Lyft and Skip the Dishes derive profits at the expense of taxpayers’ contributions and workers’ health and safety. The BC government has a unique opportunity to set high standards for sustainable, responsible platform work and we are pleased to support the government’s deliberations on this issue. Read our 12 recommendations. … View Article

Reality check: BC government can afford to make more investments in urgent social and environmental priorities

Oct 31, 2023
Provincial government spending as a share of GDP still hasn’t recovered after decades-old social spending cuts under the previous government despite growing need for public investment…. View Article

2023 Gideon Rosenbluth Memorial Lecture with Economist Ha-Joon Chang

Oct 24, 2023
By
(video) Economist Ha-Joon Chan delivers the 2023 Gideon Rosenbluth Memorial Lecture, co-hosted by the CCPA-BC and the UBC Vancouver School of Economics…. View Article

What would it take to meet Canada’s 2030 climate targets?

Oct 5, 2023
  Adapted from the CCPA’s fall 2023 submission to Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Body by Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood & Marc Lee When Canada first signed the Paris Agreement way back in 2015, the commitment to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030 seemed far away. So far away, in fact, that in… View Article

Fires and farmworkers: Climate justice means improving protections for migrant farmworkers

Sep 15, 2023
The impacts of the climate crisis are socially and geographically uneven: the wealthiest regions contribute disproportionately to the destruction of the planet while the poorest regions suffer the heaviest consequences. In this context, migrant farmworkers find themselves doubly displaced, facing droughts and inundations in their home countries, then heatwaves, fires and floods where they come… View Article

Failure to act means failing dikes

Sep 13, 2023
  Province must take responsibility for flood protection infrastructure Provincial and municipal officials were warned repeatedly that the dikes in one of the cities hit hardest by the floods that paralyzed southern British Columbia in 2021 were structurally unsound and could fail should water levels in local rivers rise quickly. For years preceding the disaster,… View Article

Here’s how BC should protect app-based workers

Sep 6, 2023
The rise of the “gig economy” and on-demand work through digital platforms like Uber and Skip the Dishes has ignited the public debate about precarious work. Despite their high-tech image, digital platform firms employ practices that are familiar from centuries of insecure work, including compensating workers on a per-task basis, offering no guarantee of continuing… View Article

Taxing land wealth for the public good: provincial policy options

Aug 30, 2023
Property wealth has become a massive source of inequality in BC as home prices and rents have risen dramatically amid a severe housing crisis and shortage. A consequence of high prices has been an explosion of residential real estate wealth now totaling over $2.1 trillion in the province, a stock of wealth that remains only… View Article

The federal government’s potential leap towards housing affordability

Aug 24, 2023
This is an excerpt from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ annual Alternative Federal Budget chapter on housing. It outlines what an ambitious federal government could achieve on housing affordability in its 2024 budget. For a growing number of Canadians, the housing market is broken. In 2021, an estimated 1.5 million Canadian households lived in… View Article

Housing lessons from Singapore

Aug 10, 2023
Could Singapore, a city-state of 5.5 million across the ocean in Asia, hold the key to BC’s housing future? On a recent trade mission to Asia, Premier Eby was introduced to Singapore and its successes in providing affordable housing for its citizens. With a promised BC Builds program in development, Singapore shows what a more… View Article

The Energy Action Framework and BC’s carbon crossroads revisited

Jul 25, 2023
Since first starting down the pathway of climate action in 2007, the BC government has both developed policies to reduce carbon emissions domestically while simultaneously promoting a growing oil and gas export industry. These contradictions are evident in the March 2023 announcement of a new Energy Action Framework, which tries to balance the interests of… View Article

That 70s show: The evolution of income inequality in Canada

Jul 13, 2023
  This brief looks at the evolution of inequality going back to 1976. Drawing on Statistics Canada’s Canadian Income Survey, it reviews changes in the distribution of income by decile (groupings of ten percent of households ranked by income from lowest to highest income), and asks a hypothetical question: what would today’s incomes look like… View Article

BC First Nation logs almost all of its treaty lands, leaving behind lots of stumps and questions

Jul 10, 2023
  In just three years, much of the McLeod Lake Indian Band’s treaty lands were stripped of their bountiful and exceedingly valuable trees in a surge of logging that included one massive clear-cut that is almost 3,000 hectares in size, or 7.5 times larger than Vancouver’s Stanley Park.   The extensive logging by the band of… View Article

Landmark health care case spotlights problems of a profit-centred system

Jun 23, 2023
In April, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear a case involving the constitutionality of legal limits on private finance in health care. A 14-year legal saga has ended, but many provinces seem to be ignoring evidence in this case indicating that a profit-centred system does not serve the public interest. Proponents of for-profit… View Article

Our recommendations for the 2024 BC budget

Jun 22, 2023
The BC government is holding its annual public consultation on Budget 2024 this June, inviting British Columbians to share their priorities for government investment next year.  On June 14, I presented the CCPA–BC’s recommendations to the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. Via the BC Legislative Assembly website, you can hear my presentation… View Article

Open letter on regulating platform work from BC experts in labour law, policy and economics

Jun 20, 2023
The following is an open letter released today led by the CCPA–BC and the Centre for Future Work. It is signed by 61 leading experts in labour law, policy and economics (signatories listed below). The letter urges the BC government to implement strong measures to ensure that ride-share and food delivery platforms fulfill the same… View Article