Archive
End Poverty. It’s Not a Game.
Feb 12, 2009
That’s the catchy slogan for the Poverty Olympics, which took place in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside on Sunday. The event mixed fun and games with a serious message about our province’s failure to adequately tackle poverty and homelessness while we spend spend spend getting ready for the 2010 Olympics (more in this Wall Street Journal article…or… View Article
Children’s mental health: Are we paying attention?
Feb 11, 2009
According to the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD), 15% or about 1 in 7 children in BC suffer from a mental health problem serious enough to cause significant distress and impair their development and functioning. In children, mental illness supersedes all other health problems in terms of the numbers affected and the degreee of impairment. Think about… View Article
Budget reality check
Feb 11, 2009
The provincial government officially changed its no-deficits-no-matter-what tune this week with its proposed amendments to BC’s balanced budget legislation. Not too surprising. To reject the view of economists far and wide that red is the new black by insisting on a balanced budget at all costs would be political suicide, not to mention bad policy…. View Article
“B.C. played no role in precipitating this international crisis”? Bunk.
Feb 11, 2009
A week ago, BC Finance Minister Colin Hansen let the cat out of the bag: the province is going to run a deficit in this year’s budget. And, as promised, two days ago the province repealed the “No More Deficits!” Balanced Budget and Ministerial Accountability Act, pushed through the legislature in 2001. Hansen’s alibi for… View Article
What the FCUCC?!
Feb 10, 2009
More on the culture of entitlement… Mark Godley is the founder and head honcho of False Creek Surgical Clinic, one of the largest companies in BC providing a range of surgical and medical services, including women’s health and gynecology, plastic surgery, pain management, cardiology, colonoscopies, general surgery, you name it, they’ve got it. Like Copeman,… View Article
School ranking: public shaming with a statistical veneer
Feb 9, 2009
By printing the Fraser Institute rankings of elementary schools the Vancouver Sun gives unwarranted attention and a gloss of respectability to a cynical attempt to create anxiety among parents and educators through public shaming of students, families, educators and to place public schools in a negative light. The FI’s ranking calculation is not a legitimate… View Article
Getting in Hot Water: A Lesson in Climate Subsidies
Feb 9, 2009
My hot water tank blew out just before Christmas. I had no idea, just went down to the crawlspace to get some wrapping paper and found the floor flooded around the old tank. We’d been expecting this for a while, having never had to change the tank since we moved in seven years earlier. Contemplating… View Article
The culture of entitlement
Feb 7, 2009
Don Copeman, of the infamous Vancouver clinic that bears his name, was plugging his business in Parksville’s local paper, the Oceanside Star. While doing so he managed to slag Canadians whose “culture of entitlement”, he charges, is the biggest obstacle to private clinics. “Trying to change the Canadian culture away from this culture of entitlement… View Article
The biggest forest crisis? A lack of imagination.
Feb 6, 2009
Everywhere you turn it’s bleak news for BC’s forest economy. Sawmills and pulp mills shuttered left and right, and a provincial government whose lame response is simply to say we’ve got to tough it out until markets improve and some of those mothballed mills possibly re-open. Not exactly encouraging words if you happen to live… View Article
About that unemployment rate
Feb 6, 2009
A couple days ago I was musing about big job losses on the horizon. Today, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that total employment has only dropped by 1.7% between Jan 2008 and Jan 2009. The bad news is that total unemployment surged by 50% over the same period. OK,… View Article
Love Those Deficits
Feb 6, 2009
As noted by Vaughn Palmer in the Vancouver Sun, it seems that all the political parties will benefit from Premier Campbell’s recent conversion to deficit budgets. While deficits are the obvious outcome of a rapidly decreasing economy, little is mentioned about the long-term effects that successive waves of tax reductions will have on building BC’s… View Article
No full-time kindergarten this year
Feb 4, 2009
Kindergarten expansion in BC has officially been postponed to the indefinite future, reports Janet Steffenhagen on the Vancouver Sun’s education blog Report Card today, referring to an article in the Nanaimo Daily News as her source. The announcement itself is hardly surprising in light of the gloomy fiscal update delivered by the Premier earlier this… View Article
Climate policy: contradiction #2
Feb 4, 2009
Speaking of BC climate policy contradictions that desperately need to be addressed (like I was doing here), wrap your head around this: our current policy framework is supposed to simultaneously reduce consumers’ dependence on fossil fuels and increase our dependence on fossil fuel production in the province. What? It’s true. It works like this. If… View Article
This is gonna hurt
Feb 4, 2009
Housing has been one of the major drivers of the BC economy in recent years. Low interest rates led to rising home prices and a psychology of “must get in before being locked out forever”; leading a housing bubble that had everyone in town swapping jaw dropping stories of bidding wars and outrageous prices paid…. View Article
Climate policy: contradiction #1
Feb 4, 2009
I don’t know if BC’s current approach to climate change is ironic, paradoxical, or just plain crazy, but whatever it is, it is desperately in need of revision. As it stands, existing policies virtually negate each other. It is even possible that overall, they make the problem worse. Consider BC’s contentious “carbon tax”. However meager… View Article
BC blinks on running a deficit
Feb 2, 2009
Now that the federal budget is over, I’ve been girding myself for the Feb 17 BC budget. My concern to date has been bold statements from both parties that they would never run a deficit, and that therefore we were in for a rerun of last Fall’s federal election where all parties kowtowed to the… View Article
Low income leads to poorer mental health
Feb 2, 2009
Statistics Canada recently published an interesting study on the relationship between low income and poor mental health. The paper, titled “Income and Psychological Distress: the Role of the Social Environment,” provides yet another reason for us to invest in a bold poverty-reduction plan. A large body of research has focused on the poorer physical health… View Article
Time to Pee on P3’s
Feb 1, 2009
Maybe it’s the Baja sun; perhaps it’s the tequila I’ve been forced to drink down here. But I just cannot understand the Vancouver Sun’s angst about the province financing one-third ($750 million) of the Port Mann project. The simple fact of the matter is that provincial government financing will reduce the tolls and/or taxes required… View Article
Chaoulli II?
Jan 30, 2009
So private surgical clinics, led by Brian Day, are suing the BC government so they can charge patients for services that they, the patients, already pay for through their taxes. What a surprise. Dr Day (aka Dr Profit) unveiled the lawsuit at a news conference on Wednesday at the Plaza 500 in Vancouver. I’d love… View Article
The utter stupidity of P3s in BC
Jan 30, 2009
For the “we told you so” file. The BC government has been insisting on P3s (so-called “public-private partnerships” where the private sector builds and operates infrastructure) all over the province. We at the CCPA have consistently argued that this practice is foolish: more complicated, more expensive, and leaving taxpayers holding the bag if anything bad… View Article