Posts by Seth Klein

Seth Klein

About Seth Klein

Seth Klein is a CCPA-BC research associate and the former CCPA-BC Director. His research deals primarily with welfare policy, poverty, inequality and economic security. A social activist for over 30 years and a former teacher, Seth holds a BA in international relations, a BEd from the University of Toronto and an MA in political science from Simon Fraser University.

Seth is an adjunct professor with Simon Fraser University’s Urban Studies program and the former BC director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. His book A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency is now available.

Seth is also a past co-chair of the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition, an advisory board member for the Columbia Institute’s Centre for Civic Governance, and an advisor and instructor for Next Up, a leadership program for young people committed to social and environmental justice.
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James at the UBCM: A welcome move off revenue-neutrality

Oct 6, 2009
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In her  speech last Thursday to the annual meeting of the Union of BC Municipalities, NDP leader Carole James declared: “I am calling on the provincial government to cancel the corporate tax cuts that are scheduled to come in over the next two years related to the carbon tax. And let’s put that money into… View Article

Poverty: How do we measure up? Very poorly

Oct 5, 2009
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Discussions about poverty in Canada and BC are, sadly, forever weighed down by debates about how to define and measure poverty. Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off (LICO) is the line most commonly used, as it is the only measure reliably produced by the federal government each year. It is imperfect, but the best we have to… View Article

Mischief making by oil and gas industry

May 8, 2009
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Ben Parfitt and I submitted the following letter to the Vancouver Sun yesterday. Hopefully it will run in the next couple days. Here it is: Letter to the editor Re. “Maintaining momentum in oil and gas,” May 7. The oil and gas industry should stop its political mischief-making, and obfuscating the numbers about the industry’s… View Article

Poverty reduction and the party platforms

May 7, 2009
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The CCPA is a member of the BC Poverty Reduction Committee, the network that has been pressing all the BC political parties to commit to a comprehensive poverty reduction plan. Over 280 organizations have now signed an Open Letter to all the political parties calling on them to commit to a poverty reduciton plan with… View Article

Government report on welfare leavers at odds with narrative

May 1, 2009
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Kudos to the Tyee’s Andrew MacLeod for extracting a long delayed report on welfare leavers from the provincial government. The report can be downloaded here. Andrew’s Tyee article about the report can be found here. The report uses tax data of BC welfare leavers between 2000 and 2005 to see how people have done. Comparing… View Article

STV is worth trying

Apr 25, 2009
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Great to see a debate kicked off among our research associates and others about the pros and cons of BC-STV. As Marc mentions below, the current issue of the CCPA’s BC Commentary has a special collection on STV, which you can download here. Keith outlines the case against STV below. And while the CCPA has… View Article

Wishing away child poverty

Apr 3, 2009
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This past week, local CTV news ran a series on child poverty called “BC’s Shame”. They’ve posted the series on their website, along with the full interview reporter Mi-Jung Lee had with Premier Campbell about child poverty. The series was very good, but the premier’s comments were disappointing. Premier Campbell spent much of the interview… View Article

UN raps our housing record

Mar 11, 2009
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In mid February, a report was released that received very little attention, but should have: The report of the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing’s Mission to Canada (hat tip to Jean Swanson for drawing the final report to my attention; it can be found here; just scroll down to the “Mission to Canada”.) The… View Article

Nailing down homeless targets

Mar 9, 2009
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Kudos to BC’s Auditor General for his report on homelessness last week. John Doyle’s report raised numerous concerns, including that the provincial government lacks solid numbers on how many homeless people there are in BC, who they are, and most importantly, he found that the province does not have a clear and comprehensive action plan,… View Article