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  • Deconstructing BC’s carbon neutral government

    Besides the carbon tax, one of the most important BC government climate action initiatives has been the adoption of Carbon Neutral Government. That is, count emissions from public buildings and travel, reduce them as much as possible and pay for carbon offsets to negate the rest. As of the 2010…

  • Are days of large federal budget surpluses at an end?

    OTTAWA–After years of large surpluses, today’s announcement of a $1.6 billion federal budget surplus in 2004/05 may seem surprisingly low. Does that mean the cupboard is now bare in Ottawa? Hardly. According to CCPA Senior Economist Ellen Russell, the surplus is low this year because Ottawa made public for the…

  • Nurses’ work deserves attention during the Ontario election

    This winter, a bad flu season that resulted in overcrowded emergency rooms shone a light on the need for a reinvestment in Ontario’s health care system.  There were crushing workloads for nurses and health care workers, whose jobs are becoming increasingly precarious—thanks to austerity measures. Starting in 2012-13, the Ontario…

  • Building a universal child care system in BC means rethinking how we fund new spaces

    Last year, the BC government made landmark investments in child care, reducing costs for tens of thousands of families. And, those in $10/day prototypes (2,500 spaces throughout the province) are finally experiencing truly affordable child care. However, too many families are still desperate for access to quality, licensed child care.…

  • Employment Insurance isn’t working for everyone

    Canada’s social security system is built on the premise that working-age adults don’t need income support for as long as they can remain active in the labour force. If that was ever true, it is increasingly not the case, and it will be even less so as labour and market…

  • Baskin-Robbins and the Walmartization of Ice Cream

    It’s been an unusually hot summer, and soaring temperatures have boosted sales of that quintessential summer food, ice cream. But Baskin-Robbins has decided to shut its production facility in Peterborough, Ont., and lay off 80 workers because of…wait for it… increased demand! From the department of “wait, what?”, here’s the…

  • Work Life: Terminally ill professor pleads for asbestos ban

    University of Manitoba professor Patricia Martens has one more mission as an epidemiologist as she confronts her final days with a terminal disease. She wants the government to stop aiding and abetting the lethal trade in asbestos. Martens is a prominent and distinguished research scientist in the university’s faculty of…

  • Cut the rhetoric, not health care

    It is an old rule of persuasion: people are rarely receptive right away; you have to work at making them so. If you want to change someone’s mind about something, you first have to shake them out of their complacency, sow uncertainty in their minds, get them worried, make them…

  • New BC welfare rules: some positive steps forward (and a couple steps back)

    Yesterday (June 11) the BC government surprised many when it announced a host of welfare policy changes. In all, almost 30 welfare rule adjustments are to be enacted (the full list can be found here). After more than a year as premier, the announcement was billed as “the first pillar…

  • Don’t Kid Yourself: We all pay for the defunding of higher education

    I went to McGill in the late 80s and early 90s when tuition fees were less than $1,200 a year, so with summer jobs and some parental help I graduated from my first degree debt-free. For my MA, which I took in Ontario, I worked part-time and graduated after one…

  • Technology and the future of public health care

    A couple years ago I put out a report for the CCPA that crunched the numbers on health care sustainability (BC version here). The main finding was that public health care was basically sustainable in that it could handle projected increases in population, aging and inflation as long as GDP…

  • Fast Facts: Bill C-10: The truth about consequences

    On September 20, 2011, a few months after winning a majority election, Stephen Harper’s Justice Minister, Rob Nicholson, tabled Bill C-10, the Safe Streets and Communities Act.   The bill was passed in the House of Commons in early December and has proceeded to the Senate. The bill is intended to…