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Search results for: “site/human rights”

  • Safe Passage

    Migrant Worker Rights in Saskatchewan Download 2.26 MB20 pages Saskatchewan’s migrant workers rights regime has been characterized as a “positive national standard” for the rest of the country. Introducing the legislation in 2012, then-Minister of the Economy Bill Boyd argued it would “position Saskatchewan as having the most comprehensive protection…

  • Proposed human rights legislation gets failing grade

    For the second time in twenty years, the Government of British Columbia has decided to abolish its Human Rights Commission. If the draft legislation set out in Bill 53 passes, the Commission will be erased again, this time in the name of providing British Columbians with a new, more efficient…

  • The Struggle Continues

    Indigenous peoples still suffering from rights violations Indigenous women today work with many issues ranging from domestic violence, youth gangs, child welfare issues, land rights, right through to helping frame the 1995 Bejing Declaration at the Fourth World Conference for Women. The Beijing Declaration was described as the most significant…

  • A pile of wood pellets is shown in front of a cross-section view of a stack of logs.

    Trees to pellets? Scarred by two previous resource industry boom and busts, pivotal decisions lie ahead for community of Fort Nelson

    The residents of Fort Nelson know better than most rural British Columbians about the harsh economic realities of resource dependency. It is now 13 years since the forest industry ditched the community in dramatic fashion when Canfor Corp. ceased all its local operations in the region and closed its plywood…

  • The federal government’s potential leap towards housing affordability

    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…

  • Employment rights justice denied to thousands of BC Workers

    For decades, the BC Employment Standards Branch has not effectively enforced the Employment Standards Act, meaning thousands of workers are denied their legal rights, a new report that we co-wrote with the BC Employment Standards Coalition shows. Complaints take between 18 months to three years to resolve; the Branch doesn’t…

  • Modular housing for LNG Canada workers, Kitimat BC/ Photo credit Marc Lee

    Fracking in BC’s northeast

    Last summer I got out of Vancouver and toured northern BC. While the trip was mostly for pleasure, my inner economist could not resist some industrial tourism and visits to resource towns and major industrial sites that are the heart and soul of BC’s resource economy. Forestry dominates near Prince…

  • May 2005: Canadian Workers’ Rights Assaulted

    Collective bargaining more an illusion than a right Based on the premise that labour rights are human rights, Canadians have seen a serious erosion of a fundamental and universal human right in the past two decades—their right to organize into a union and engage in full and free collective bargaining. …

  • Why we need sectoral bargaining

    Why BC needs sectoral bargaining now

    Too many BC workers lack meaningful access to the benefits of collective bargaining and the failure of our labour laws to keep up with the evolving nature of work is a key culprit.

  • Photo: © Garth Lenz

    After the rush: Fort Nelson needs firm government commitments to reclaim lands abandoned by fossil fuel industry

    In the face of the economic fallout from COVID-19, it’s easy to forget that some communities in British Columbia were in deep fiscal distress long before the pandemic began. Fort Nelson is a good example, and a textbook case of why senior levels of government need to be mindful when…

  • Fast Facts: Respect and the right to abortion

    The loss of abortion rights in the U.S. has spurned new debate here in Canada. In the Free Press op ed “A key question in the abortion debate” (July 8), Carl DeGurse, in launching an argument against abortion, writes about his being conceived to young parents prior to their marriage.…

  • The Monitor, Sept/Oct 2019

    Election 2019: Thinking Bigger, Demanding Better Download 6.52 MB The pollster Nik Nanos claimed in June that climate change would be “one of the defining battle grounds” this election. “More important than jobs, more important than health care, more important than immigration.” In July, Abacus Data put climate change in…