Search results for “site/human rights”

  • What we deserve

    Warren Urquhart discusses two important digital rights for Canadians

    Warren Urquhart discusses two important digital rights for Canadians

  • 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…

  • 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. …

  • Stoking the Tsunamis of War and Repression

    Canada’s military exports arm world’s most belligerent nations Finally, after years of delays and just a few hours after Japan’s horrifying earthquake on March 11, the Harper government finally released its latest deeply-flawed report on Canada’s military exports between 2007 and 2009. This timing ensured that the latest data on…

  • uber eats delivery person of colour on their bike looking down on their phone

    New protections for BC platform workers entrench racism

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • True, Lasting Reconciliation

    Implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in British Columbia law, policy and practices Download 1.04 MB28 pages Implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a central political and public policy issue around the world. The BC government has committed…

  • 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…

  • The Latin American Revolution (Part XX)

    Union in Colombia battles anti-union Canadian oil company In May 2012, the third edition of my report Profiting from Repression: Canadian Investment in and Trade with Colombia was published and released by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) in Ottawa. The report links ten Canadian companies in Colombia to…