Search results for “site/human rights”

  • Creating a Just Society

    Reducing poverty, inequality will spur economic recovery An economic recovery that is mainly reliant on consumer spending is unavoidably fragile, since most Canadian consumers are now deeply in debt. Going into the Great Recession, the average Canadian household owed $1.40 for every dollar of disposable income. By mid-2009, that figure…

  • Harper’s Record on Immigration – Lawyers Weigh In

    The following is cut and pasted from an email that is in circulation to lawyers, practitioners and academics regarding the Harper record on immigration.  It does not address the rapid growth in the issuing of temporary foreign worker permits, particularly since the recession began. Harper’s record on that issue is…

  • Trade and Investment Research Project

    The EU wants a wide-open banking system. We should say no.

    The stakes are high in the last stages of the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) talks, yet there remains a serious lack of public information and debate about what is actually on the table. Negotiators boast that the CETA is the most ambitious and comprehensive economic treaty ever,…

  • Cattle ranchers and farmers are big groundwater users. But many ranchers and farmers have failed to apply for groundwater licences. Photo: Matt Miles.

    Out of water?

    As deadline looms, thousands of BC groundwater users risk losing access to water, but not most water bottling, fracking and mining companies In February 2018, the head of a little-known Surrey-based company asked the BC government for a licence to withdraw 864 cubic metres of water per day from a…

  • February 2004: Poisoning the Environment — Free

    Polluters are supposed to pay clean-up costs–but they don’t What is remarkable about the latest environmental law decision from the Supreme Court of Canada is not how ecologically enlightened the Court is (since a series of previous cases had already demonstrated the Justices’ “green” wisdom), but rather the breadth of…

  • Fast Facts: Proposed parental control of schools remains baffling

    First published in the Winnipeg Free Press April 23, 2021 A teacher hands a child his report card in the morning, and intervenes in a child’s bullying in the afternoon — a few hours later, their parents tell the principal if that teacher’s career should continue.  Bill 64 creates that…

  • For Some, Arrogance is Bliss

    This fall, Margaret Wente discovered people under 40. Woot! Okay, that’s not entirely fair. Given her years of pontificating on topics like the environment, public schools, and the glass ceiling, it’s inevitable that sooner or later she manages, even accidentally, to quote or refer to someone under 40. But an…

  • From the ground up: Building a successful Early Learning and Child Care System in Nova Scotia

    The Nova Scotia government has announced that it will introduce a new free pre-primary program for children turning four by the end of December 2017. While there are many reasons to be concerned about the implementation of this program, the good news is that the government is investing in the…

  • Polling on taxes – response to a critic

    On November 29, the CCPA released an opinion research study led by myself and Randy Galawan called Beyond the 1%: What British Columbians think about taxes, inequality and public services. The study involved an extensive online survey (poll) of a broad sample of British Columbians, conducted by Environics Research, and…

  • Manitoba’s Climate & Green Plan

    Catastrophic Failure of Leadership Last week, the Manitoba government announced it would amend Bill 16, the “Climate and Green Plan,” to eliminate its flat $25/tonne carbon tax, leaving it essentially empty of any real action on climate change. Just a few days later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the…

  • The Attack on Organics

    Anti-organics study funded by Cargill and other corporations Food issues have been much in the news recently, but I want to focus on what can only be called an attempt to trash organic food and organic farming – an attempt that, as we shall see, fits into a larger agenda.…

  • Your Brain on Capitalism

    At least as far back as Sokrates, people have speculated on the relationship between psychology and politics. In the 20th century, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm and members of the Frankfurt School (such as Herbert Marcuse) pioneered discussion about how individual dispositions affect one’s social and political ideologies. On the other…