In anticipation of Tuesday’s provincial budget, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives warns that further cuts to public spending will impede the economic recovery, which is already expected to be slow and jobless.
“There is no ‘fat’ to trim from public services as BC’s public sector is already among the smallest in Canada,” says CCPA economist Iglika Ivanova. “Recent rounds of spending cuts have compromised much-needed social services and removed a potential source of stimulus at a time when the provincial economy needs all the help it can get.”
Economy and economic indicators
It is a little known fact that BC’s public sector has been shrinking both in terms of employees per capita and expenditures relative to GDP (or the size of the economy) since the early 1990s. This is because our public service already went through several comprehensive reviews in recent years that looked for ways to cut costs. Simply put, BC entered the recession with one of the leanest public sectors in the country and there was little room for cuts without compromising much-needed public services.
On November 18th, 2009, in Ottawa, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Canadian Labour Congress held an event entitled "Recession, Recovery and Transformation: Meeting the policy challenges of our time." The session was filmed by CPAC, and are available through the links below.
There has never been a better time in recent history when the core democratic value of equality can be seen as both an ethical and practical option. Governments in advanced democracies around the world have been forced by the current prolonged economic crisis to openly acknowledge that the dominant political and economic ideology has been a failure. Its system of values, with the minimal role assigned to government, has been proven by experience to be disastrously wrong, both in terms of stability and social justice.
Politics is about choices. But we can’t make effective choices without clarity. And that means we have to have an adult conversation about taxes and public services. A conversation that starts at A and goes to B, and doesn’t assume something that doesn’t make any sense to get there. A conversation that re-establishes in public discourse a connection between the public services we need and the taxes that pay for those services. The kind of conversation we expect our children to learn to engage in virtually from the moment they can talk.
Inside this issue:
Managing BC’s Forests for a Cooler Planet: Carbon Storage, Sustainable Jobs and Conservation by Ben Parfitt
How Big is BC’s Public Sector? by Iglika Ivanova
Communities in Crisis: A Case Study of Campbell River by Blair Redlin
2010 and All That by Marvin Shaffer
Public or Private — How the Choice for P3s Gets Made by Keith Reynolds
Food Bank Use Takes a Distressing Jump by Seth Klein
Government ministers and Canadian trade officials have avoided saying just how much the tentative deal on Buy American preferences is worth to Canadian suppliers. As the details of the agreement begin to emerge, the reasons for this reticence are becoming clear.
The agreement gives Canada fleeting access to a sliver of the U.S. stimulus package. Canadian businesses will get to compete for $US 4-5 billion worth of projects. This amounts to less than 2% of the $275 billion of procurement funded under the Recovery Act. The rest falls outside the scope of this agreement.
OTTAWA—The tentative Buy American deal fails to gain a meaningful exemption for Canadian suppliers from provisions in the U.S. stimulus package while permanently curtailing provincial and municipal procurement sovereignty, says a new analysis of the deal from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).
“The agreement is highly unbalanced and provides significantly better access for U.S. suppliers to the Canadian procurement market than for Canadian suppliers to U.S. stimulus projects,” says senior CCPA trade researcher Scott Sinclair.
In recent decades we’ve seen a dramatic increase in income inequality, which has concentrated the gains from economic growth in the hands of a small minority at the top of the income distribution. Studies documenting this development cite an unprecedented increase in the amount paid to corporate executives since the early 1980s as a key factor in the growth in inequalities. This trend has been accentuated by tax changes that benefit people with very high incomes.