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Two obvious but generally unstated details about the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline are climate change and that oil and gas companies stand to make mega-profits. An honest appraisal of the project would be something like, “yes, putting in the pipeline will facilitate even more greenhouse gas emissions from the Alberta oil sands, but our buddies [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under Alberta, BC, climate change, oil and gas.
January 27th, 2012
Comments: 2
This morning the CCPA released a new report (co-authored by yours truly) that looks at the thorny issue of health care reform in BC (and Canada) and identifies some practical, evidence-based strategies that have been successful in improving quality of care and controlling costs in other jurisdictions. The papers comes out at a time when [...]
Posted by Iglika Ivanova under BC, health care.
January 16th, 2012
Comments: 2
Putting aside the impact of the proposed Enbridge pipeline on GHG emissions or spills on land and at sea, the case in favour of the pipeline rests on creating jobs. Personally, I think industry and government use “jobs” as a euphemism for “profits” as that is where the lion’s share of revenues go. But for [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under Alberta, BC, climate change, employment, fossil fuels, oil and gas, resources.
January 13th, 2012
Comments: none
The United Nations climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, ended 2011 with a whimper. After a year in which climate disasters rolled across the globe, major polluting nations like Canada chose to ignore them, seeking instead to disrupt the Durban negotiations, then blew the world a raspberry, by officially pulling out of the Kyoto [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, climate change, Conservative government.
December 13th, 2011
Comments: 1
Last month, the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) released a document entitled Public Education for the Public Good: A National Vision for Canada’s Post-Secondary Education System. I found the document to be quite informative, filled with a lot of useful statistics. For example: -Enrolment is rising in colleges and universities across Canada. Since the late 1990s, full-time enrolment has [...]
Posted by Nick Falvo under BC, democracy, education, employment, fiscal federalism, part time work, post-secondary education, public infrastructure, social policy, user fees, young workers.
November 6th, 2011
Comments: none
This summer I put our household through an energy efficiency retrofit. I was working on a research paper on energy efficiency, and then both the BC and federal governments announced new funding for their retrofit programs, so I engaged in some direct action research, staring with an energy audit of our home (more in part [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, energy.
October 24th, 2011
Comments: 4
Today CCPA released a new Climate Justice Project report, Fighting Energy Poverty in the Transition to Zero-Emission Housing: A Framework for BC, by yours truly, Eugene Kung (a lawyer with the BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre and a steering committee member of the CJP) and Jason Owen (who worked on this project as a student at UBC, now with the [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, carbon pricing, energy, housing, inequality, poverty.
September 28th, 2011
Comments: 1
If you are interested in what BC’s new Premier Christy Clark is doing on the job creation front, check out a couple articles on the BC Policy Note blog (here and here). Like the Dance of the Seven Veils, the Jobs Plan is being revealed piece by piece over the next few days, and today [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, employment.
September 19th, 2011
Comments: none
The C. D. Howe Institute is out this morning with a press release entitled, “Raising Oil and Gas Royalties Does Not Benefit Provincial Coffers.” A complete analysis of the accompanying 30-page paper – featuring many graphs, tables and regressions – will take time. But here is my initial take. Background The Institute correctly notes that [...]
Posted by Erin Weir under Alberta, BC, budgets, C. D. Howe Institute, media, resources, Saskatchewan.
September 14th, 2011
Comments: 1
Earlier today, Elections BC announced the much anticipated HST referendum results. British Columbians have voted to scrap the HST. The best part about having the results is that now we can move on from the narrow issue of what type of sales tax is better and focus our energies on some of the bigger issues [...]
Posted by Iglika Ivanova under BC, HST, income distribution, Jack Mintz, poverty.
August 26th, 2011
Comments: 8
Our climate justice framework for BC is to eliminate fossil fuels by 2040. In the household sector, this poses a significant challenge, not so much in terms of technology and knowledge, but because natural gas is much cheaper than electricity per unit of energy. Even though BC has among the lowest prices in North America, [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, carbon pricing, climate change, energy, fossil fuels, housing.
July 28th, 2011
Comments: 8
Whenever we consider the pros and cons of a new policy, we want to know if it benefits or hurts the poor, the middle class and those who are better off. Often, the answer depends on how we define each of these groups. It’s said that 99% of Canadians think of themselves as middle class, [...]
Posted by Iglika Ivanova under BC, income distribution, inequality.
July 20th, 2011
Comments: 6
I was in the budget lock-up in Ottawa back in 2009, when the feds announced a home renovation tax credit as part of the stimulus package, and one of my first thoughts was “kitchen reno”. Months later we had a nice kitchen upgrade to enjoy as our contribution to getting the Canadian economy back on [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, climate change, energy.
July 20th, 2011
Comments: 3
We’ve known for a long time that we all pay for poverty. We just didn’t know how much. This is the question I investigate in my latest CCPA report The Cost of Poverty in BC. If you’re not in the mood for reading the report, you can watch a short video that summarizes the findings [...]
Posted by Iglika Ivanova under BC, budgets, poverty.
July 14th, 2011
Comments: 3
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 calendar year, the BC government [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, budgets, carbon pricing, climate change, public services, taxation.
July 13th, 2011
Comments: none
Any day now the BC government should be releasing the latest greenhouse gas data for the province, and we will see if any progress is being made towards a legislated 33% reduction in emissions by 2020 (relative to 2007 levels; data will be for 2009 and we know that emissions rose in 2008). Below the [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, climate change, fossil fuels.
July 11th, 2011
Comments: none
“The fact that the Clark government’s Frankenstein HST hybrid will significantly reduce provincial sales tax revenue at a time when public services are already under intense fiscal pressure is a powerful and principled reason to throw the whole package out in the referendum, and start the debate from scratch.” I may live in Ontario, but [...]
Posted by Jim Stanford under BC, HST, Ontario.
July 8th, 2011
Comments: 16
With much of the talk on taxes in BC about the HST, we issued a new report today that looks at the bigger context for BC’s tax system (Vancouver Sun oped here, CTV News story here). Iglika Ivanova, Seth Klein and I compare and contrast BC’s tax system after a decade where tax cuts were [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, inequality, super-rich, taxation.
June 28th, 2011
Comments: 1
BC Stats put out a release yesterday with the headline “Low Income Cut-Offs (LICOs) are a Poor Measure of Poverty” and author Dan Schrier gets in a dirty hit right in first paragraph: Despite protestations from Statistics Canada that LICOs are not meant to be used as a measure of poverty, there are many groups [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, poverty, StatCan.
June 25th, 2011
Comments: 19
Amazingly, BC’s government has joined its official opposition in proposing to restore the provincial corporate income tax rate from 10% to 12%. The same government that cut from 12% to 10% would now reverse itself as part of a last-ditch effort to save the HST. Revenue from a higher corporate tax rate would help finance [...]
Posted by Erin Weir under BC, corporate income tax, HST.
May 26th, 2011
Comments: 2
Just in time for Earth Day, CCPA has a new release from the Climate Justice Project, Transportation Transformation: Building Complete Communities and a Zero-Emission Transportation System in BC. The report is perhaps the most visionary of our CJP publications to date (and has lots of great graphics to illustrate that vision), a necessity given that [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, climate change, transportation.
April 19th, 2011
Comments: 2
Despite all the arguments outlined on this blog, and the federal election debates, the race to the bottom in corporate taxation seems to be alive and well in the G-7. The latest move comes from the UK, whose March budget announced a new 2 percentage point reduction in their corporate tax rate. Meanwhile, Canadian provinces [...]
Posted by Iglika Ivanova under BC, corporate income tax.
April 10th, 2011
Comments: 3
Below is an oped on my new carbon pricing paper that was published today in the Vancouver Sun. Our communications officers have also done a cool animation about carbon pricing in BC, available on the CCPA web page. Look to Europe for Next Phase of BC’s Carbon Tax When it comes to good urban planning, [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, carbon pricing, climate change, taxation.
February 23rd, 2011
Comments: 1
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the sorry state of the BC minimum wage, stuck at $8 after nine years two months and still counting. Yes, it will likely increase very soon, now that almost all leadership candidates on both sides have expressed support for higher minimum wages, but one has got to ask [...]
Posted by Iglika Ivanova under BC, economic literacy, economic models, education, income distribution, inequality, labour adjustment, minimum wage, unemployment.
January 20th, 2011
Comments: 8
With a government as centrally controlled as our federal government, one has to wonder why the media make such a fuss covering cabinet shuffles. Peter Kent may be the new Environment Minister, but the message box is still from the Prime Minister’s Office. So it was not much surprise to see our new Environment Minister [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under Alberta, BC, climate change, energy, fossil fuels, resources.
January 7th, 2011
Comments: none
I’ve long thought that we should lower the voting age to 16, so thanks to Mike deJong for raising it in the BC Liberal leadership campaign. I speak from some experience, as I voted shortly after I turned 17 in the Ontario provincial election. I was a frosh in residence at Western and no one [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, democracy.
December 16th, 2010
Comments: 1
For many years now, the year 2010 had an almost mythic quality to it. More than just a decade-ending round number (we never collectively named that decade; I like “the naughties” myself), it had deep meaning for BC because THEY WERE COMING. The Olympics. Vancouver 2010. In the early days, utopian olympianism ruled the province. [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, climate change, inequality, Olympics.
December 6th, 2010
Comments: 9
Among the concerns about the HST that we at the CCPA have raised was the poor timing of the tax change. From my pre-budget piece last September: If British Columbians respond to the HST by reducing their consumer spending, the timing of the HST introduction may actually slow down the economic recovery, which should be [...]
Posted by Iglika Ivanova under BC, consumers, economic growth, GDP, HST, Jack Mintz, labour market, recession.
October 1st, 2010
Comments: 2
Today CCPA released a new report by myself and Ken Carlaw, an economist at UBC-Okanagan, called Climate Justice, Green Jobs and Sustainable Production in BC. I doubt you’ll see any headlines about it in the major news dailies, but I think it will have a longer-lasting impact as a key economic framing piece for our [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, ccs, climate change, environment, labour market.
September 30th, 2010
Comments: 19
BC’s carbon tax was supposed to be “revenue neutral”, meaning all carbon tax revenue would be “recycled” to British Columbians through personal income tax cuts, corporate income tax cuts and a low-income credit. When the 2008 budget launched the carbon tax, we were provided with a forecast that had revenues precisely match recycling through tax [...]
Posted by Marc Lee under BC, carbon pricing, climate change, corporate income tax, taxation.
September 22nd, 2010
Comments: 2