Posts by Marc Lee

Marc Lee

About Marc Lee

Marc Lee is a Senior Economist at the CCPA’s BC Office. In addition to tracking federal and provincial budgets and economic trends, Marc has published on a range of topics from poverty and inequality to globalization and international trade to public services and regulation. Marc is Co-Director of the Climate Justice Project, a research partnership with UBC's School of Community and Regional Planning that examines the links between climate change policies and social justice. Follow Marc on Twitter

BC’s natural gas giveaway: Production soars, revenues plummet

Feb 9, 2017
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Not long ago, BC received huge annual royalty revenues from its growing natural gas sector. The revenues were often billed as paying for essential public services like health care and education, and were appealing politically as they meant governments did not have to raise taxes to do so. The provincial government claimed that new production… View Article

Canada cannot have it both ways on climate and fossil fuel expansion

Jan 25, 2017
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With great fanfare and a claim that “Canada is back,” Prime Minister Trudeau helped usher in the Paris Agreement on climate change in December 2015. Since then, however, the federal government has pushed to expand fossil fuel production through new bitumen pipelines and LNG terminals. This contradiction points to a loophole in the Paris Agreement,… View Article

Taking stock of BC’s new (affordable?) housing policies

Jan 11, 2017
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In 2016, the BC government set out several new actions intended to address housing affordability. But as 2017 begins, Metro Vancouver continues to have a massive problem – in both home ownership affordability and rental markets. This threatens to undermine the region’s long-term prosperity by driving out young people and making it harder to attract… View Article

Kinder Morgan’s pipeline sales pitch: Too good to be true?

Dec 8, 2016
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After the federal approval of Kinder-Morgan’s controversial Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion (TMX), Alberta Premier Rachel Notley came to BC to sell the pipeline’s economic benefits. She claims BC will get a $1 billion per year boost in GDP as a result of the pipeline, as well as thousands of jobs in both construction and operations… View Article

The case for a progressive property tax

Nov 2, 2016
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In 1993, then-Finance Minister Glen Clark tabled a controversial BC Budget, featuring a wide range of tax changes. A one-point increase in the provincial sales tax was the largest measure, tempered by the introduction of a refundable sales tax credit. Most of the budget measures increased taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Up went the… View Article

A reality check on a national carbon price

Oct 4, 2016
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After years of waffling, Canada is finally moving forward on climate action, including the thorny issue of putting a price on carbon. Last December, Canada helped usher in the Paris Agreement, a new international framework to reduce the carbon pollution that is warming the planet. On the domestic front, federal and provincial first ministers agreed to the… View Article

The abysmal economics of LNG

Sep 26, 2016
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In the lead up to the last provincial election, British Columbians learned about an economic panacea named LNG – Liquefied Natural Gas. This new industrial sector would take vast amounts of fracked gas pipelined from Northeast BC, and convert it to liquid form for shipment to Asia, where high prices would justify multi-billion dollar investments. BC,… View Article

Previewing Canada’s climate action plan

Sep 21, 2016
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It’s been six months since First Ministers unveiled the Vancouver Declaration on Clean Growth and Climate Change. At the time, the Declaration was somewhat of a disappointment: no new national greenhouse gas reduction target, no consensus on carbon pricing, and a parallel push for pipelines (for a review and analysis, see this post). Basically, Ministers agreed to… View Article

Rising housing prices fuel the growing gap

Sep 19, 2016
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Vancouver is now a “city of millionaires”, according to Environics’ 2016 Wealthscapes report: In B.C., the red-hot real estate market fueled a rise in average net worth, producing Canada’s first “city of millionaires”: Vancouver. In 2015, the average net worth of Vancouver households hit $1,036,202 – an impressive 7.1 percent increase over the previous year. You are forgiven if… View Article