Employment & labour

It’s time to give high tech workers equal basic rights

Mar 28, 2017
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The BC government recently announced an update to its BC Jobs Plan that focused on measures to encourage increased employment in nine key sectors of the economy. One of those sectors is technology and innovation. To facilitate employment growth in this area the Premier announced that an “Innovation Network” would be created, headed by UBC… View Article

Affordable housing and jobs: Now is the time to build

Mar 16, 2017
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The BC government is spending millions on advertising to promote its actions on affordable housing. In Metro Vancouver, however, where the crisis is most acute, there is no sign that housing is going to be within reach of ordinary middle-class households any time soon. .@MarcLeeCCPA takes a look at how BC can build the affordable… View Article

Precarious work a reality across employment sectors in BC

Mar 5, 2017
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Across the world, one of the features of contemporary labour markets is the rising level of precarious employment. We know that labour markets look quite different from place to place for a variety of reasons – institutional, legal, technological, sectoral mix, education, immigration, and other factors that all contribute to geographic differences in precarity. Many… View Article

The Great Log Export Drain: BC government pursues elusive LNG dreams as more than 3,600 forest industry jobs lost to raw log exports

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First of Two Parts Its members include the most powerful players in the province’s forest industry, companies that do the vast majority of all logging on British Columbia’s coast. Its website boasts of “innovative, high-tech” companies whose workers turn out “a growing array of forest and wood products.” But in truth, members of the Coast Forest… View Article

Adult education in BC: A Canadian outlier

Feb 6, 2017
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Thankfully for their residents, not every province handles adult education like BC where the government has eroded access to high-school level courses for adults while other provinces are making basic education more accessible. In mid January, the Province of Ontario announced policy changes to make adult education more affordable and to ensure that low and… View Article

A bleak jobs picture outside BC’s big cities

Jan 8, 2017
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We hear a lot about BC’s strong jobs performance – it’s mentioned in every speech and media appearance by our Premier and members of her government. On the surface, it sounds like a good news story with over 73,000 new jobs created in 2016 while many provinces actually lost jobs. But what the Premier doesn’t… View Article

Recap of our 2016 Rosenbluth Lecture with Pierre Fortin

Dec 8, 2016
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This year, CCPA-BC’s annual Gideon Rosenbluth Memorial Lecture featured economist Pierre Fortin, who shared lessons from Quebec’s experience with low-fee, publicly funded child care. Professor Fortin spoke about research he conducted with colleagues at the University of Sherbrooke, which found that for every $1 invested in the Quebec child care program, the provincial and federal… View Article

Lessons from the Trump election for progressives in Canada

Nov 18, 2016
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It’s been a little over a week since we were jolted by the profoundly disturbing reality of a Donald Trump US presidency. We’ve all found ourselves in many discussions about how such an abhorrent and blatantly racist and misogynist candidate could have won the most powerful political office in the world, and about how to… View Article