Poverty, inequality & welfare

Rethinking social protections in the age of contractors

Feb 14, 2015
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The job market is changing rapidly. While most workers of our parents’ generation could have reasonably expected to spend their entire working careers in permanent full-time jobs with one or two employers, today many rely on contract work or freelancing, and even regular full-time employees change jobs frequently. There are pros and cons to this shift,… View Article

It’s time to seriously tackle child poverty

Nov 24, 2014
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One in five BC children lives in poverty. This is the sobering finding of the 2014 BC Child Poverty Report Card released on November 24th, the 25th anniversary of a unanimous all-party resolution in Canada’s House of Commons to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000. Child poverty is not just a big… View Article

How the Pie is Sliced in BC

Nov 19, 2014
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It’s an interesting finding, and perhaps the start of a good trend: the share of income going to Canada’s top 1% has declined (Statscan release here, Globe story here). One great thing Statscan has done in recent years is to make its data freely available, so I went to dig deeper on national, BC and… View Article

Where’s the fanfare for tackling poverty effectively? Connecting the dots between three political moments over three months

Jul 30, 2014
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The following op-ed was originally published in The Georgia Straight. On June 16, I attended the B.C. government’s Disability Summit, the culmination of a three-month public consultation process on disability in B.C. I watched Minister of Social Development and Social Innovation Don McRae lead the audience through the event. I felt the flurry of excitement… View Article