Poverty, inequality & welfare

The latest poverty statistics were released by Statistics Canada last Wednesday, and the data once again shows that British Columbia has one of the highest poverty rates in Canada. Using the Low Income Cut-Off – After Tax (LICO-AT) as the poverty line, 1 in 10 British Columbians are living in poverty. That’s 469,000 people struggling… View Article

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

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