It isn’t easy being a Minister of Finance. Especially when your starting point is: we want to meet the zero deficit target we set 5 years ago,[i] despite slower economic growth and slower growth in revenues than anticipated. But today Finance Minister Sousa pulled a rabbit out of the hat…
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Last week, I sat in the historic chambers of Cambridge’s old city hall with about a half dozen contributors to the Waterloo region living wage committee to see if that city would become Ontario’s first living wage municipality. Old city hall, which opened in 1858 to service the fine people…
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How times have changed in 2015. Just days away from?the Paris climate conference, Prime Minister Trudeau met with the Premiers to talk about working together to make Canada a?leader on climate. Compare this to PM Harper, who never met with the Premiers, championed the oil and gas industry, and if…
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Professors and academic librarians are at the heart of Ontario universities. They teach courses, mentor students, and conduct research that expands our knowledge and drives our economy. So everyone with a stake in our higher education system—students, parents, businesspeople, citizens, and policymakers—should be concerned with one important question: do we…
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With the Paris climate conference only days away, a Canadian climate action strategy is now urgent and overdue. The CCPA’s Climate Justice Project has been researching climate solutions for the past seven years. We conclude that an aggressive approach to tacking carbon emissions can also be a good employment and…
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With under 24 hours’ notice and released on a Friday, you could be certain the news from today’s fall Update of Economic and Fiscal Projections (UEFP) wasn’t going to be good. Nor was it surprising. The rosy picture painted in the April 2015 budget, the last time these figures were…
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1. In 2008, Calgary became the?first Canadian municipality?to publicly commit to “ending homelessness.” More than a dozen other Canadian municipalities have since followed suit, with Medicine Hat’s Mayor recently?claiming that his municipality has indeed “ended homelessness.”?Such plans have the potential to raise awareness and focus collective efforts to develop new…
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Fossil fuel divestment campaigns have become a focus for climate change organizing, targeting university endowments, churches, foundations and pension funds. While the motivations are primarily moral—if it is wrong to wreck the climate, it is wrong to profit from that wreckage—there are important economic arguments for divestment. If we are…
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The government of Ontario says it wants to help workers in precarious jobs. With the launch this year of its “Changing Workplaces Review,” the province aims “to improve security and opportunity for those made vulnerable by the structural economic pressures and changes being experienced by Ontarians in 2015.” It’s a…
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The schedule for the global strategic environmental assessment (SEA) on hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) tells us that it was on October 28th, that the population gained access to the documents that will inform the whole string of policies related to the exploration, drilling, and transportation (by pipeline, train or boat) of…
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