The following remarks are excerpted from the 2018 Alternative Federal Budget press conference, featuring Gauri Sreenivasan, David Macdonald and Peter Bleyer (February 22, Parliament Hill). Today we are releasing the CCPA’s 23rd annual Alternative Federal Budget. Our Budget is a roadmap for policymakers; a set of realistic, fully costed proposals based…
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Don’t leap to conclusions from January’s job loss numbers in Ontario. We can’t draw conclusions from one month’s worth of data; The lion’s share of job losses were not concentrated in minimum wage sectors; It will take time for this increase in the minimum wage to work its way through…
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Discussions about raising the minimum wage for workers often generate maximum rage from business. But is there any truth to the arguments and fear mongering? Let’s take a look. 1) The fear mongering is overblown It’s hard to miss the reports predicting job losses as a result of the minimum…
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Over a million workers in Ontario just got a big raise thanks to tireless, bottom-up organizing, but to hear the media tell it, this is a bad news story. The same, tired headlines are back. Wednesday, the CBC ran a story titled, “Minimum wage hikes could cost Canada’s economy 60,000…
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For most working people, environmental concerns have historically been a bit like Harvey Dent—two faced. One face says that poisoned water supplies and changing weather patterns threaten our health, our way of life, and our planet. The other face says we do not entirely understand human-environment interaction and cannot endure…
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As we continue to dig into university and college finances in Ontario, what becomes apparent is not only the change in revenue sources these institutions are experiencing (which we discuss here). There are also shifts in how and where institutions choose to spend their money. The current strike by college…
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Now that the dust has begun to settle on the federal government’s train wreck of a tax reform initiative that would have limited the ability of wealthy Canadians to use special provisions for small business to reduce their taxes, it is worth sifting through the ashes for clues as to…
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A lot of numbers are circulated during the coverage of a strike. But in the current strike by Ontario college faculty, two in particular stand out. The first number, 70, is the percent of college faculty who are on contract (these include partial-load, part-time, and sessional faculty—and 70% is the…
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Business in skewed economic assessments of Ontario’s move to a $15 per hour minimum wage has been brisk this week. Only a day before the Chamber of Commerce released its full (of holes) study, the economics department of TD Bank published its own dire predictions about job losses. The gloomy…
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It’s no secret that university and college revenues are shifting, with the public component of funding largely in decline. It’s also no secret—or coincidence—that the tuition and other fees charged to students are up. In most cases, way up. After all, the money has to come from somewhere. And as…
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