One of the apparent silver linings of the COVID-19 lockdown has been a significant drop in air pollution in cities around the world. Although the effect has been most pronounced in notoriously polluted places like New Delhi, Beijing and Los Angeles, we’ve seen improvements in Canada as well. As I…
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The COVID-19 pandemic and associated policy response has caused an unprecedented economic shock in Canada. Millions of workers have lost their jobs, schools and workplaces have closed and everyone who can is staying home. One consequence of this precipitous decline in economic activity has been a reduction in air pollution….
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The coronavirus pandemic is an unprecedented public health crisis that demands immediate and decisive action. Governments around the world are taking extraordinary measures to contain the virus to avoid the dire consequences of an uncontrolled COVID-19 outbreak. Those measures, extraordinary as they are, hold important lessons for the other, bigger…
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The decision by Vancouver-based Teck Resources, announced on Sunday, to withdraw its application for the Frontier oil sands mine was both unexpected and foreseeable. Unexpected because the decision about whether or not the project would move forward had been framed solely as a federal government judgment, rather than being determined…
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The idea of a Green New Deal—a radical and comprehensive transformation of the economy to cut greenhouse gas emissions while tackling inequality—has been gaining steam over the past few decades as an organizing principle for the environmental and social justice movements, but it wasn’t until 2019 that the GND exploded…
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The federal government’s commitment to extend employment insurance (EI) sickness benefits from 15 weeks to 26 weeks is a welcome and overdue expansion of the Canadian social safety net. In our 2018 report On the Mend, we recommended doubling the available benefits from 15 to 30 weeks, but 26 weeks…
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The urgency of the global climate crisis could not be more obvious than in India right now, where a 50ºC heatwave is causing “heavy casualties” both directly through heat-related deaths and indirectly through water and food shortages. Canadians have been spared that kind of heat so far, but it’s little…
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Climate action under the current federal government has followed a now-familiar pattern: identify the need for real change, commit to taking ambitious action, and then propose modest policies that only tinker around the edges of our fossil fuel-based economy. Budget 2019, as in past years, does many things right on…
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The much-anticipated final report of Canada’s Just Transition Task Force was released on Monday. The task force was announced in late 2017 and spent the past year studying the potential impacts of the national phase-out of coal-powered electricity generation for coal workers and their communities. The new report—and its 10…
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When I first heard the phrase “generational genocide” used in the context of climate change, I was both shocked and skeptical. The term genocide is reserved for the most sickening and violent atrocities in human history—the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, the extermination of Indigenous…
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