A couple of months ago, my colleague Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood considered five ways in which Canada’s climate policy might be affected (hopefully for the better) by the Biden-Harris presidency. Inauguration day now safely behind us (phew), I thought I would perform a similar thought experiment with Biden’s proposed worker- and climate-centred…
Read more
I’ve written a report for Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) that assesses the likely long-term impact of the current recession on homelessness. The link to the report is here. Here are 10 things to know: 1. The current recession may contribute to rising homelessness across Canada, but that matter is…
Read more
When it comes to addressing anti-Black racism in Canada, I can’t help but think of the mythic plight of Sisyphus. As the story goes, the Greek gods sentenced Sisyphus to an eternity of repeatedly rolling a large boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down again once…
Read more
The pandemic’s tightening grip and government efforts to strengthen public health measures are impacting employment in Canada: we lost 63,000 jobs between November and December 2020. And with additional necessary public health measures this winter, we can expect even more job losses—especially among Black, Indigenous and other racialized workers who…
Read more
There is little time left before public consultations on proposed regulations in support of the new federal Pay Equity Act close on January 13th. After years spent looking ahead to a new pay equity regime in Canada, what’s at stake is not just about a pay raise, as vital as that…
Read more
With the recent release of the federal government’s fall economic statement, Canadians got their first official overview of the government’s fiscal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments in Canada have implemented or announced $382.4-billion in fiscal measures, according to the federal government’s statement. Numbers of this magnitude are hard to…
Read more
Five years after the negotiation of the Paris agreement, the federal government is finally starting to walk the talk on climate change. Canada’s updated climate action plan, released December 11, is the most serious piece of climate policy we’ve yet seen from this government. It comes alongside new measures announced…
Read more
‘More explosive than any terrorist’s time bomb’ read a headline in the Ottawa Citizen on the release of the report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW) on September 28, 1972. Fifty years later, the recommendations of the Commission seem tame. Yet, in its day, the report…
Read more
The federal government has promised a new climate plan before the end of the year and we expect it to be released any day now. The plan will build on the 2016 Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change that has shaped the government’s climate agenda for the past…
Read more
In Canada we vow to end violence against women every December, to remember the massacre of 14 young women studying engineering at the Université de Montréal’s École Polytechnique. It’s a mission that won’t succeed, however, until we speak plainly and in the active voice about “violence against women.” Call it “intimate…
Read more