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Reality Check on the Size of BC's Public Sector
Spending cuts and staffing reductions have seriously weakened BC's public sector. Budget 2013 lays out further cuts of over 1,000 full-time public service jobs in 2013/14 alone. These cuts have been justified by appealing to a commonly held (but inaccurate) notion of an oversized public sector, claiming that reducing "overspending" is key to eliminating the deficit and can be done with little impact on much-valued programs and services. This report examines trends in public sector employment and provincial government spending in BC, and finds that the numbers tell a very different story.
Solving Poverty
Poverty in Canada’s inner cities is deep, complex, racialized and often intergenerational. In this collection of essays published over the past decade, Jim Silver argues that urban poverty today includes not only low incomes, but in all too many cases also poor housing, poor health, low educational achievement, high levels of neighbourhood violence, racism, colonialism and social exclusion. As a result many poor people experience low levels of self-esteem and self-confidence and may blame themselves, which is reinforced by the dominant blame-the-victim discourse about poverty. Silver argues that today’s urban poverty is qualitatively different than the urban poverty of forty years ago, a...
Common Ground in a Liquid City
If we want to preserve what's still left of the natural world, we need to stop using so much of it. And, says veteran environmental activist Matt Hern, cities are the best chance we have left for a truly ecological future . . . but what does it take to make a truly sustainable city? Common Ground in a Liquid City is a fun and engaging look at the future of urban life. Hern takes us on a journey through over a dozen urban centers, from Vancouver to Istanbul, Las Vegas, and beyond, exploring the history and current composition of cities around the globe and highlighting the elements of each that make it livable. Each of Hern's ten chapters focuses on a central theme of city life: diversity, st...
Tax Is Not a Four-Letter Word
Taxes connect us to one another, to the common good, and to the future. This is a book about taxes: who pays what and who gets what. More than that, it’s about the role of government, about citizenship and our collective well-being, about the Canada we want. The contributors, leading Canadian practitioners and scholars, explore how taxes have become a political “no-go zone” and how changes in taxation are changing Canada. They challenge the view that any tax is a bad tax and provide broad directions for fairer and smarter approaches. This is a book that will be of interest to anyone concerned with public policy and public affairs, economics, and political science and to anyone interested in challenging the conventional wisdom that lower taxes and smaller government are the cures to what ails us.
Small Cities, Big Issues
Small Canadian cities confront serious social issues as a result of the neoliberal economic restructuring practiced by both federal and provincial governments since the 1980s. Drastic spending reductions and ongoing restraint in social assistance, income supports, and the provision of affordable housing, combined with the offloading of social responsibilities onto municipalities, has contributed to the generalization of social issues once chiefly associated with Canada’s largest urban centres. As the investigations in this volume illustrate, while some communities responded to these issues with inclusionary and progressive actions others were more exclusionary and reactive—revealing form...
Live Well Between Your Ears
Why do we do what we do? Why can't we do what we want? How can we achieve and maintain psychological health? What are the consequences, especially for our kids, when science and education take a back seat to myth? Why are we not happier? What makes for good relationships? How can we adapt to the massive changes driven by a shrinking world, a shrinking middle class, and exponential growth of digitization? Helpful answers to many of these kinds of questions are often found in obscure scientific journals. Many of these hidden bits of wisdom offer the best perspective to help us lead psychologically healthy lives, but we never see them. Now, they are boiled down here, in over 100 simple, short, fresh, and sometimes humorous chapters, to help you live well between your ears.
Missing Women, Missing News
Missing Women, Missing News examines newspaper coverage of the arrest and trial of Robert Pickton, the man charged with murdering 26 street-level sex workers from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It demonstrates how news narratives obscured the complex matrix of social and political conditions that made it possible for so many women to simply ‘disappear’ from a densely populated urban neighborhood without provoking an aggressive response by the state. Grounded in a theory of ideology, this book argues that the coverage offers a series of coherent explanations that hold particular individuals and practices accountable but largely omit, conceal, or erase the broader socio ‐ political context that renders those practices possible.
Academia Inc.
Canadian universities are being slowly but inexorably corporatized. Casualizing academic labour, remaking students into consumers of education, implementing corporate management models and commercializing academic research all point to the ascendance of business interests and values in Canada’s higher education system. Academia, Inc. examines the tensions that result from the merging of two fundamentally incompatible institutions — the university and the corporation. Brownlee argues that moving from liberal education to corporate job training, public service to profit-making and critical research to commercial invention radically undermines the goals of higher education. Investigating the history, causes and impacts of corporatization, this book explores how this transformation has taken shape and its ramifications for both universities and society as a whole. Brownlee suggests several strategies for resisting this process.
