A generation ago, Gordon Campbell promised to privatize auto insurance but changed his mind once he was premier after seeing the value it provided to B.C. Let’s take a look at public auto insurance in B.C., the 2021 reforms to the system, and how all of this stacks up against other provinces when it comes to household finances. British Columbians most likely don’t realize how good the public system has been in keeping a lid on rising auto insurance prices in recent years. 

Public auto insurance in B.C.

The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) was created in 1973 by the NDP government of Dave Barrett. The new Crown corporation was a response to high costs and coverage gaps in the private auto insurance market. To boost profits, private insurers try to weed out drivers whom they deem to have a higher likelihood of making a claim, or at least charge much higher premiums based on age, gender, or other factors. 

Public auto insurance allows for universal coverage and more coherent and stable pricing. It simplifies administration without needing multiple bureaucracies, and there’s no incessant drive to boost profits. Alignment with public policy is also important given the central social and economic role played by transportation. Rates go through a public process at the B.C. Utilities Commission.

That said, ICBC has often made a profit, which adds to the B.C. budget’s bottom line. ICBC’s contribution averaged $1.5 billion in each of the last three fiscal years, although the 2026-27 projection is a smaller $700 million. This is a remarkable turnaround from the late 2010s, when ICBC had a run of financial troubles, leading the provincial government to implement no-fault insurance for injuries in 2021. 

Then-Attorney General David Eby was tasked with fixing ICBC’s financial woes—attributed to the growing cost of accidents, both personal injuries and damage to more expensive vehicles. On the legal side, victims with major injuries often sought out lawyers to get sufficient compensation from ICBC in settlements, particularly in cases like head injuries that were not straightforward in terms of evaluation of injury and recovery. Lawyers would file the documentation, but most of the time a settlement with ICBC would be achieved shortly before the court date. Lawyers would typically walk away with a third of the settlement, an extremely high wage on an hourly basis, but victims would get more than they otherwise would for their care.

The no-fault reforms removed the right to sue for compensation, which cut out the large share of ICBC’s claim dollars going to lawyers. Simultaneously, ICBC increased the scope of health care services and costs available to victims (called “Enhanced Care”). Most of these represent supplemental health care like massage or physical therapy that are outside of the public health care system. They would otherwise need to be covered out of pocket or, if applicable, by a private health plan through an employer. 

ICBC’s costs for claims came way down, by about $2.3 billion (a drop of 35 per cent) from their pre-reform peak in the 2018-19 fiscal year to 2023-24. As a result of this mix, ICBC was able to lower premiums. ICBC dropped basic coverage rates by 15 per cent and made other reductions on optional coverage. The public insurer estimated that someone with full coverage would save $490 in the first year. Financially, the move was a success, and ICBC returned to providing dividends to the B.C. government in even larger amounts than before. 

While most drivers—and the B.C. government—have been better off, others argue that these savings have been at the expense of victims. This includes lack of compensation for pain and suffering from the forgone right to sue, as well as caps on income replacement (at 90 per cent of income up to a maximum $113,000). In other cases, caps on covered treatments put victims out of pocket, or that the value attributed to various injuries has been too low. 

Without the legal hammer, ICBC essentially has all of the bargaining power in these situations. At this point, it’s hard to know if these are a handful of anecdotes on the fringes or if they are indicative of deeper problems in how ICBC is managing its claims. A legislative committee had been holding hearings into the matter but was abruptly shut down when the writ was dropped to launch the 2026 election.

How does B.C. compare

Benchmarking B.C. against other provinces is challenging and there are few true apple-to-apples comparisons out there. There are several reasons for this, including scope of coverage and different policy terms, as well as demographic differences worked into rates (in provinces with private insurance). 

In B.C., ICBC’s monopoly extends to a mandatory “basic package” that includes coverage of injuries (regardless of fault), damage to your vehicle (if the other party is at fault) and up to $200,000 liability for injuries and damages to others. Beyond basic coverage, British Columbians can purchase additional optional coverage from ICBC or private insurers. 

In addition, there can be differences in deductibles (the amount you pay before the insurance coverage kicks in), co-payments and limitations of coverage. There are also differences in the package of care and services available should someone need to make a claim. 

The grey-suited accountants at Ernst and Young made an attempt (commissioned by ICBC) at an apples-to-apples comparison in 2022, after Eby’s no fault reforms. They created 30 profiles with different demographic and vehicle characteristics. B.C.‘s rates were consistently lower than in private insurance provinces.

Interestingly, B.C.’s rates were somewhat higher than Saskatchewan and Manitoba (the other public systems) in some cases, with the biggest differences for young drivers and those with at-fault accidents. In others, like claim-free adults and retired couples, B.C.’s rates were among the lowest in the country (note: Quebec was not included in the study). In addition to being public insurers, Saskatchewan and Manitoba also benefit in lower costs arising from smaller populations and lower urban population density. Nonetheless, it’s pretty clear that a public insurance model saves money for drivers. 

Another interesting study was commissioned by the Alberta government and considered the prospects of shifting to a public auto insurance model. They found that the typical driver and the system as a whole would save about 38 per cent by moving to the type of no fault public system that exists in B.C., Saskatchewan, or Manitoba. 

While these studies are now a bit dated, the core issues are the same. If anything, ICBC has been an affordability buffer. B.C. auto insurance rates in 2026 are a total of 0.4 per cent higher than in 2017. In the rest of Canada the average increase was 46 per cent over the same period, and as much as 117 per cent in neighbouring Alberta. The NDP has promised to freeze rates for the next three years.

The bottom line on auto insurance is that the system books annual profits, which have been used to keep premiums low and provide the occasional rebate. There’s a case to be made for using some of that money to improve the benefits and coverage for victims who are receiving insufficient care. In contrast, shifting away from no fault, and back to big legal battles, will clearly result in higher insurance premiums at a time when voters are looking for greater affordability. 

The post What would happen if B.C. scrapped public auto insurance? appeared first on CCPA.

The housing and homelessness crisis in Saskatchewan has worsened: Regina’s houseless population quadrupled in the last 10 years, with a reported count of 1,156 individuals experiencing homelessness in some form and Saskatoon has 1,931 people experiencing homelessness—a nearly 30 per cent increase from 2024’s reported number.

In all their planning materials, the cities acknowledge that major investment and collaboration from all levels of government are required to solve the housing and homelessness crises. Cities are constrained by factors that make it difficult to solve the homelessness crisis:

• One of the major issues facing cities is budgetary constraints.
• Another is that because cities are “creatures of the province”: via the powers of the Municipalities Act, cities are limited in the legislative responses they can implement with respect to many of the root causes of poverty.

The government of Saskatchewan is not undertaking sufficient actions to prevent people from falling into homelessness. Between rising rents, declining social welfare, and a lack of affordable housing, people are not being given the help they need to stay in stable housing that they can afford month after month. To put it simply, a house cannot stand on a cracked foundation.

Life is hard for renters in Saskatchewan and the data shows that it’s getting harder: In 2026, both Saskatoon and Regina posted month-over-month rent increases, bucking the national trend of declining average rent prices to the tune of a 26.2 per cent increase for the cost of a one-bedroom unit over three years—the highest increase in the country.

Despite this, the government of Saskatchewan has repeatedly rejected calls for any kind of rent control legislation. The issues of rising rents and a lack of protections are compounded by Saskatchewan’s low minimum wage and insufficient social assistance programs:

• Saskatchewan’s minimum wage, even after the planned October increase of 35 cents, remains the second lowest in the country.
• The rental wage (calculated as being “the hourly wage needed to afford rent while working a standard 40-hour week and spending 30 per cent of income on housing”) for someone working for minimum wage in Regina and Saskatoon means they would need to earn over $22 an hour, equivalent to working 1.5 full-time jobs at minimum wage.

An audit of social housing in Saskatchewan shows that there are 16,988 social housing units in the province, 2,795 in Regina and 2,422 in Saskatoon—falling far short of need.

These factors are uniquely the realm and responsibilities of the government of Saskatchewan, not the federal nor municipal governments. Without adequate protections for renters, increases to social assistance that reflect the true cost of living, or an increase in the supply of social housing, at-risk persons will continue to fall into homelessness.

There are proven solutions: Housing First programs and focusing on homelessness prevention. Across many jurisdictions, including major success in Helsinki, Housing First programs are proven to get people off the streets and keep them stable. Once that need has been met as a precondition of care, then people can access the support they need. This data-driven model has been proven to work, with cities like Medicine Hat being able to cost-effectively eradicate chronic homelessness through this approach. Homelessness prevention requires systems to be in place to help people stay in the housing they are already in. The government of Saskatchewan must implement rent control policies and tenant protections, provide social assistance that reflects the true cost of living, and expand the supply of deeply affordable social housing in the province.

Introduction

Over the last decade, the housing and homelessness crisis in Saskatchewan has worsened, with few meaningful actions taken by governments to seriously address it. The most recent Point-in-Time (PiT) count showed that Regina’s houseless population quadrupled in the last 10 years, with a reported count of 1,156 individuals experiencing homelessness in some form (Namerind, 2026). Saskatoon has seen a similar worsening of the homelessness crisis, with the most recent point-in-time count released in early 2026 identifying 1,931 people experiencing homelessness, a nearly 30 per cent increase from 2024’s reported number (City of Saskatoon, 2026). The number of encampments have also risen in spite of efforts to remove them, and the overall costs of homelessness continue on a sharp upward trajectory.

Despite the intensifying crisis, the Government of Saskatchewan’s response to the issue remains weak. Rents in Saskatchewan continue to rise with few to no tenant protections in place. There exists no effective rent control legislation, making the province an outlier compared to the rest of the country. Saskatchewan’s low minimum wage, coupled with the province’s two income assistance programs—whose benefits are woefully inadequate—make it increasingly difficult to keep up with unaffordable market housing costs. Even with the scheduled minimum wage increase planned for October 2026, going from $15.35 an hour to $15.70 an hour, Saskatchewan’s minimum wage will remain the second lowest in Canada. While social housing does exist in the province, units are being left vacant and demolished, with little effort made to replenish the supply, much less expand it. One only needs to look at 1100 Wascana Block, a 24-unit social housing complex built in Regina in 2021. After a fire in April 2024 that severely damaged nine of the 24 units and displaced all occupants, the complex was boarded up and left vacant. When community leaders brought this to attention in December 2025, the complex was then demolished without community consultations, leaving an empty lot that still stands, with no plans to rebuild (Vera, 2026).

While the municipal governments of Regina and Saskatoon have been engaged and partnered with key community partners and Indigenous organizations (the majority of individuals experiencing homelessness in Saskatchewan are Indigenous), city councils do not have the resources, nor access to law-making power, to materially address the root causes of the homelessness crisis. Meanwhile, the provincial government steadfastly refuses to implement rent control, presides over insufficient social services benefits to cover food and rental costs, and severely neglects expanding affordable social housing.

This paper explores three themes: how governments have responded to the crisis, what are the significant gaps in policy and programs related to prevention and housing first, and what new initiatives are possible.

Housing and homelessness plans in Regina and Saskatoon

In recent years, both Regina and Saskatoon—the largest municipalities in Saskatchewan—have worked to update their housing and homelessness plans. This report will compare the two cities’ housing and homelessness plans, the governance structures charged with implementation, and some of the strengths and weaknesses of each.

In Regina, the last city-wide strategic homelessness plan created by the municipal government was Reaching Home: Regina Homelessness Plan 2019-2024, which was developed jointly with Indigenous communities, leaders, and organizations. The plan maintains a focus on supporting housing services, with investments also made in prevention and shelter diversion programs, as well as coordination and data collection. The primary measures of success for the Homeless Serving System are: year-over-year decreases in the number of unsheltered and emergency sheltered persons, decreases in the duration of homelessness experienced, decreases in the length of stay in emergency homeless shelters, and bringing the percentage of persons who return to homelessness with 12 months of exiting it to <10 per cent (Regina Homelessness Plan, 2018). Since 2024, the City of Regina conducted a Housing Needs Assessment and is in the process of finalizing the City of Regina Housing Strategy for 2027-2032. With the ongoing consultation process, the plan is not final at this point, but the city has published a draft of the report to their website. Of note is the line that states plainly that “[t]he City is not involved in the operation of transitional, supportive, community and affordable housing” (p. 4, Regina Housing Strategy, 2026). The plan points out that the city will work with community partners on homelessness initiatives, but is not responsible for financing and implementing the majority of them.

Saskatoon’s Strategic Homelessness Action Plan (SHAP) was spearheaded by Saskatoon’s Housing Initiatives Partnership (SHIP) in 2016. The plan accounted for four primary target areas: system coordination, increasing housing support services, homelessness prevention, and solving homelessness through housing. Since that time, SHAP has been undergoing a renewal in order to update the plan to better serve the community. The City of Saskatoon, meanwhile, has undertaken a number of housing and homelessness initiatives designed to address all manner of housing needs in the city. These include the Housing Action Plan (created as a requirement for receiving federal Housing Accelerator Fund money) and Saskatoon’s Affordable Housing Strategy 2025-2030. Informed by the City of Saskatoon’s PiT count, the 2024 Housing Needs Assessment, and aligned with SHAP, the Affordable Housing Strategy is integrated with Saskatoon’s city-wide plans and seeks to address the entire housing continuum (i.e., the spectrum of diverse forms of housing). This integration of plans across the entire municipal ecosystem, as well as clear descriptions of the role that the municipal government plays in making housing accessible, is a strength of the planning system, but it is also a slow and cumbersome bureaucratic approach. Despite planning systems being in place for a decade, the sharp rise in PiT count numbers demonstrate that success indicators set out in the various plans are not being met.

When the City of Saskatoon’s strategic plan was announced in August, a member of the planning team revealed a weakness in the ability of the city to accomplish its first goal identified as homelessness reduction. “The plan says at least 113,00 people in Saskatoon are renting and that renters are three times more likely to become homelessness. Nearly one in five Saskatoon residents earns $42,500 or less a year, and the maximum monthly rent affordable for those making $17,000 to $42,500 a year is $1,063.” (CBC) When the average rent for a one bedroom unit in Regina and Saskatoon exceeds $1,400 a month (CMHC, 2025), it becomes increasingly obvious that affordability issues are out running the ability of municipalities to maintain control of the homelessness issue.

How are homelessness responsibilities divided?

In all their planning materials, the cities acknowledge that major investment and collaboration from all levels of government are required to solve the housing and homelessness crises. The housing crisis is a nationwide issue in Canada, and there are different responsibilities relegated to each level of government. Because of this, it can be difficult to identify gaps in the system without first developing a clear picture of which actors are responsible for what. To do this, we need to ask: what levers of power can municipalities access in this crisis and how are they being supported by the federal and provincial governments?

At a national level, the federal Reaching Home strategy was launched in 2019 as a means of preventing and reducing homelessness, supporting the 10-year National Housing Strategy. The primary goal of this plan is to work directly with communities and municipalities to deliver funding for community housing and homelessness projects, including supporting affordable housing providers, improving data collection efforts, and investing in research (INFC, 2025). This plan also introduced a federal requirement for the implementation of a Coordinated Access System (CAS). This is a method of standardizing and streamlining access to housing and homelessness supports in a given community, coordinated across the entire network of actors in the system. The CAS is a means of streamlining intake into the housing support system through standardized access structures, assessment and prioritization mechanisms, and effective mapping and data collection (CAEH, 2018). On the housing side, the Housing Accelerator Fund was launched as a way to boost housing supply through zoning changes and bylaws. While this fund is creating a number of construction starts, it is not designed to address the root causes of poverty, instead focusing on creating market housing supply.

Through the Reaching Home Strategy, the federal government reaches out directly to designated community entities. These are the organizations that are responsible for the administering of funds delivered through the strategy and are directed by a Community Advisory Board. In Regina, Namerind Housing Corporation, an Indigenous-owned social enterprise and affordable housing provider, acts as the designated community entity (CE) while in Saskatoon, Saskatoon Housing Initiatives Partnership is the CE. Whereas Namerind is also the lead organization responsible for managing the Coordinated Access System in Regina and performing (PiT) counts, the CAS in Saskatoon is led by Métis-Nation Saskatchewan. In addition to these city-specific organizations, there is also a province-wide information sharing system required by the Reaching Home Strategy—the Homeless Individuals and Families Information System (HIFIS). This tool streamlines data collection and sharing, enabling policy-makers to effectively respond to the challenges of reducing homelessness through timely data. Through the use of the CE/CAB direction setting, the CAS standardizing intake, and the HIFIS for information gathering, the Reaching Home Strategy attempts to ensure that municipalities have the tools they need to collect the necessary data and create policy to identify and address the crisis at the municipal level.

Unfortunately, cities are constrained by a number of factors that make it difficult for municipal governments to effectively solve the homelessness crisis. One of the major issues facing cities is budgetary constraints, especially for major investments in infrastructure funding. Putting into perspective the resources available to these jurisdictions, the total City of Regina budget for 2026-27 is $676 million, versus $22.2 billion for the total budget of the government of Saskatchewan. Another is that because cities are “creatures of the province” via the powers of the Municipalities Act, cities are limited in the legislative responses they can implement with respect to many of the root causes of poverty.

The government of Saskatchewan is the primary provider of social benefits, such as income support. The province provides two primary social assistance programs: Saskatchewan Income Support (SIS) and Saskatchewan Assured Income for Disability (SAID). SIS was introduced in 2019, meant to replace the Saskatchewan Assistance Program (SAP) and the Transitional Employment Allowance (TEA) over time. These programs have been “reformed” several times and are intended to support claimants by helping them to meet basic needs, such as shelter and food, on top of additional income they earn. The provincial government is also the primary provider of low-income housing and is responsible for setting housing policy across the province. As per the mandate of the Saskatchewan Housing Corporation, a Treasury Board Crown Corporation, SHC “provides housing and housing services to people who could not otherwise afford or access adequate, safe and secure shelter, while recognizing the marketplace as the primary housing provider in the province” (SHC, 2026). Because cities lack direct control over the stock of affordable housing within their jurisdiction—which is a serious impediment to their ability respond to the homelessness issue—municipalities are left to do data collection, community safety and enforcement (clearing encampments, policing, combatting overdoses) and providing and administering emergency shelters (funded, in large part, but sparsely, by the province). Many of the cities’ actions do not solve homelessness, nor the poverty that keeps people out of housing.

What is the provincial government doing to address the crisis?

At this point, the countermeasures being taken to address the existing crisis of homelessness at the city level—with support from the federal government—have been well documented. Cities are being given resources to monitor and track the issue, as well as the means to standardize intake procedures across the network of organizations working together to solve homelessness. Despite that, research has repeatedly indicated that this is not enough to end the cycle of poverty that keeps people out of housing nor to prevent more new people entering the system. This is because, at its most basic level, the government of Saskatchewan is not undertaking sufficient actions to prevent people from falling into homelessness. Between rising rents, declining social welfare, and a lack of affordable housing, people are not being given the help they need to stay in stable housing that they can afford month after month. To put it simply, a house cannot stand on a cracked foundation.

Life is hard for renters in Saskatchewan and the data shows that it’s getting harder. In 2026, both Saskatoon and Regina posted month-over-month rent increases, bucking the national trend of declining average rent prices to the tune of a 26.2 per cent increase for the cost of a one-bedroom unit over three years (CKRM, 2026)—the highest increase in the country over this time. This represents almost 50 consecutive months of rent increases. Despite this, the government of Saskatchewan has repeatedly rejected calls from the provincial NDP for any kind of rent control legislation, including tying rent increases to the Consumer Price Index and the rate of inflation. Because of this gap in legislation, landlords are allowed to raise rental costs with impunity, free to raise rents so long as sufficient notice is given. A distinct lack of renter protections in Saskatchewan makes staying in rental housing precarious, even as the renter population continues to increase in the province and competition for affordable units heats up. In June, the vacancy rate for rental units in Regina was only 2.7 per cent—a figure classified by Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) as being “unhealthy” (CKRM, June 2026). Despite the record number of housing starts, the rising costs of construction and market forces will repeatedly result in premium-priced market units, all while rental costs continue to rise for renters.

The issues of rising rents and a lack of protections are compounded by Saskatchewan’s low minimum wage and insufficient social assistance programs. As stated above, Saskatchewan’s minimum wage, even after the planned October increase of 35 cents, remains the second lowest in the country. According to research done by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) on the rental wage (calculated as being “the hourly wage needed to afford rent while working a standard 40-hour week and spending 30 per cent of income on housing”), someone working for minimum wage in Regina and Saskatoon would need to earn over $22 an hour, equivalent to working 1.5 full-time jobs at minimum wage (CCPA, 2024). Despite such low wages, Saskatchewan’s social assistance programs do not provide an adequate level of support for those who require it most.

Through the SIS program, single recipients are granted up to $375 a month on Adult Basic Benefit, and $675 a month through the Shelter Benefit (for those living in Regina/Saskatoon). Benefits and recipient categories are tracked using Maytree’s data on social services. Using data from Maytree’s Social Assistance Summaries, unattached singles were the majority of SIS and SAID recipients (64 per cent and 86 per cent respectively) (Maytree, 2026). Unattached singles are faced with deep poverty. It’s expected this monthly stipend is spent across shelter, food, household goods, etc., but this is simply not enough to maintain stable access to affordable housing. In Food Banks Canada’s poverty report card, Saskatchewan received a D+, with Fs being given for a household’s fixed costs as a percentage of income and in the amount of government support recipients who say rates are insufficient to keep up with cost of living. The data shows that “[p]people are spending 61% of their income on essentials—the highest rate in the Prairie region and among the worst nationally” (Food Banks Canada, 2026). The provincial government has noted that benefits through their social assistance programs are increasing monthly, but SIS and SAID are integrating telephone and laundry benefits, which means that the total amount of benefits is increasing, but only through consolidation of existing revenue streams. Even though the total amount per month shows up as being higher, the actual impact of the increase is negligible for people already receiving these benefits. Between the low minimum wage and insufficient benefits, vulnerable renters are caught up in a situation where to stay in housing on a single income is highly precarious, and too often becoming more likely to fall out of their housing and onto the streets.

But what about social housing? The Social Housing Program is provided through the province and is intended to ensure that people who do not otherwise have the means to afford suitable housing can do so at an affordable rate (rent is adjusted to 30 per cent of the renter’s income, ensuring it remains within reach). This is administered through the Saskatchewan Housing Corporation, a Treasury Board Crown, and units are managed through local agencies on behalf of the SHC. In Saskatoon, this is the Saskatoon Housing Authority (SHA) and in Regina, it’s the Regina Housing Authority (RHA). The SHA and RHA both manage a large number of units dispersed throughout the city, renting to families, seniors, and low-income claimants. An audit of social housing in Saskatchewan shows that there are 16,988 social housing units in the province, 2,795 in Regina and 2,422 in Saskatoon (SHC, 2026). These numbers do not come close to meeting the need for deeply affordable housing in the cities, considering the thousands of people who are currently without a home. Unfortunately, at time of writing, over 200 units in each city are unoccupied (SHC, 2026), with no indication that more are being built or planned to be built. Most of the housing starts in the province, either through the Housing Accelerator Fund or otherwise, are going towards creating market housing, such as condominiums or single-family detached homes, instead of dense and affordable social housing. This has exacerbated the need for social housing as more units fall into disrepair or disuse without an equal drive to create new spaces.

These factors are uniquely the realm and responsibilities of the government of Saskatchewan, not the federal nor municipal governments. Without adequate protections for renters, increases to social assistance that reflect the true cost of living, or an increase in the supply of social housing, at-risk persons will continue to fall into homelessness. Then, when they become the responsibility of municipal organizations without the capacity to increase the housing supply themselves, the only options left are monitoring, enforcement, and cycling them through the medical or correctional systems—at a much greater cost to the province.

The proven solutions: Housing First programs and prevention

The government of Saskatchewan’s Provincial Approach to Homelessness (PATH) was created in 2023, granting $40.2 million to municipalities, later expanded in 2025 to invest an additional $20 million. The investment is allocated to not just Regina and Saskatoon, but also to a number of other cities in the province. This money was put towards creating 215 total new supportive housing models, increasing emergency shelter spaces (as well as shelter spaces for those with complex needs), and supporting community-led safety and outreach programs (GOS, 2023) (2025). Expanding supportive housing is important, but the number of spaces created does not reflect the reality nor the scale of the issue. Also, expanding shelter spaces does not end homelessness, it only furthers the amount of time people spend without access to secure housing. While these investments demonstrate a willingness to act towards reducing homelessness, they do not have the political will to permanently end homelessness.

So, what are possible solutions? More than any other methods, what’s proven to work in addressing the homelessness crisis are Housing First programs and focusing on homelessness prevention. Bringing people experiencing homelessness through the medical or carceral systems and putting them back into the streets without supports only exacerbates the issue and can enable a progression into chronic homelessness (defined as going six or more months without a permanent shelter). Across many jurisdictions, including major success in Helsinki, Finland, Housing First programs are proven to get people off the streets and keep them stable. At its core, housing first models recognize that the most immediate need for those living on the streets or moving between shelters is finding stable, secure housing. Once that need has been met as a precondition of care, then people can access the support they need. Wraparound social service support is also key.  This data-driven model has been proven to work, with cities like Medicine Hat being able to cost-effectively eradicate chronic homelessness through this approach. When calculated, “[t]he approximate cost of homelessness on public systems (per individual) is estimated to be between $66,000-$120,000 annually. The cost of providing housing with supports is estimated to be between $12,000-$34,000 annually” (At Home in Medicine Hat, 2019). When people need housing, the most effective way to help them is not to force them through rigorous multi-stage approvals to first access temporary shelters—it’s by providing housing and following up with support.

On the other end of the spectrum, it is also much more cost effective to ensure that people don’t lose access to their housing in the first place. Homelessness prevention requires systems to be in place to help people stay in the housing they are already in. Whether that be through updating and maintaining the existing housing supply without letting units fall into disrepair, or bolstering social services like rent support, prevention models can take on a variety of forms while still making sure that people do not fall through the cracks. Anti-eviction measures and tenant protections like rent control go a long way towards ensuring deeply affordable and stable housing. In Saskatchewan, landlords are allowed to evict tenants in any season, even in -30°C weather, and evictions are not always used as a last resort option (Tank, 2020). This places evictees in real danger from the harsh conditions of Saskatchewan’s climate, at a time when shelters are most likely to be at full capacity or overflowing. At the same time, increased social services can create the sort of deeply affordable housing that avoids the need for evictions in many cases. Subsidized rent is a much cheaper alternative than the cost of the resources required to treat and police people who are living in encampments or on the street. With a wider net of social assistance and renter protections, the governments responsible for ending homelessness can deter homelessness at its source—a loss of housing.

Conclusion

When we are talking about the multi-level governmental approach to the housing and homelessness crisis, it simply isn’t enough for cities to rely on federal grants like the Housing Accelerator Fund to increase the housing supply, especially if this funding goes towards building market housing. Building more market housing will increase the overall supply, but it doesn’t target the needs of the people in vulnerable housing situations, nor those who are currently experiencing homelessness. The cities are responsible for much of the day-to-day strategic policy for managing the worst and most visible parts of the crisis, but the foundations to prevent homelessness lie within provincial authority. As such, the government of Saskatchewan—with its budget of $22.6 billion—must implement rent control policies and tenant protections, provide social assistance that reflects the true cost of living, and expand the supply of deeply affordable social housing in the province. Through these interventions, governments at all levels can work together more productively and move towards the proven to be effective models of homelessness prevention and Housing First policies. What matters more than anything is ensuring that everyone has a home that they can feel secure in—nothing less than that.

Works cited

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City of Regina, Reaching home: Regina homelessness plan 2019-2024, 2019.

CMHC, 2025 Rental Market Report, 2025, https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/professionals/housing-markets-data-and-research/market-reports/rental-market-reports-major-centres.

Food Banks Canada, Report Card-Food Banks Canada, May 13, 2026, https://foodbankscanada.ca/poverty-report-cards/report-card/sk/#overall-grade.

About Saskatchewan Housing Corporation, Saskatchewan Housing Corporation, Government of Saskatchewan, 2019, https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/government-structure/crown-corporations/treasury-board-crowns/saskatchewan-housing-corporation/about-shc.

Marc Lee, David Macdonald, Making rent: The CCPA’s rental wage update 2024, CCPA, 2025, https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/making-rent-the-ccpas-rental-wage-update-2024/.

 Maytree, Social Assistance Summaries, Saskatchewan, 2026, https://maytree.com/changing-systems/data-measuring/social-assistance-summaries/saskatchewan/.

Medicine Hat Community Housing Society, At Home in Medicine Hat: Our plan to end homelessness, 2019, Retrieved September 7, 2026, from https://mhchs.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Year-9-Progress-Report.pdf.

Namerind Housing Corporation, Regina’s Homelessness Data Dashboard, 2026, https://www.namerindhousing.ca/.

Oldhues, M., “Regina rental market rises as national rents decline, driven by migration and tight vacancy rate,” 620 CKRM, 2026, https://www.620ckrm.com/2026/06/16/regina-rental-market-rises-as-national-rents-decline-driven-by-migration-and-tight-vacancy-rate/.

Tank, P., “Questions about data loom over Saskatoon homelessness action plan”, CBC News, 2026, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/homeless-homelessness-poverty-housing-city-hall-9.7278476.

Tank, P. “Saskatchewan to remove ban on non-urgent evictions on Aug. 4”, 2020, The Star Phoenix, https://thestarphoenix.com/news/saskatchewan-news/saskatchewan-to-remove-ban-on-non-urgent-evictions-on-aug-4/.

Vera, C., “People demand more social housing in Regina as homeless encampment grows”, 2026, CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/social-housing-unoccupied-encampments-affordable-living-9.7298983.

The post A cracked foundation: The worsening homelessness crisis in Regina and Saskatoon appeared first on CCPA.

When campaigners invoke the term “taxing the rich,” it’s important to distinguish between wealth (holdings of assets like cash, real estate, stocks and bonds net of debts/liabilities) and income (the annual flow from wages and salaries, plus interest, dividends and rent arising from the ownership of assets). Property taxes already are applied to B.C. real estate, so wealth taxation is largely about taxing holdings of financial assets. Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks’ recent Rosenbluth lecture highlights the need for a wealth tax, although they argue it should be national in scope. 

Let’s take a closer look at the proposed NDP upper-income tax increase. Asking the most well-off to pay a bit more should not be a hard sell at a time when our province is mired in a trade war, and has many pressing challenges that need public support. There is a lot of misinformation about taxes in B.C., and who pays what. Prepare for an offensive from top earners in B.C. against this tax proposal, which should otherwise be fairly popular among voters.

Tax increase details

B.C. currently has five tax brackets with progressively higher rates applied to income above certain thresholds. The term “progressive tax system” means that the higher up the income distribution you go, the greater the share of income paid in tax. This income tax structure is central to keeping inequality in check as the distribution of market incomes is highly unequal. B.C.’s brackets ensure the highest income households pay higher tax rates and the NDP proposal would increase that progressivity even further. 

Table 1 shows the current income brackets and the changes proposed by the NDP. In short, the rates on the top two brackets each would go up by two percentage points and a new bracket is created for income above $1 million. The brackets themselves would normally increase in line with inflation, but the 2026 B.C. budget paused those annual adjustments—a stealth tax increase because incomes tend to rise over time, pushing more individuals over the threshold. Nonetheless, this simplifies things because the brackets for 2026 will be the same in 2027 and subsequent years.

Note that the rates in the table only apply to income above the threshold for the bracket (called marginal tax rates). The vast majority of British Columbians would not be affected by the higher income tax rates. Individuals with income below $190,405 would not see a cent of tax increase from the NDP proposal. Because taxes are based on individual income, a two-earner family with each earning $190,405—for total household income of $380,810—would also pay no additional tax.

The NDP tax proposal is thus laser-focused on the top three per cent of individual income earners in British Columbia. Table 2 gives a sense of the magnitudes: someone with a taxable income of $250,000 would pay only an additional $1,192 in income tax, rising to an additional $6,192 for income of $500,000. These numbers are likely to be maximum amounts, as they do not factor in the various ways the truly rich can use charitable donations or other tax credits to reduce their tax bills, as well as only being required to claim half of any realized capital gains as income for tax purposes. 

Table 2 shows taxes as a share of income—the average tax rate. There is often a lot of confusion and misinformation that the marginal rate for a person’s income applies to all income, when it only applies to income above the bracket threshold. The average rates in the table show that tax rates increase more steeply as income rises, but even at the new proposed NDP tax rates, a very high income of $5 million income would pay 23.5 per cent in taxes, up 3.5 per cent of income relative to the current structure. 

In terms of revenues, CCPA’s David Macdonald ran the new brackets through Statistics Canada’s Social Policy Simulation Database and Model, and estimates the tax increase would raise an additional $750 million per year in 2027, less than the NDP’s headline claim of $1 billion in new revenues. Of that amount, the top one per cent of earners would pay 86 per cent, and those with more than $1 million in annual income would pay 54 per cent. That said, some caution is needed here as estimating revenues at the very top of the income distribution is a challenging exercise. But the overall shift in the provincial income tax system is quite clear.

Any revenue gains from higher income taxes will also be affected by other election promises. In particular, the NDP announced a 10 cent reduction in provincial fuel taxes, which would cost about $670 million on an annual basis, close to our estimated amount for new income tax revenue. This fuel tax reduction would have a much greater benefit for low- and middle-income earners. Thus, these combined measures would have little impact on the BC deficit but would constitute a more progressive tilt in the overall tax system toward greater equality. 

Pushback on higher income taxes

British Columbians should expect a lot of resistance from the high-income individuals that would be most affected by the higher rates. While many of these individuals might threaten to leave, this is not a credible threat as most would still pay less income tax in B.C. And they would stay because B.C. is an incredible place in the world with a high standard of living, in big part because taxes support good public services and infrastructure. People move for many reasons and family and home would keep them rooted.

It’s worth noting that B.C. has the lowest income taxes in Canada for most households. The Figure shows Statistics Canada data for different income groups, for Canada as a whole and different provinces. B.C.’s average income tax rates (combined federal and provincial) compare favourably with Alberta, even at the very top, and are consistently less than Ontario and Quebec. Top income rates are lower in both Saskatchewan and Manitoba, but few suggest top earners in B.C. will be moving there.

Taxes on top earners used to be much higher up to the 1980s, and were high through the “golden age” period after World War II, with top marginal rates of 80 per cent or higher in the 1960s. These higher tax rates were associated with very strong economic growth in B.C. and Canada. There’s a good reason for that in that income earners at the very top of the ladder put an increasing share of their income towards saving. That money goes into speculative investments in stocks, real estate or Picassos. Taxing that income and using it to deliver public services and build out public infrastructure both creates public sector jobs and provides social and economic benefits to British Columbians.

That said, for the very top earners, tax avoidance strategies are inevitably going to be part of the mix. That is not a reason to stop trying to tax the rich, it’s an argument to close up loopholes that allow legal forms of evasion. It’s also a good reason why B.C. also needs to tax corporations effectively so that income cannot be accumulated indefinitely to the benefit of major shareholders. 

Differing tax proposals

The biggest challenge for the NDP is not whether taxing higher incomes is the right move, but whether voters believe this type of tax increase would actually be implemented should the NDP win the election. In the 2024 election the NDP promised a middle class tax cut or “grocery rebate“ and then failed to deliver in the 2025 budget. 

The change in tone and priorities from the incumbent NDP government is notable. Back against the wall, having potentially made a catastrophic error in calling a provincial election, Premier Eby has shifted the NDP campaign into populist mode. Whereas just a month ago he was a pro-business, status quo manager with limited ambition for changing the province, apart from luring more mining and LNG projects, the premier has rediscovered the common touch in a bid to return to government.

The Conservatives have yet to table a more comprehensive plan besides categorically refusing any tax increases and cutting the provincial sales tax on alcohol, a measure estimated to cost $250 million per year. Seeking to lower liquor prices seems of dubious benefit for the province. If anything, the intent of the cut should be to provide additional income to the sellers of alcohol (adversely affected by the U.S. trade ban) rather than lowering prices. 

The Green party’s wealth tax for B.C. comes in two parts: a one-time tax of five per cent on net wealth above $50 million, 10 per cent above $100 million, and 20 per cent above $1 billion; and an ongoing wealth tax of two per cent, three per cent and five per cent respectively on the same thresholds. While well-intentioned, this would be extremely difficult to implement in B.C. The obvious challenge is how this would be implemented in a provincial jurisdiction and whether that would actually make sense given federal regulation around finance. Wealth taxes or inheritance taxes are best implemented on a national or federal level for this reason, and that the federal government could levy an exit tax on those wishing to leave the country. This would not be possible at the provincial level. 

Nonetheless, there are now some clear distinctions in the political choices facing British Columbians, and there’s still lots of campaign to go. All parties will need to table costed plans for their policy recommendations and how they link taxes, public spending and budget deficits. But if British Columbians want a lower deficit and greater equality, upper-income tax increases make a lot of sense. 

The post Taxing the rich: What’s on the table in the 2026 B.C. election? appeared first on CCPA.

Keynote Speaker Morna Ballantyne, Executive Director of Child Care Now

“Why Canada’s Child Care Program Must Succeed”

Date: Sunday November 8, 2026

Time: 10:00 am

Location: Hotel Fort Garry, 222 Broadway Avenue

Individual tickets $125 (a $60 tax receipt for each ticket will be issued)

Table sponsorship (table of eight) $1500

Please join us for a delicious breakfast and an inspiring talk on today’s pressing issues, while honouring a Manitoban who has contributed immensely to our province. 

Morna Ballantyne is the Executive Director of Child Care Now, Canada’s national child care advocacy organization, and holds governments to account to fulfill the promise of $10-a-day universal child care. She served in senior staff positions with the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) until 2009, and then with the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC). She is a highly respected and experienced expert in public policy, advocacy, and government relations. 

This year, we are proud to honour the Right Honourable Edward Schreyer, former Premier of Manitoba and Governor General of Canada. As Manitoba’s first NDP premier, Schreyer expanded the public sector’s role in the economy and in delivering universal services. His government eliminated health care premiums, introduced pharmacare and home care, created public auto insurance through Manitoba Public Insurance, expanded public housing, strengthened Manitoba Hydro, and led Winnipeg’s amalgamation. Together, these reforms helped establish a distinctive “Manitoba model” of publicly owned essential services and infrastructure—an approach that continues to shape debates about affordability, inequality, privatization and the role of government.

About the Errol Black Chair in Labour Issues

Errol Black was a dedicated activist, leader, economist and Brandon City Councillor who fought tirelessly for social justice. When Errol passed away in 2012, a research chair was created to continue his legacy at CCPA Manitoba. Every fall, we honour a Manitoban who has demonstrated leadership in advancing the rights of citizens and positively influenced the political landscape of our province.

Please join us Sunday November 8, 2026!

Tickets: $125 for individuals (with $60 tax receipt)

Table sponsor: $1500 (table of eight)

The post November 8 – Errol Black Chair Fundraising Brunch 2026 appeared first on CCPA.

Linda and Neil make a compelling case that the growing wealth of billionaires is a serious public policy problem for Canada, and they outline a plan for a wealth tax to improve fairness, raise revenues and serve as an overarching organizing focus for progressives.

CCPA thanks the Rosenbluth family and the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, our co-sponsors for the event. Gideon Rosenbluth was a professor of economics at UBC and an early research associate of the CCPA. His legacy of research in economics and public policy is honoured by the annual Rosenbluth lecture.

The post Cancelling billionaires: Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks present the 2026 Rosenbluth Lecture appeared first on CCPA.

The Joe Zuken Citizen Activist Award is given to individuals or groups that uphold Joe Zuken’s values of serving the community and working to build better communities. The Award honours those who have made significant contributions and rendered service to Winnipeg in a variety of ways, particularly in terms of education, social policy, justice and law, and the arts. 

Joe Zuken (1912-86) was one of Winnipeg’s most effective politicians. He served for over 42 years as a school trustee and city councillor, representing Winnipeg’s North End. By the time he retired from public office, many of his proposals had become accepted, including the implementation of kindergarten, free textbooks for schoolchildren, and increased public housing and urban development. For more on Zuken and a fascinating history of leftist politics in Winnipeg during the 1960s-90s,  you may read Joseph Zuken, Citizen and Activist by Doug Smith.

The Joe Zuken Citizen Activist Award was created by the Joseph Zuken Memorial Association. When this group wound down, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Manitoba was honoured to become the host of the award. 

Nominations

A call for nominations for the Joseph Zuken Citizen Activist Award is made annually. To inquire, please email ccpamb@policyalternatives.ca.

Previous recipients 

Dorothy Betz

Sel Burrows

Olga Foltz

Kent Gerecke

Barry Hammond

John Loxley

Mount Carmel Clinic                       

Neechi Foods

Carl Ridd

Rossbrook House

Jim Silver

Tom Simms

Murray Smith

Leslie Spillett

Val Werier

Errol Black (2012)

Shirley Lord (2014)

Meet Me at the Bell Tower (2017)

Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata (2019)

Roz Usiskin (2020)

Mitch Bourbonniere (2021)

Harold Dyck (2022)

Lynda Trono (2024)

Right to Housing Coalition (2026)

The post The Joe Zuken Citizen Activist Award: Honoring the work of building better communities appeared first on CCPA.

On the other hand, the recent swing from relatively balanced budgets over the course of the business cycle to large annual deficits under the Eby government is notable. Added to a big increase in public capital spending, higher debt is leading to larger debt service costs. There is no reason to panic but B.C. is now at a point where provincial policymakers, and the voters who elect them, must make some difficult choices.

It behooves the parties running to be B.C.’s next government to explain clearly what choices they would make in Budget 2027. Parties may rhetorically prefer a lower deficit or even a balanced budget going forward, but that pathway entails spending cuts and/or tax increases, both of which would have economic and distributional consequences. With the high social costs of cutting back public services, targeted tax and natural resource royalty increases aimed at high-income individuals and large corporations is an approach that would minimize economic impacts and improve fairness in B.C.

Fiscal policy unpacked

A deficit in a government’s budget refers to the annual shortfall of government operating revenues (personal and corporate taxes, resource royalties and other fees) relative to expenditures (health care, education, etc.). A surplus is the opposite, when revenues exceed expenditures. The actual budget balance tends to fluctuate with the state of the economy, with a strong economy leading to surpluses and weak economy to deficits. This is desirable as the B.C. government plays a stabilizing (also known as counter-cyclical) role in the economy through its budget.

Figure 1 shows the trend for B.C. surpluses and deficits (above and below the line, respectively) going back to 1999-2000 and includes projections in the current three-year fiscal plan (in red). The budget includes $5 billion of extra padding in each year of the fiscal plan, known as “contingencies,” which I have removed. To make surpluses and deficits comparable over time, we adjust them as a share of B.C.’s GDP. 

While deficits for 2026-27 fiscal year and the next two years are within historical norms, and less than two per cent of GDP, the concern is more with the overall trend of successive deficits year after year. A “structural deficit,” one that is present in good times and bad, is problematic to the extent that growing debt service costs eat into revenues. Indeed, by 2028-29, B.C. will be paying almost 10 per cent of budget revenues in debt service costs, compared to an average of 4.6 per cent for the decade up to 2025-26. The historically low interest rates over the past quarter-century appear to be at an end, a global situation, but even locally, credit downgrades increase the cost of borrowing for the B.C. government.

Figure 2 shows total provincial debt broken down into: “taxpayer-supported” debt reflecting government operations, smaller Crown corporations and the capital spending above; and “self-supporting” debt of large Crowns like BC Hydro or the Insurance Corp of BC (ICBC), which have their own sources of revenue to repay debt. Again, these are after accounting for contingencies that artificially increase the debt numbers, and as a share of GDP. 

While self-supported debt has increased somewhat in recent years, the steep rise in taxpayer-supported debt is the most striking. Taxpayer-supported debt-to-GDP levels in the current fiscal plan are well above historical norms for B.C., and could hit 34 per cent of GDP in 2028-29, which would be more than double the level in 2022/23. The B.C. budget already plans a major reduction in taxpayer-supported capital spending by 20 per cent in 2028-29 relative to 2026-27.

B.C.’s growing taxpayer-supported debt includes substantial new borrowing in support of public infrastructure in education, health care and transportation. In other words, new and replacement schools and post-secondary facilities, new and replacement hospitals and cancer care centres, and new Skytrain lines in Metro Vancouver, the new Massey tunnel and 21 km of highway expansion in the Fraser Valley. 

It’s hard to argue with any of these expenditures in terms of meeting the needs of ordinary British Columbians, although there are several multi-billion-dollar examples of highway projects reinforcing auto-dependent suburban living. Nonetheless, these are all assets that have substantial economic value underpinning B.C.’s future standard of living. Just looking at the increase in debt associated with building them is seeing only half the picture. They also represent thousands of construction jobs. 

Finally, in addition to debt or liabilities, B.C. also has substantial financial and non-financial assets. Figure 3 shows B.C.’s net debt, which adjusts for financial assets, in comparison to other provinces. The picture is more reassuring, and B.C. clearly has a long way to go before it reaches net-debt-to-GDP ratios common to most other provinces. There’s still a lot of room before B.C. hit levels seen in Ontario or Quebec, although the gap has closed in recent years. Only Alberta fared better than B.C. on this measure. However, this is only a snapshot up to the end of 2024, and B.C.’s debt has increased since then. 

Statistics Canada makes one further adjustment in its inter-provincial comparisons to include non-financial assets (not shown). At the end of 2024, B.C. had a positive net worth of $25.8 billion, equivalent to six per cent of GDP. This would likely come as a surprise to most British Columbians given the drumbeat of bad news stories about B.C.’s debt. 

Looking to Budget 2027

While the current economic situation justifies some level of deficits and increased debt, B.C. will face a crossroads moment in the 2027 budget that will pose big challenges for whichever party forms government. Those choices risk further undermining the economy. 

Thus far, larger deficits have steadied B.C.’s economy and the province has weathered the trade and housing headwinds reasonably well. Real GDP growth is forecast to be just under one per cent in 2026 and 1.9 per cent in each of 2027 and 2028. That said, the provincial unemployment rate has been creeping up steadily from its most recent low of 4.2 per cent at the end of 2022 to 6.5 per cent in July 2026, and youth unemployment rates have been much higher. These stats would be much worse if the government arbitrarily tried to balance its budget.

Deficit reduction poses important trade-offs that are typically ignored by electoral platform rhetoric that promises to do the mathematically impossible: cut the deficit, reduce taxes, and increase or maintain public services. In fact, a choice to reduce the deficit must entail cuts to public spending and/or increases in taxes, both of which have consequences depending on how they are implemented. Neither choice is a popular one. 

Figure 4 shows that, at 21.4 per cent in 2026-27, B.C. public expenditures are up only modestly over recent historical levels. It’s hard to make the case that the province is radically over-spending, and the next two years already project a decline. The austerity of the Gordon Campbell years (2001 to 2011) is evident in the figure and a reminder of what cuts look like when we go from abstraction to implementation. 

Health care alone is 40 per cent of budget expenditures, followed by education at 20 per cent and social services at 10 per cent, so if a party is serious about deficit reduction from spending cuts, it’s hard to avoid these areas. The vast majority of B.C. government expenditures are the wages and salaries of professionals in these core public services. Cuts to expenditures inevitably mean public sector layoffs (disproportionately women in administrative and care work) or reductions in the quantity and quality of public services (with bigger impacts in rural, remote, and Indigenous communities). 

B.C.’s own-source revenues (i.e. not counting federal transfers) have been declining relative to GDP, with the current fiscal plan at historical lows. Asking the most affluent British Columbians to give more back should not be a hard sell—highers tax rates on top incomes, for example, or an increase in corporate income tax. The 2026 B.C. budget expanded the scope of Provincial Sales Tax to many uncovered services to raise more than $500 billion per year on a full-year basis, but Premier Eby promised to cancel the increase mere days before calling the provincial election. 

There is certainly potential to increase natural gas royalties, for which the province is getting a pittance. Royalties are a fraction of what they used to be 10-15 years ago, even as the province has overseen a massive increase in production. A new royalty framework has been in development to launch in January 2027 but has not been made public. Various reports suggest it will give even more of the economic value to the companies rather than the provincial treasury. 

Promises, promises

The fiscal bottom line is that politicians cannot have it both ways. If they want a lower deficit they need to articulate whether they would increase taxes or reduce spending to get there. The Conservative campaign, for example, has committed to no tax increases while wanting to reduce the deficit, which can only mean spending cuts. The NDP have promised  to reduce the deficit, and would raise $1 billion per year by increasing taxes on the top two per cent of British Columbians (only applied to individual income before taxes above $190,405). However, they also would cut provincial fuel taxes, which would cost $670 million full-year and would have a relatively stronger benefit for low- to middle-income households.. 

In the 2024 election, the NDP promised a large income tax cut ($500 for individuals and $1,000 for households) and an increase in the basic personal amount (i.e., the threshold for paying income tax). Neither happened, although the 2025 budget did eliminate B.C.’s consumer carbon tax, which led to the cancellation of the Climate Action Tax Credit  for low-income households and a modest increase in income taxes in the 2026 budget to cover some of the lost revenue.

We are mid-campaign and the promises are starting to accumulate but they may not add up at budget time. In the remaining time of the election campaign, voters need B.C.’s political parties to table costed platforms that put numbers to their promises—and provide clarity about their financial decision-making should they win the electoral prize.

The post B.C.’s fiscal choices after the provincial election appeared first on CCPA.

The government is framing the bill as part of its agenda to “build Canada strong,” a slogan that federal policy-makers never tire of trotting out. But will this proposed law—the largest piece of legislation yet introduced in this session—actually strengthen the Canadian economy?

When we look at the details, it becomes clear that the main purpose of this legislation—much like the rest of the federal government’s policy agenda—is about clearing the way for greater corporate profit, at the expense of everything else. In this case, the feds are offering up the environment, First Nations, and workers to the bulldozer. 

Climate: Standards? What standards?

It comes as little surprise, given the systematic dismantling of Canada’s climate policy over the past 18 months, but the federal government would really prefer that we not talk about climate change in the context of Bill C-39. The term “climate” does not appear in the government’s backgrounder promoting the bill at all. The bill itself includes only obligatory references to existing climate commitments, which are framed as one consideration among many for determining project approvals.

Instead, Bill C-39 chips away at various environmental protections that currently exist in the Impact Assessment Act, Canadian Environmental Protection Act, Species at Risk Act, Fisheries Act and Canadian Navigable Waters Act. Generally speaking, these changes:

• Accelerate assessment timelines, which means less fulsome reviews;
• Give federal ministers more power to unilaterally approve project proposals; and,
• Privilege commercial considerations when setting project conditions.

Taken together, the changes in Bill C-39 will make it easier to approve new oil pipelines and other projects with significant environmental impacts. The bill even allows the environment minister to permit limited construction activities on major projects before environmental assessments are complete.

The biggest red flag in the bill, however, is the designation of “regions of national interest”—geographic areas in which proposed projects may bypass the usual assessment processes. While the bill does not name any regions specifically, it is easy to imagine which parts of the country the federal government may be keen to label as sacrifice zones, including Ontario’s Ring of Fire, Alberta’s oil sands and various B.C. pipeline corridors.

Canada is already 20 years behind on its climate goals, with no plan to meet the 2050 net-zero target. Bill C-39, if implemented, would make it even harder to turn things around.

—Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, CCPA senior researcher. Thank you to Julia Levin at Environmental Defence Canada for sharing insights on these changes.

Indigenous rights: Steps backward for nation-to-nation relationships

The federal government has a constitutional duty to consult and accommodate First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples when projects may affect their rights. The government says Indigenous groups have called consultations burdensome, duplicative and difficult to navigate. Bill C-39’s answer is consolidation: one consultation process per project, per Indigenous community.

Streamlining consultations does little to address the underlying problem of how these processes are ultimately structured and who carries the burden. Indigenous nations are repeatedly asked to assess project impacts and share generations of knowledge about their territories, within timelines and rules designed by non-Indigenous governments and project developers. Impact assessments, which are supposed to identify a project’s impact on communities and the environment, have historically centred Western science. Indigenous perspectives contributed within those frameworks can be taken out of context or treated as a supplement. 

The bill calls its approach a “strengthened Crown consultation,” yet it gives Nations no new authority nor resources.

Meaningful consultation requires that First Nations have the time and capacity to gather evidence and deliberate when their communities and lands could be permanently altered. The one-year timeline can be paused for consultation, but the crown decides when. The bill also lets the minister authorize early site work before an impact assessment decision. Once work begins, changing or stopping a project becomes more difficult. 

These provisions are drawing concerns from Indigenous leaders. Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak has warned the government against rushing the bill through parliament. The AFN is also seeking legal counsel, a sign that First Nations may be gearing up for a legal fight. 

Litigation means uncertainty. The bill undermines its own promise: Ottawa cannot offer investors certainty while sidestepping its obligations to rights holders. 

—Rachel Pettigrew, CCPA research assistant

Labour: Frontal attack on the right to strike

The labour movement has been on alert for months about potential coming restrictions on the right to strike among federally regulated workplaces. The feds engaged in a “consultation” earlier this summer that was poorly advertised and hastily concluded—generally a sign that policy-makers have already made a decision about which direction they’re planning to take.

That decision is now on the table with Bill C-19. The legislation does a lot of things, but “reforms” to Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code are relevant here—that is, the feds’ most prized piece of strike-breaking legislation (the latest tool in a long history of Canadian government strikebreaking). Section 107 of the code allows for the labour minister to unilaterally order a work stoppage to end in order to secure “industrial peace.” It has been the subject of a major backlash from Canadian workers, most notably when Air Canada workers ignored the law and engaged in an “illegal” strike after being ordered back to work in 2025.

The reforms, according to labour minister Patty Hajdu, would create “guardrails” around federal use of Section 107. Sounds positive, right? Except those “guardrails” mostly revolve around a simple requirement that the feds declare ending the labour stoppage to be in the “national interest.” How would that be determined? Well by the labour minister, of course. 

Previous iterations of Section 107 were subject to union court challenges, which threatened to undo the feds’ favourite tool entirely, and these changes would likely nullify those challenges, forcing the process to begin anew. More importantly, it would also formalize the minister’s unilateral power to break strikes, since that power previously rested on a somewhat novel (one might even say strained) interpretation of the Canada Labour Code. Now that power would be fully formalized and more difficult to legally challenge.

All this together amounts to an unprecedented attack on the right to strike—and would make Canada’s government strikebreaking powers the most significant of any G7 country by far. A wide variety of labour unions have condemned the proposal, and many are promising court challenges against it. The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), the largest union in Canada by membership, has gone farther—the union’s national executive board has unanimously declared, in no uncertain terms, that it intends to defy the law if it is applied to a CUPE strike.

—Jon Milton, CCPA editor and chair of the Trade Union Research Collective (TURC)

A bill of rights for corporate power 

The message from the federal government is quite clear: everything is on the menu. By making C-39 their signature piece of legislation for this parliamentary session, this government is signalling that the door is wide open for every one of corporate Canada’s demands, no matter the impact on the rest of the population. 

The federal government is, of course, framing these measures as necessary actions to bolster the Canadian economy in the face of a belligerent United States. But if a strong economy means weak workers, we should probably ask ourselves: whose economy are we talking about?

There are multiple ways to build “Canada strong,” as the feds love to say. Protecting the environment that we depend on, making sure that workers are able to fight for dignity at work, and strengthening the government’s relationship with First Nations are all strengths, too—no matter what the business lobby says.

The post Bill C-39 is a massive corporate giveaway appeared first on CCPA.

In his signature irreverent style, Eric Duhaime’s comments aimed at highlighting the outsized influence that his party’s brand of libertarian right-wing politics has had on the electoral campaign. Though it would be an overstatement of the PCQ’s power (despite their growing popularity) to credit them entirely with the general framing of this campaign, Duhaime’s comment does highlight a noticeable rightward shift in the political landscape of Quebec. 

This shift has articulated itself in the policy propositions of most of the main parties. Indeed, the alignment between the financial frameworks presented by the Parti Québécois (PQ), the Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ), the ruling Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), and the PCQ has been remarkable yet unusual in their shared commitment to reducing public spending, albeit to varying levels. Only Quebec Solidaire (QS) has proposed a financial framework which maintains the size of the state and its spending costs. 

This should be understood in the context of 30 years of neoliberalism in the province, following the adoption of the 1996 “Zero Deficit” bill, which legally binds the government to limit its public spending and has guided Quebec governments—regardless of party—through cycles of austerity that have severely undermined public institutions. This has understandably bred frustration among voters who have felt the effects of diminished services. 

It is not surprising then that we have found ourselves in a campaign which increasingly feels like a referendum on the future of Quebec’s battered social democracy. Four main issues have been key battlegrounds for this debate: the rising cost of living, the size of the state, immigration, and Quebec’s independence.

Cost of living

The rising cost of life has been the flagship issue of this campaign, with 38 per cent of voters wanting it to be the main priority of the next government. There is, however, a generational divide in the electorate—with nearly half of 18-34 year-old voters naming this issue as their main priority, compared to a little less than a third of 65 + year-old voters. It is worth noting that these same young voters also tend to be mostly drawn to QS, the PQ, and the PCQ, three parties representing greater vision for change, albeit highly different visions.  

This generational divide is also reflected in the parties’ proposals to address this cost-of-living crisis. 

On housing, the largest expense item for Canadian households, QS is the only party which has announced any measures to help renters—they propose to index annual rent increases to inflation, to create a national rent registry, and to ban evictions when  the inoccupation rate is below three per cent. That party also happens to be holding the most voting intentions among 18-34 year-old voters (27 per cent), the demographic most likely to be renters. 

The other parties have focused their housing platforms around facilitating access to property and supporting the conversion of existing properties into intergenerational homes. The PQ and the CAQ have both proposed increasing tax credits for first-time homeowners, while the PLQ would support these buyers by waiving the welcome tax. The PCQ,  on the other hand, proposes simplifying the provincial building code and reducing renter protections to create a friendlier environment for landlords and housing developers.

On inflation and grocery prices, QS distinguishes itself through more experimental projects like a plan to create 15 publicly owned grocery stores.  Most other parties focus their efforts on reducing the sales tax on key items. The PCQ offers little to support households other than the temporary suspension of the provincial gas tax. 

The PQ manages to stand out on the issue of family supports. Having made the province’s low birth rate a campaign issue, the party has vowed to encourage Quebecers to have more kids by increasing the government’s child allowance for the 3^rd and 4^th child, and creating 10,000 additional subsidized daycare spots. The party has framed these measures around the goal of bringing the province’s birth rate up to 1.9 from its current 1.36—a goal which has led some to qualify the PQ as natalist, a label the party rejects.

Size of the state

The influence of the PCQ is most notable on the topic of the size of the state. While the PCQ has always been upfront with its desire to drastically reduce the size of the state by eliminating 20,000 full-time civil service jobs, they are far from alone in this initiative. 

Following suit, the PLQ has proposed cutting 12,000 full-time civil service jobs, while the CAQ and the PQ respectively propose cutting 2,900 and roughly 2,000 (or 2.5 per cent of the total) full-time positions. All four parties have promised that these cuts would not negatively affect services and thus would not be felt by the population—which has left economic experts perplexed given the strain under which public services already operate. 

Quebec’s Public and Parapublic Service Union (SFPQ) has expressed concerns about the civil service sector, which has already shrunk in the last few years. Using hospital wait times as an example, the union warns that “they always say they’ll cut on bureaucracy and regulation, and that it won’t affect services for citizens but that’s not true. For several years now, there have been long wait times.” Those wait times have increased over the past decade. 

Both the PCQ and the CAQ have also proposed more privatization in the health care system. Those parties have proposed hybridization measures (programs which would see the state commission services from the private sector), despite governmental data itself showing that medical interventions like surgeries commissioned to private clinics end up being more expensive to the state than those done in public hospitals. 

Immigration

Immigration has been a polarizing issue in this campaign. The PCQ has led the anti-immigration charge—proposing a change in the selection process that would  prioritize immigration from “democratic” countries (without defining criteria for declaring a country democratic), and a 33 per cent reduction to social assistance benefits for asylum seekers despite the current monthly allowance already not being enough to cover basic needs. PCQ leader Eric Duhaime has routinely demonised asylum seekers, depicting them as a privileged class in Quebec with outsized access to free services, and as “fake refugees” by falsely claiming that over a third of asylum claims were fraudulent when data from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada shows that only 2.3 per cent of claims were considered fraudulent in the last year. 

Aligning themselves with this alarmist vision, the PQ has promised to bring down the annual number of permanent immigrants by 10,000 and halve the number of temporary immigrants. The party would also increase linguistic requirements for admitted immigrants as a measure to address what it describes as the “worst backsliding of the French language” in a generation. The PQ also sees a correlation between French decline and immigration in public schools in Montreal and Laval, where they say immigrant students no longer use French as the common language because they “tend to group together according to their origins.” The party is promising a public inquiry into the “language of socialization” in schools. This rhetoric makes an allusion to communitarianism, a concept popularized in France which accuses immigrants of refusing to integrate, while dismissing the social structures that might hinder that process. 

While the CAQ and PLQ’s discourse on immigration have been much milder this campaign, they have both presented a market driven vision of immigration, which prioritizes  newcomers based on their ability to fill sectoral labor shortages. Those parties would both maintain the current permanent immigration thresholds, though the CAQ would still require them to pass a Quebec values test and would reduce the number of temporary workers. 

On this issue, again, QS operates in its own lane by proposing an increased number of permanent immigrants and a further regionalization of that immigration by creating incentives for newcomers to settle outside of urban centres. 

Independence

For months, the PQ has been unequivocal on their intention to hold a referendum on Quebec’s independence during their first term in power. The recent tariff war with the United States and the economic instability created by it has led the party to somewhat moderate its stance by promising to wait until the end of Donald Trump’s presidency before holding a referendum. 

Though there has been a clear resurgence of the independence movement, most notably among the youth, the idea remains fairly unpopular, with 70 per cent of voters saying they would vote “No” if a referendum were to be held today. Nonetheless, the PQ still leads in polling intentions—a contradiction that points to relative apathy of the electorate about this question. Only 55 per cent of self-identified PQ voters—the voters most likely to support independence—say they would even vote in favour of independence in an eventual referendum. 

The PLQ has positioned itself as the only openly federalist party running, but given the aforementioned voter apathy on the question, it does not seem to have resulted in increased support. 

What’s been forgotten?

Among all these issues, a number of other key issues have received very little air time in this election campaign. 

Chief among them seems to be the environment, which has seemed to only ever come up in response to the PCQ’s proposition to overturn the current ban on natural gas extraction (via fracking). Though every party has included measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it has not seemed to be a particularly salient issue for any of the parties. 

Another noticeably absent issue has been education—despite the campaign taking place barely a month into the school year which, like most years, began with over 3,000 missing teachers. Finally, the culture industry has also been absent from conversations in this campaign. This is particularly concerning given the industry’s reliance on public funding which makes it especially vulnerable to the effects of the austerity measures. Moreover, in a campaign where themes of sovereignty and linguistic preservation have been so prevalent, the lack of conversations about the vitalization of the province’s cultural industry begs the question of what this call to protect Quebec’s rich and distinct culture really means for the political class. 

Neoliberalism has been the lingua franca of Quebec governments since the late 1990s, but this election is highlighting the lack of meaningful alternatives. For the most part, what the parties are putting to voters on October 5 are different degrees of departures from what made the Quebec model so unique in North America. Quebecers would do well, then, to consider what would be lost in that departure.

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For example, the federal government is once again tipping the collective bargaining scales in favour of management. Labour has argued that Bill C-39 (The Building Canada Strong Act), designed to get Canada building more and faster, introduces changes that trample on collective bargaining rights. This bill has also sparked criticism from Indigenous and environmental groups who claim that human rights and the environment will be endangered. 

The government sides with business when it argues that strikes in the federal jurisdiction—which covers workers in inter-provincial trucking, telecommunications, shipping, ports, air travel, rail and mail—disrupt the economy and are inconvenient for consumers. Such disruptions are rare and obscure that there are two sides in collective bargaining. Workers argue for better working conditions and wages, and employers do their best to give as little as possible. Sometimes they push to roll back past gains. If collective bargaining is unsuccessful at reaching a settlement agreeable to both sides, the only recourse is a lockout by the employer or a strike by the workers. A lockout is an action by the employer to temporarily close the workplace—locking out the workers—to pressure them in negotiations. 

The vast majority of these negotiations, over 95 per cent, are settled at the bargaining table without industrial action. However, those don’t receive disproportionate media attention. A strike vote, for example, is not the beginning of a strike but, rather, a show of support by the members for their union. However, a strike vote is treated by the media as though a strike is imminent. 

Again, in most cases, the negotiations end with no strike or lockout action. 

Business has lobbied for these changes to shore up business confidence during Canada’s current ‘elbows up’ economic situation with respect to U.S. tariffs. Strikes, they argue, disrupt business, inconvenience the public and undermine confidence in Canada as a place to invest. 

No worker takes a strike lightly. Anyone who has ever been on a picket line, standing up to their employer, knows how unequal their power relationship already is. The ability to collectively refuse to work and join a picket line is workers’ last resort to pressure the employer. 

For workers, a strike is challenging because you are used to working by the employer’s rules, since the workplace is far from a democracy. Strikes also create precarity for workers because they forfeit their paycheque for meagre strike pay and never know if they can win any improvements.

However, it is through strikes that workers have fought for and won the right to limit their hours in the working day, the right to pensions, vacations, overtime pay and so on. That many workers will protest that they still don’t have those rights speaks to the decades-long tipping of the labour relations scale to favour employers over workers. While profits have soared in many sectors, workers’ wages have generally remained flat. Private sector workers, increasingly atomized into self-employed, mainly in the service sector, often remain without union representation.

Some workers sacrificed much during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those who couldn’t work remotely, often among the lowest paid workers, were disproportionately exposed to the virus. Some died. Some got ‘hero pay’, usually removed after the pandemic. Those who had to work remotely faced other challenges as the world adapted to an urgent threat. 

After the pandemic, the economy boomed and profits soared. But the workers who had kept us alive in this period found their ‘hero pay’ cut and their wages stagnated. Not surprisingly, in this period, many workers pressed for change; some went on strike. Federal government workers who had kept the country running, either in person or remotely, found their pay entangled in faulty software introduced by the government, and were pressed to both return to in-person work and to keep wage demands low.

The federal government has already intervened many times in federal bargaining disputes. Under section 107 of Part One of the Canada Labour Relations Act, the minister can order workers back to work and send the outstanding issues to an arbitrator. The problem with this is that if the employer knows that the minister will likely intervene, they have less interest in bargaining for a solution. They just have to wait for the government to act. Employers have admitted as much. 

A recent example is the CUPE members who work as Air Canada flight attendants. With a 99 per cent strike vote in support of the union, the workers were determined to make gains in collective bargaining. Air Canada, as the CEO admitted, was expecting the government to act, so they stalled bargaining. When the minister ordered the workers back to work, they defied the order and stayed out on strike.The company was forced to negotiate and only one issue was sent to an independent third party to decide. The subsequent collective agreement was democratically ratified by the workers.

This is the danger of this government’s change to collective bargaining. Employers can just wait until a dispute is seen as very disruptive so that the government gets involved. Imagine in Canada’s tariff negotiations with the U.S. if a third party came in and said that instead of a 50 per cent tariff, Canadians would now only pay 25 per cent. Would that be acceptable? No, of course not. But that is the kind of settlement that a third party could impose in labour management negotiations. 

Federal ministers insist that these changes strengthen the collective bargaining process and that they would never interfere with the right to strike. In fact, they are acquiescing to business demands to reign in unions. Working people across Canada got us through the COVID-19 pandemic and they are putting their elbows up to stand with the government in this current tariff fight. The government would be wise not to abuse that support with Bill C-39. Tipping the scales in collective bargaining in favour of employers could just tip workers’ support away from the bigger tariff effort.

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AI, they say, is going to revolutionize work. It will eliminate countless jobs and send labour productivity into the stratosphere. It is going to fundamentally change public services. It will revolutionize warfare. It will transform arts and culture. It will destroy all previous assumptions about the possibilities of technology. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in one of his many outlandish claims, said “we are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish.”

Even negative stories can reinforce this framing. Scary tales about frontier AI models “breaking containment” out of their testing areas and engaging in “autonomous” hacks against other AI companies reinforce the idea that these new digital technologies are accelerating faster than human designers can control. We are, indeed, on the verge of the AI revolution, everything seems to say—whether we view that as a good thing or not.

But are we? The actual rollout of AI has been, for the most part, underwhelming. The productivity gains have mostly failed to materialize. AI integration into online services like Google search has almost universally worsened the quality of those services, with next to nothing on the upside. Nobody likes AI “art.” Companies are re-hiring workers that they laid off to replace with AI during the early days of the rush. Stock markets are beginning to punish major tech companies for their growing debt ratios.

Altman’s genie claims are obviously absurd, but they do reflect the way most people view AI technology: as a type of magic. Tech companies and their boosters deliberately mystified AI technology, and that lack of understanding is a key part of why AI seems like an inevitable behemoth.

Take the term “AI” itself: ChatGPT is a Large Language Model (LLM), a type of word prediction machine that guesses, based on probability, which word is likely to follow another—much like the predictive text feature on your cell phone keyboard. It is not, in any meaningful sense, intelligent, in that it contains no internal capacity for logic or to check the veracity of references. Its core function is word prediction, not reason (which is why it is significantly less reliable for information retrieval than a standard search on Google or Wikipedia). “Artificial intelligence” is a marketing term.

By referring to these technologies as “intelligent,” we contribute to mystifying them. It certainly feels more serious to tell ourselves that we “asked AI” about something rather than asking the Magic 8 Ball.

But the hype cycle this narrative produces has consequences. Policy-makers across the world are falling over themselves to deeply embed “AI” systems into the economy. They are constructing energy-hungry data centres, replacing public service workers with chatbots, and funnelling public money to tech companies that constantly claim to be on the verge of “revolutionizing” something or other, if only we gave them a little more cash.

Back in the 1980s, governments across the developed world were massively restructuring their economies—they were going to war with labour unions, gutting the welfare and regulatory state, signing away sovereignty through trade deals, and running fire sales for newly privatized public services. It was the early days of neoliberalism, and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it in simple terms: “there is no alternative.”

From tech CEOs to the federal government’s AI strategy to the chattering classes in the media, that narrative is once again taking hold with regard to a massive restructuring project. This time, the people deploying that rhetoric are using technology (rather than economic theory) to justify their power grab. But just like last time, it is indeed a power grab—and one that we do have the capacity to resist.

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The biggest boosters of the various technologies and products that fall under the “AI” banner are, unsurprisingly, the big tech companies that have the most to gain from widespread AI adoption. But they are not alone: governments around the world are all in on AI, and Canada is no exception.

In its recent AI strategy, the federal government declared that “to thrive in the era of AI, Canadians need to trust in its promise.” It was a revealing plea. If the benefits of AI were obvious and immediate—and the harms merely speculative—there would be no need to appeal to the technology’s future promise.

Instead, the opposite is true. The proliferation of AI is awash in immediate harms, but the benefits remain elusive. Widespread AI adoption is thus a costly bet—a gamble on future prosperity with our jobs, our planet and very minds at stake.

Welcome to the AI casino.

Ante up

The scale of the AI mania is extraordinary. Global investment in the AI supply chain may top US$2 trillion this year—approaching two per cent of global GDP. Most of that money is pouring into the physical infrastructure that enables the AI economy. In the next three years, an estimated US$3 trillion will be spent on the construction of new data centres alone. Within a decade, AI is projected to be a US$5 trillion industry—comparable to the entire economy of Germany or Japan.

The sums are not only large in absolute terms, but they are also large relative to other sectors of the economy. More than half of all venture capital is now being absorbed by AI companies. In the U.S., AI investment accounted for a third of GDP growth in 2025. Major AI companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are now valued at a trillion dollars apiece. Legacy big tech firms, such as Alphabet (Google) and Microsoft—already among the largest corporations in history—are pivoting aggressively into AI infrastructure and products.

AI industry investment in Canada is smaller by several orders of magnitude. Compared to the US$286 billion invested in U.S. AI companies in 2025, only US$4.3 billion was invested in Canadian firms. Compared to the trillion dollar valuations of leading American AI companies, the largest-AI focused firm in Canada, Cohere, is valued at “only” US$7 billion.

For all its talk of aggressively embracing AI, the federal government is only ponying up $2 billion for new computing infrastructure—a tacit acknowledgment that Canada cannot beat the U.S. at its own game. Nor should we try. But the feds nevertheless remain fervently committed to AI adoption as a matter of principle.

Among other goals, the national AI strategy aims to increase the rate of AI adoption among Canadian businesses from 12 per cent today to 60 per cent within a decade. The strategy hopes to reach a million post-secondary students and thousands of K-12 teachers with AI “literacy” programs. And it aspires to “transform public service delivery” through AI.

And if all of those AI tools happen to be made and owned by American firms? So be it. Digital sovereignty—the principle of domestic (and, ideally, democratic) control over the technology we use—is an aspiration to which the federal government pays lip service. But, when push comes to shove, AI adoption is a higher priority.

After all, the benefits of AI adoption are so incontrovertibly large and widespread that we cannot afford to get bogged down in questions of risk and harm. Right?

Betting the farm on productivity

The AI boom has several premises, including an appeal to the alluring and enduring myth of inevitable technological progress. But the big bucks pouring into the industry today are driven by a simpler promise: productivity growth.

Productivity refers simply to a worker’s output per hour worked. Productivity growth is how much that output per hour worked increases over time. Continued growth in labour productivity is necessary for modern, debt-fuelled economies that would otherwise collapse in on themselves. And, indeed, employers have succeeded for decades in squeezing more and more value (and profit) out of every worker—whether or not that value was shared with workers themselves. Corporate enthusiasm for AI is merely the latest incarnation of that profit-motivated logic.

According to Claude developer Anthropic, AI adoption will double the rate of productivity growth in the next decade. Independent assessments are less rosy, but still tend to converge on potential gains in productivity growth in the range of 10 to 20 per cent. If that pans out, it would indeed add trillions of dollars to the global economy. In Canada, industry-adjacent studies project a cumulative, AI-driven boon of $300 billion to the Canadian economy over the next 10 years.

The problem is that actual productivity gains are elusive. The vast majority of corporate AI pilots are finding no return on investment. A Statistics Canada study concluded that “there is no statistically significant direct association between AI adoption and productivity” among Canadian firms to date. Companies that embraced AI tools and started laying off workers, including Ford and IBM, have started rehiring them. Half of employers who made AI-driven job cuts admit it was a mistake.

There are a few reasons for AI’s economic underperformance. The first is technological. Despite the appearance of intelligence, AI tools—especially the large language models (LLMs) underpinning popular chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot—are fundamentally unintelligent. They are prediction machines that do not (and cannot) know whether their own outputs are accurate or reasonable. Even as these tools get more capable and reliable over time, they can never be 100 per cent trustworthy. To make matters worse, they are also inherently backward looking, capable only of inference based on past data, which means they struggle with novel situations and edge cases. Those are big problems in contexts where accuracy, judgment, creativity and liability matter.

The second problem is institutional. Most individuals and organizations do not know how best to deploy these technologies—or whether they should be deployed at all. Handing a nurse a screwdriver and saying, “use this, it’s the next big thing,” does not automatically make that nurse do more or better work. To the surprise and chagrin of many in the tech sector, not every job is like software development.

In fact, AI adoption can often have the opposite of the intended effect. For example, the amount of time workers must now waste reviewing and parsing what researchers call AI “workslop” often offsets any time saved in the first place. The assumption that indiscriminate AI adoption will make all workers and/or organizations more productive has not been the case in practice, and it is bound to be wrong in some (perhaps most) cases moving forward.

The big question then—and the big bet underpinning the trillions of dollars in AI investment—is whether those promised productivity benefits will actually materialize at scale. If they don’t, AI mania will prove to be the largest financial bubble in history, and its collapse would have massive and far-reaching consequences. Index and pension funds, including Canadian funds like the CPP, are now deeply implicated in the AI industry, so the damage would not be localized.

But even if the technological and institutional hurdles are overcome and the AI industry delivers on its promised productivity panacea, an even more important question remains: is it worth it? 

Skin in the game

A true accounting of the costs of the AI boom is a daunting task. There are the environmental costs of data centres, especially the burning of fossil fuels to meet ballooning electricity demand. There are the democratic costs of AI-fuelled mis- and disinformation. There are the human rights costs of AI-enabled corporate and state surveillance. There are the cognitive costs of offloading more and more of our thinking to machines. There are the security costs of entrenching dependence on foreign, especially American, AI infrastructure. There are the cultural costs of AI systems imbibing the totality of human intellectual and artistic expression without consent, credit or compensation. The list goes on.

Each of these costs represents an existential threat in its own way—to the habitability of the planet, to the viability of democracy, and so on. AI is proving to be a force multiplier for so many of the challenges we are already struggling with.

Any claims of AI’s economic benefit to Canada must be weighed against the profound risks it poses across all of these other domains. But even in the domain of the economy and of worker productivity, it is not clear that workers in the aggregate will be made any better off by the federal government’s enthusiasm for AI adoption. We are rolling the dice both in terms of job quantity and of job quality.

On job quantity, there is intense academic disagreement about the risk of AI-related automation of the workforce. While most workers, especially knowledge workers, are theoretically exposed to AI for at least some tasks, that does not necessarily equate to replaceability. As noted above, AI-driven layoffs have proven to be premature—and have been reversed—in many contexts where the technology was simply less capable than the humans who lost their jobs. To date, AI adoption has not had a significant effect on overall employment levels.

Yet it is already evident that AI is having structural effects on the workforce. Stable overall employment levels hide worrying trends. In the tech sector, for example, hiring of senior level employees has remained stable or even increased as hiring of junior level employees has fallen precipitously. Banking, law and other sectors are following suit. In Canada, entry-level job vacancies are at their lowest levels in a decade despite a growing population, and youth unemployment is near record levels.

Young workers are thus the canaries in the coal mine. As AI systems improve and employers get smarter about deployment, the universe of at-risk positions (and whole professions) will inevitably grow. Canada’s national AI strategy aspires to create 250,000 new jobs through AI by 2031. It does not mention how many jobs will be lost along the way.

On job quality, AI is reorganizing work itself in ways that undermine the autonomy and dignity of workers—even where they are not outright replaced. Workers who were previously responsible for producing creative or intellectual work are increasingly relegated to reviewing the outputs of AI systems. Workers must also contend with algorithmic management, a term that refers to managerial tasks, including hiring and disciplinary decisions, being offloaded to AI systems. All of this is happening in contexts where AI-powered workplace surveillance is increasingly ubiquitous and brazen.

The upshot is an intensification and dehumanization of labour that would make Marx blush.

The house always wins

The cruel irony here is that, to the extent AI is already or will potentially improve workplace productivity, many of those benefits may prove to be short-lived. Gutting entry-level employment and deskilling the professional workforce creates enormous vulnerabilities for individual institutions and the economy writ large. Organizations that depend on senior professionals overseeing AI systems are going to be in a lot of trouble when those leaders move on and there are no junior workers in the ranks.

Geopolitical risk also looms over Canada’s AI enthusiasm. Canadian firms were recently cut off from leading American AI models by decree of the U.S. government. Microsoft, which is a pillar of the federal government’s AI infrastructure, has acknowledged it cannot guarantee the security of sensitive public data. Outsourcing public and private sector capacity to U.S.-controlled services is a noose we tie for ourselves.

When it comes to gambling, the only winning move is not to play. Eventually, the house—which, in this case, is the nexus of U.S. big tech companies and state imperialism—always wins.

For Canada, that has two major implications.

First, we need to slow down. Rushing to indiscriminately adopt AI across every sector and domain of Canadian life, as the federal government aspires to, is a dangerous and unnecessary risk, especially where those systems are not domestically controlled. The harms are too real and too immediate to justify the speculative, long-term benefits.

Second, to the extent that the various technologies underpinning the AI boom have the potential to be genuine public goods—as they do in narrow, sector-specific applications such as energy efficiency and scientific research—we need Canadian-controlled options. That will require investment and experimental adoption, but it is a far cry from AI chatbots being forced into every workplace and school in the country.

There’s no denying that AI is here to stay. And there is little we can do about rapacious U.S. tech companies. But we don’t have to go to their casino. It’s time for Canada to play our own game.

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