The Living Wage: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

By Lynne Fernandez Minimum-wage workers are not just teenagers working at fast-food restaurants after school. According to the Manitoba Federation of Labour, 55 per cent of minimum wage earners in Manitoba are adults twenty years and older; 51 …

Program to Subsidize Business at the Expense of the Unemployed

By Kevin Linklater Federal Employment and Social Development Minister, Jason Kenney, met with his provincial counterparts last Friday to discuss the federal government’s proposed overhaul of job training, the Canada Job Grant (CJG) program. The Provinces have opposed …

Sign on to support child care in Manitoba

Despite major investments by the Provincial Government in early childhood education since 1999, tens of thousands of families lack affordable child care. Only one in five children under the age of five is in licensed child care in …

We Day sidesteps the real issues of child poverty

By Molly McCracken This week, 16,000 high school students will be bused to the MTS centre to attend “We Day” and be encouraged to help others. Organized by social enterpreneurs Mark and Craig Kielburger, their globally branded Free …

Federal jobs strategy undermines local employment training

The new Canada Jobs Grant (CJG) program proposed in the recent federal Throne Speech represents a fundamental shift in funding for employment training in Canada. Provinces have opposed the changes because they fail to meet local employment training …

The Education Property Tax Rebate: Do we seniors really need it?

The opposition’s unproductive filibuster of the provincial 2013 budget increase in the PST has left many aspects of the budget undebated. One is its failure to provide for improvement in the Employment & Income Assistance Program (EIA – …

Are we as cooperative as we think we are?

This post, by Brendan Reimer was originally posted by the Canadian Community Economic Development Network. This summer, I had the great privilege to be invited by Vancity Credit Union to join their two-week study tour of the Italian …

Workplace Safety a motherhood issue? Not yet.

By Jean-Guy Bourgeois and Keven Rebeck Download the PDF In Manitoba, messages about the importance of workplace health and safety are hard to miss. The SAFE Work campaigns run year-round by the Workers Compensation Board are trying to …

Manitoba Needs a Public Childcare System

By Susan Prentice On September 19, Manitoba launched an on-line consultation on the province’s next multi-year plan for childcare.  Since 2002, Manitoba has had two five-year plans, each of which made incremental changes. A major redesign of childcare …

What goes around comes around: A living wage and worker solidarity

By Lynne Fernandez, Errol Black Chair in Labour Issues There have been some rumblings from south of the boarder that people under 40 may not recognize and that may be only vaguely familiar with others: the sound of …