Category — Economy

With city finance officials already beginning the 2011 budget preparations, these end-of-June building permit stats will be good news: residential construction has nearly doubled this year over the same period last year to $437 million.

A new category this year is laneway housing. Eighty have been issued permits, 17 in the last month alone.  Total value of that construction is $7.7 million.

In China’s polarizing economy, where a tiny few have become fabulously wealthy, minimum wage workers would spend half a day’s pay to buy a small Starbucks caffe latte.

To put that in perspective, a small latte at the Georgia and Granville Starbucks was priced today at $3.05. Anyone here tried to get by recently on $6 a day? 

That’s the lot of millions of Chinese workers. Increasingly, however, they are winning raises, very large raises.

That’s good news. Their lives will improve. China’s economy will become more consumer, rather than export-oriented. Downward pressure on wages globally will ease. But how many consumers can one planet support?

Last night’s Global News coverage of $18 million in impending cuts by the Vancouver School Board — likely to trigger layoffs, a shorter school year and school closures –  ended with this predictable declaration by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation spokesperson Maureen Bader: “taxpayers pockets are empty, they just can’t be picked anymore.”

Really?

A concerned parent who leads off the Global report still seems to have a little cash in his jeans.

Worried by the “issue of erosion of quality education,” he is considering moving his children to private school. After all, he says, “it’s always going to be a case of haves versus have-nots,” implying that the “haves”  take care of themselves, one way or the other.

In fact, there is some evidence that empty classrooms in east Vancouver are the result of better-off parents migrating west to better-off schools, where even wealthier parents have shifted their children to private schools, which also receive a significant chunk of public funding.

As Vision Vancouver school board chair Patti Bacchus makes clear, the problem facing VSB is Victoria’s determination to pile on more costs — all-day kindergarten, pre-school programs and rising labour costs — without providing sufficient resources. The new programs are positive, but they can’t be funded for free. [Read more →]

From the latest Business in Vancouver, my take on labour relations in the Port of Vancouver, where the greatest threat of labour unrest appears to come from the employer side of the bargaining table. Given the critical importance of the port to the city’s economy, this is not good news.