It is spun in government press releases as a "first" for any jurisdiction in North America, an achievement that places British Columbia "on the leading edge" of efforts to combat climate change.

But scratch the surface just a little and questions arise about the legitimacy of Environment Minister Terry Lake's recent claim that "from this point forward, every government building in our province will be carbon neutral."

Besides the carbon tax, one of the most important B.C. government climate action initiatives has been the adoption of Carbon Neutral Government. That is, count emissions from public buildings and travel, reduce them as much as possible and pay for carbon offsets to negate the rest. As of the 2010 calendar year, the B.C. government announced mission accomplished, at the end of June.

Any day now the B.C. government should be releasing the latest greenhouse gas data for the province, and we will see if any progress is being made towards a legislated 33% reduction in emissions by 2020 (relative to 2007 levels; data will be for 2009 and we know that emissions rose in 2008).

With much of the talk on taxes in B.C. about the HST, we issued a new report today that looks at the bigger context for B.C.'s tax system (Vancouver Sun op ed here, CTV News story here). Iglika Ivanova, Seth Klein and I compare and contrast B.C.'s tax system after a decade where tax cuts were touted as the solution to every problem.

Last week, BC Stats put out a release with the headline "Low Income Cut-Offs (LICOs) are a Poor Measure of Poverty" and author Dan Schrier gets in a dirty hit right in first paragraph:

Despite protestations from Statistics Canada that LICOs are not meant to be used as a measure of poverty, there are many groups that insist on using them for exactly that purpose.

The campaign to save the HST is rather shameless, not to mention bad public policy. We won't, as HST spin masters would have it, pay less tax with the new and improved HST. The amount of tax we collectively pay depends on the amount of services and support government provides - total government spending- not the manner in which taxes are paid.

True, different types of taxes affect people differently and the fairness of different tax policies is a valid concern. But don't tell me we are going to pay less overall by instituting one tax as opposed another. It is a silly reason to support of the HST in the same way that it was a silly reason to support the ‘revenue-negative' carbon tax.

Statistics Canada released a report today on incomes across Canada in 2009. As First Call B.C. points out in their news release, key points for B.C. include:

-- B.C.'s child poverty rate rose to 12 percent in 2009, the highest child poverty rate of any province for the eighth year in a row.

-- The B.C. rate also remained higher than the national child poverty rate of 9.5 per cent in 2009, and has been higher than the national rate for a decade.

-- The poverty rate for people of all ages in B.C. also rose to 12 per cent. It was the highest overall poverty rate of any province for the 11th consecutive year.

Anyone wanting to see just how dysfunctional politics in B.C. has become should check out Bob Simpson's recent Private Members' statement in the provincial legislature.

For seven minutes Simpson, Member of the Legislative Assembly for Cariboo North and one of two Independent MLAs, spoke about why he and fellow Independent Vicki Huntington (Delta South), had called on Premier Christy Clark to appoint a special committee of the legislature to investigate B.C.'s ballooning unconventional gas production and its public policy implications.

Last week Premier Christy Clark took the unprecedented step of promising there would be public consultation regarding the province's position on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union.

If this really happens it would be an important opportunity. The current government has never allowed the public to have a say on these issues. The TILMA agreement with Alberta was signed in secret. The things B.C. gave away as part of the U.S. procurement deal were equally hidden. B.C. gave up more than any other province in that deal.

It is now clear that economic, and social variables -- more than individual behaviour -- are the most salient factors in determining people's well-being. Things like working and living conditions, the distribution of wealth, and where we live are, "the primary factors that shape the health of Canadians" (CCPA Monitor, June 2010).

For instance, almost everything that is vital to a healthy community, from life expectancy to levels of depression to crime rates, is affected by inequality. This is true in both rich and poor countries. (The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Wilkinson and Pickett).