With Alison Redford's big re-election as Alberta premier last week, Alberta will now join the ranks of provinces with a comprehensive poverty reduction plan. This will leave B.C. and Saskatchewan as the only jurisdictions in Canada without a provincial or territorial plan.

The Alberta plan may prove to be the most ambitious to date. On April 11, the Alberta Progressive Conservatives issued a news release that read:

December marked the three-year anniversary of Ontario's Poverty Reduction Strategy. While I believe there is much to celebrate, much remains to be done.

The Strategy surprised a lot of observers, especially in light of the fact that it was announced in December 2008, just as Ontario was entering a recession. Its focus was almost exclusively child poverty, and at full implementation (i.e. 2013), it will result in $300 million in new annual spending. This is equivalent to 0.3 per cent of total provincial spending in Ontario, which is roughly $100 billion.

Last week, I was in Yellowknife, where I released results of new research on affordable housing in the Northwest Territories (NWT). The research project was sponsored by the Social Economy Research Network of Northern Canada, and was a collaboration with the Centre for Northern Families.

Research findings include the following:

Last weekend, I spoke on a panel at the annual conference of the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association. The panel was inspired in large part by the recent debate in Toronto over Mayor Rob Ford's attempt to sell social housing units to private buyers. The panel, entitled "To Privatize or Not to Privatize?

The meeting of G20 Labour Ministers in Paris on September 26-27, held in advance of the November G20 summit in Cannes, reached some conclusions which go some (extremely modest) way toward living up to prior G20 commitments in London and Pittsburgh to promote quality jobs and a more progressive labour market model as part of a long-term solution to the global economic crisis.

Ministers met with trade union and employer representatives, including myself, in a half-day session on their first day of meetings, and the ILO, with the OECD, was also invited to participate. There was one labour representative per country at the meeting with Ministers (and more from France.)

Pollsters tell us that Ontario's New Democrats may double their seat total in next month's provincial election. It's also entirely conceivable that they could be part of a coalition government at Queen's Park. But what's actually in the party's election platform?

One central feature of the NDP's proposals is to implement a tax credit for companies that hire new workers. The tax credits would be valued at 20 per cent of wages to a maximum of $5,000 per worker. This only applies to the creation of full-time, permanent jobs.