economics

When I arrived from Brazil to start my studies in Canada, I felt ready to live in a new country and ready to adjust myself to a different food culture. I still believe I was right about the first feeling. But it took me only a few hours to realize how mistaken I was about the second. ...

British Columbia faces a massive social, economic and environmental crisis in the form of the mountain pine beetle. Unemployment among aboriginal people in the province is more than twice that of non-aboriginal people, and commuting times in the Greater Vancouver Regional District have increased 30 per cent in the past 10 years.

The show today is brought to you by the numbers 120 and 1.2 billion.

120 is the World Wildlife Fund’s current estimate of the percentage of global carrying capacity for human life that we are currently using. Despite improvements in environmental behaviour and resource efficiency on many fronts, our overall demands on the planet are now excessive. And they are still growing. We are, with increasing speed, wrecking the only home we have.

In Alberta, Canada’s freewheeling, economic success story, a market-based economy rules. So it’s not surprising that in 2002, the Alberta government chose to counter growing water problems in Southern Alberta with the province’s first water market. In anticipation, Theodore Horbyluk, an economist at the University of Calgary, said he believed the new system would effectively “transform historical licences into marketable commodities.” And in Southern Alberta, where some 20,000 licences make claims on water, there is considerable history to market. ...