The Report Card on Secondary Schools in British Columbia and Yukon collects a variety of relevant, objective indicators of school performance into one easily accessible, public document so that all interested parties — parents, school administrators, teachers, students, and taxpayers — can analyze and compare the performance of individual schools. Parents use the Report Card’s indicator values, ratings, and rankings to compare schools when they choose an education provider for their children. Parents and school administrators use the results to identify areas of academic performance in which improvement can be made.

On March 16, 2011, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark announced her first major policy change, a $2.25 (28.1%) increase to BC’s current $8.00 per hour minimum wage. Controversy surrounds minimum wages because of the tension between well-intentioned efforts to increase incomes for lower income workers and the unfortunate reality of significant economic costs that come with increasing the minimum wage. A general misunderstanding of the types of workers who earn the minimum wage fuel that controversy. This Alert aims to provide British Columbians with an up-to-date account of these realities and an estimate of the economic costs of the recently announced increases to the province’s minimum wage.

Canada's Medicare Bubble examines whether the public costs associated with Canada’s health system are economically sustainable. Total provincial health spending has grown at an average annual rate of 7.5% over the last ten years, compared to only 5.7% for total available provincial revenue (including federal transfers), and only 5.2% for GDP. Long-term trends are similar: government spending on health has grown faster on average than GDP since 1975.