Dion Swerves Right of Harper

Apparently following Andrew Coyne’s advice, Dion seems to be positioning himself to the right of Harper on tax policy.  This move casts further doubt on Dion’s promise of a progressive alliance with the Greens. When the Conservatives cut the GST, the Liberal response was not that this move would take money away from important public services, but that it would […]

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Toxics and our failed regulatory system

The Globe and Mail deserves full credit for continuing to publish stories on environmental toxins. After being in circulation for decades, many chemicals are now (slowly) being put to the test, and some may even be taken out of circulation some time in the next decade. A first step being taken by the feds is labelling of what is in […]

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Green Strategy and the SPP

At the conference a couple of weeks ago where Elizabeth May mused about income trusts, she also committed to make opposition to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) the centrepiece of the Green Party’s forthcoming election platform. The SPP is an arrangement between Canada, the US, and Mexico that seeks to accelerate tar-sands development, among other objectives. It is very […]

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Canada’s Curious Deglobalization

Everyone knows globalization is an irresistible worldwide process enveloping every economy, including Canada’s, in its market-driven tentacles.  Right? Wrong. In fact, since 2000, Canada’s economy has been curiously de-globalizing before our eyes.  The importance of global markets to our employment and production has been diminishing, not increasing – and at a remarkable pace.  Year-end GDP numbers for 2006, recently released […]

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Canadian International Assistance – Dismal Performance

Canadian Aid Performance Declines in 2006: The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) released preliminary statistics for ODA for 2006 and Canada is near the bottom, tied with Australia for 15th  position among 22 donors.   At 0.30% of our Gross National Income (GNI) in 2006,   Canada  is down from 0.34% in 2005.  In both years, Canadian aid, along with other […]

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Fear and Loathing on Bay Street

Budget 2007 made interest on funds borrowed in Canada to finance foreign business operations nondeductible from Canadian corporate taxes. Finance Canada suggested that this arcane reform would raise relatively little revenue and, initially, business barely seemed to notice. More than a week after the budget, a Globe editorial and a Financial Post op-ed criticized the change as a huge ‘tax […]

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Income Trusts and “Hollowing Out”

In Thursday’s Financial Post, the Canadian Association of Income Funds articulated the argument suggested by Elizabeth May: the devaluation of income trusts has made them vulnerable to takeovers by foreign private-equity. Certainly, many enterprises that paid little tax as income trusts will continue to pay little tax by converting to new organizational forms, such as private equity or publicly-traded corporations. […]

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Central Nova by the Numbers

Stéphane Dion, who is not progressive, has allied with Elizabeth May, who is not progressive, ostensibly to prevent progressive vote-splitting. As Andrew Coyne notes in tomorrow’s National Post column, this maneuver is clearly directed against the federal NDP, which is progressive. It is worth recalling the 2006 election results in Central Nova, the riding where Dion has pledged to prevent […]

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We Went to Separate Schools Together

Today’s Ottawa Citizen has a good editorial on the existence of two publicly-funded school systems in several provinces. The original concept of one system for Protestants and another for Catholics has evolved into a “public”, secular system and a “separate” system that teaches some Roman Catholicism but is also attended by many non-Catholics. Many schools cannot afford needed supplies, many […]

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International Temporary Workers

I’ve pasted below an excellent column from the Toronto Star by Carol Goar. The CLC’s analysis of the issue and policy prescriptions are avaialable from: http://www.canadianlabour.ca/index.php/Salimah_Valiani/1117 As I’ve noted earlier, its pretty hard to square the “shortage of Canadian workers” story from employers with the avaialable data on (flat) wage growth. There are clearly some shortages of specific skills (eg […]

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Canadian growth and productivity

Two Canadian macro articles diverted me from my best laid plans today. Side by side, the two make for some interesting observations on the state of the Canadian economy, as well as some fodder for thinking about what drives investment. The first, a Statscan piece by Phillip Cross, is a demand-led investment story, with most attention on the resource sector, […]

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On the price elasticity of gasoline

Statistics Canada’s economic review of 2006 contains an interesting passage about consumer responses to higher gas prices. One would expect that as gas prices rise, drivers would consume somewhat less gas in the short run (gas demand is inelastic, so the reduction may be small), and to change their behaviour over the long-run by purchasing more fuel efficient vehicles. This […]

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Supply-side economics and its refusal to die

Supply-side economics (and its trickle-down theory) is a zombie, intellectually dead but continuing to roam the halls of the public debate.  Witness the 2001 BC elections and the mantra “tax cuts pay for themselves”, a free-lunch argument that we can have tax cuts and not have to pay a price in terms of cutting social programs (note: as of 2007, […]

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Productivity and Pay

http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1122&Itemid=77 This is a very nice piece from Dean Baker of the CEPR on the delinking of real worker pay from labour productivity growth in the US. I’ve argued for years, with much of the left, that average worker pay has lagged productivity growth mainly because of the increased bargaining power of capital vis a vis labour due to “globalization”, […]

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Supply-side economics

Over at Economist’s View, Mark Thoma got a snowball rolling (trickling?) downhill by citing a revisionist article by Bruce Bartlett on the history and legacy of supply-side economics. He then put forward a lengthy and useful theoretical response, after which all kinds of interesting commentary followed. I have taken this updated post for a summary, which includes the original oped […]

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Fear and Loathing in Bora Bora

This missive below from the Conrad Black trial must be really embarrassing for Black. Reading about this horrible trip and his feelings of inadequacy next to young honeymooners, I feel kind of sorry for the guy … OK, it’s gone now. What is amazing about the doomed flight is that Conrad could have had it all – and kept the […]

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Early learning lessons from the UK

A report from the front lines of the battle over early learning and child care in the United Kingdom, which appears to be in a similar space as Canada – supported by academic and policy elites, but with too little action on the political side to overcome the great inertia of the existing patchwork system. Taking great care We should […]

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McGuinty on TILMA

Today’s Financial Post reports that Ontario’s Premier “is exploring the possibility of joining the B.C.-Alberta free trade initiative.” Specifically, it quotes him as saying, “what I have done is talked to [B.C. Premier] Gord Campbell and [former Alberta premier] Ralph Klein, in the past, and said, you guys seem to have done something which sounds good. I’m not sure the […]

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Reynolds on Manufacturing

Neil Reynolds has discovered that a fraction can be increased by reducing its denominator. Because labour productivity equals output divided by employment, he claims that “In manufacturing, you measure success by the number of jobs you eliminate.” By definition, a given volume of manufacturing output produced by fewer workers implies higher manufacturing productivity. However, it does not follow that lost […]

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Ralph’s Revenge

As I mentioned below, I am home in Saskatchewan this week. As a result, I have seen the latest “Parliamentary Update” from my former Member of Parliament (MP), Ralph Goodale. It is, of course, normal that MPs of all stripes deploy these publicly funded “householders” to present themselves and their activities in a positive light. When the Liberals were in […]

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Internal Trade Conference

On March 30, I attended the federal government’s conference on “Internal Trade: Opportunities and Challenges,” which was hosted by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and by Industry Canada. Other attendees included academics, federal and provincial civil servants, and representatives of business and professional organizations. The academic and policy people all agreed that the material costs of alleged inter-provincial barriers […]

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Climate change winners and losers

The New York Times reports on the inequities generated by global warming below. The April edition of The Atlantic also featured a story on the same theme, but it was really poorly done. While the article makes a few interesting observations of what might happen in different parts of the world, Gregg Easterbrook, from Brookings, was more inclined to treat […]

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The equity considerations of congestion pricing

Lance Freeman of Columbia University argues against congestion pricing: The Equity Considerations of Congestion Pricing Getting stuck in traffic is fast becoming one of those necessary evils that everyone complains about but seldom does anything about it. Or at least anything that seems terribly effective. Neither additional road building nor public transit seemed to have had a major impact on […]

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TILMA and the environment

Last week, the Sierra Legal Defence Fund published a legal analysis on the environment and TILMA. Below is an excerpt from the press release, and the full document is here. This is an important analysis as BC’s point man on the file, Colin Hansen, has been claiming that the environment has been set aside as a “legitimate objective”. April Fools’ […]

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The end of DRM for online music?

Over at Wired, Leander Kahney comments on this week’s deal between Apple and EMI to sell EMI’s catalogue free of digital rights management (DRM): How Steve Jobs Calls the Tunes Steve Jobs’ new partnership with EMI to sell music without copy protection is a lesson in how to wield power in the digital age. Carefully and strategically, Jobs set up […]

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