The Progressive Economics Forum

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 [...]

A report by Felix Salmon from the front lines of Columbia University on some issues arising out of the Stern review. I’d love to see a transcript of this session. Stern, Sachs, and Stiglitz on the Economics of Climate Change … I managed to ask Stern the question I’ve been wanting to ask him for [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Bill C-30 – the Clean Air Act – is a strange beast – a government bill which was fundamentally re-written by the three opposition parties to finally move Canada towards a real national action plan to prevent catastrophic climate change.The media are so focused on the politics of climate change that little attention seems to [...]

George Monbiot takes us behind the curtain of the IPCC report-making process, and who is really pressuring whom to censor what: The Real Climate Censorship Posted April 10, 2007 It’s happening, it’s systematic, and it is precisely the opposite story to the one the papers are telling. By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 10th [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Over at MaxSpeak, the state of housing and whether or not it is a bubble is reviewed: THE GREAT HOUSING BUBBLE FLAP Probably most who read this blog accept that there was a bubble in the US housing market, and that it has come to an end. Some regulars here, notably the notable Dean Baker, [...]

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. [...]

Two recent reports from the Globe below point to the failures of our regulatory system. The first is on bisphenol A, an endocrine disrupter, and the second on trans fats. The challenge is a regulatory approach that insists on bullet-proof evidence of harm – which can take decades to accumulate – before action is taken [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]