The Progressive Economics Forum

It is so nice to see the backlash against Ticketmaster’s monopolistic practices. Two class action suits have been filed in Canada over the past weeks, and south of the border anti-trust alarm bells are ringing due to Ticketmaster’s proposed merger with Live Nation. Tickets sales have become something close to a natural monopoly, and as [...]

(I prepared these as speaking notes for a workshop. They cover a lot of ground covered on this blog but they may be of interest.) The rapid descent of the global economy into what even the International Monetary Fund has begun to call a Depression will see very rapidly rising unemployment in Canada and around [...]

I just returned from the Steelworker Mecca of Hamilton-Burlington, where the Michael Coren Show is taped. It will be broadcast at 8pm tonight through the Crossroads Television System (CTS) on cable in Ontario and Alberta, and on satellite across Canada. Sarah Blackstock of the Income Security Advocacy Centre and I squared off with two Kevins, [...]

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has written a pretty scathing critique of the new US Administation’s overhaul of the TARP program.  I am increasingly convinced by Duncan Cameron’s  argument that – in the US at least – the best way out is to nationalize the banks, run them as a public utility, and compensate [...]

A standard objection to the Buy Canadian policy proposed yesterday by Canada’s largest industrial unions was that Canada enjoys a trade surplus. Such a policy would allegedly prompt foreign retaliation, erasing our current trade surplus and its contribution to aggregate demand in Canada. This morning, Statistics Canada reported that we actually ran a merchandise trade [...]

A year after crunching the numbers and coming to the conclusion that an economic downturn spelled deficits, I got this hat tip in Maclean’s: It’s true that there was no consensus forecast, through most of last year, that saw Canada suffering a deep recession in 2009, and a return to staggering deficits in Ottawa. However, [...]

It is amazing to see the charged responses to the idea of a made-in-Canada policy for procurement related to infrastructure stimulus spending. Perhaps it is just that all economists are supposed to accept free trade as the One True Policy. But what I am seeing are largely moral arguments for free trade in the abstract [...]

For those who love BC (and who doesn’t?), there is a new blog for you. The CCPA has started The Lead-Up, a blog about BC public policy with coverage of next week’s provincial budget, and all the political follies one might hope for with an election three months away and an economy in free-fall. A [...]

Andrew Coyne blogs a summary of how the Conservatives have abandoned their principles to get and stay in power. Of course, Coyne views this sell-out with derision; I see it with a smile and great thanks, but with concern that they will rediscover those lost “principles” should a majority somehow be achieved. Despite the perspective [...]

Canadian airlines are squealing that MP Jim Maloway’s proposed “Air passenger bill of rights” would “send airfares soaring and throw flights into chaos.” What strikes me is that American airlines already provide much of what Maloway suggests. They frequently over-book flights, but always offer free flights to induce passengers to volunteer to be bumped. In [...]

The heads of Canada’s largest industrial unions just presented the following appeal to use government procurement policy to maintain and create Canadian jobs. UPDATE: It seems that Peggy Nash (from CAW) and I (from USW) will be taking calls about Buy America and Buy Canadian policies on CP24, a Toronto news TV station, between 9pm and [...]

My hot water tank blew out just before Christmas. I had no idea, just went down to the crawlspace to get some wrapping paper and found the floor flooded around the old tank. We’d been expecting this for a while, having never had to change the tank since we moved in seven years earlier. Contemplating [...]

Today’s Statistics Canada release of January employment numbers reveals staggering job losses: Employment fell by 129,000 in January (-0.8%), almost all in full time, pushing the unemployment rate up 0.6 percentage points to 7.2%. This drop in employment exceeds any monthly decline during the previous economic downturns of the 1980s and 1990s. More jobs were [...]

International Trade Minister Stockwell Day is claiming credit for an amendment to the US stimulus bill affirming that its Buy America provisions will be “applied in a manner consistent with US obligations under international agreements.” Canada tops the list of countries to which the US has such obligations. However, Day and his colleagues demanded the [...]

In a column in The Tyee, former BC Socred cabinet minister Will McMartin reviews the ups and downs of BC’s three strikes at balanced budget legislation. Each time this legislation has been repealed, although when the latest BC legislation is “amended” next week it will mark the first time this has been done by the [...]

Housing has been one of the major drivers of the BC economy in recent years. Low interest rates led to rising home prices and a psychology of “must get in before being locked out forever”; leading a housing bubble that had everyone in town swapping jaw dropping stories of bidding wars and outrageous prices paid. [...]

Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Stephen has posted a nice graph comparing the average projections from the private sector (as compiled by the Parliamentary Budget Officer) and the Bank of Canada with the paths of the last two recessions. He is poking a hole in a story that there is a gap between the more [...]

I admit to not keeping up with all of the progressive reaction to the new Liberal-Conservative coalition. But among mainstream political pundits, there seem to be two main explanations for Igantieff’s decision to not substantively amend the budget. First, he was unwilling to go through with the progressive coalition or risk an election, so he tried [...]

In his latest rabble.ca column Duncan Cameron takes on a piece of the federal budget that got little play in the media: Budget 2009 and the Bay St. bailout Duncan Cameron Why did the Liberals support the Conservative budget when the analysis is clear: the Finance Minister ignored the vulnerable, punished women, did not provide [...]

There have been a lot of media stories about freak weather lately, all tacked on with comparators like “worst in 18 years” or several decades or ever. The latest from London is a snowstorm that shut down the city. Here in Vancouver we had a few weeks of heavy snowfall bookending the Christmas period that [...]

Now that the federal budget is over, I’ve been girding myself for the Feb 17 BC budget. My concern to date has been bold statements from both parties that they would never run a deficit, and that therefore we were in for a rerun of last Fall’s federal election where all parties kowtowed to the [...]

Alarmist media reports on “Buy America” rules for steel used in US public infrastructure projects have emphasized the value of Canadian steel exports allegedly threatened, but have largely ignored the similar value of American steel imported by Canada. In fact, in the most recent month for which data is available (November 2008), Canada bought more [...]