The Progressive Economics Forum

Prime Minister  Harper went to Davos yesterday to sing Canada’s praises.  No sooner had he finished reciting a long list of our national achievements, however, then he launched into a list of the sober, realistic, inevitable things that must be done in Canada to ensure “sustainability” in the long term.  Top of the list is [...]

Quick: what do U.S. Steel, Rio Tinto, and Caterpillar all have in common? They’re all enormous, flexible global companies, given carte blanche by the Canadian government to purchase important long-standing profitable assets here with few if any conditions, who promptly locked out their Canadian workers in an effort to extract historic concessions in compensation and [...]

Here is an amazing multimedia article published by Bloomberg Markets Magazine in the U.S., that lists all of the individual banks which received financial assistance from the U.S. Federal Reserve during the 2008-09 crisis.  It shows each bank’s peak borrowing from the Fed, the number of days they held the funds, and the timeline for [...]

Statsitics Canada released the third quarter GDP numbers today, and on the surface they seem pretty upbeat, considering all the doom and gloom lately.  Headline real GDP grew at an annualized 3.5% rate.  I predicted a few weeks back that there was no chance that the 3Q number would be negative (thus sparing us a [...]

The labour market is in much worse shape than the official 7.3% unemployment rate implies.  The latest evidence for this proposition is today’s miserable report on employment and earnings from Statistics Canada. Further to Andrew Jackson’s post on today’s release, most media coverage of this report focuses on year-over-year measures of growth in hourly wages [...]

The Globe and Mail is running an interesting series this week on Canada’s miserable performance in business innovation and productivity.  Here is the main page.

Many long-held tenets of neoclassical orthodoxy have fallen by the wayside in the past 3 years, but perhaps one of the biggest dominos that is at least teetering precariously (if not fully tipped over) is the consensus that inflation targeting should be the exclusive focus of monetary policy.

What do banks actually DO?  Create credit out of thin air. Were Canadian banks bailed-out?  Absolutely, to the tune of $200 billion.  And they are still protected and subsidized more than any other sector of the economy. What must be done with these banks?  Tax them, control them, and ultimately take them back. Those are [...]

Posted below is a slightly longer version of my column in today’s Globe and Mail regarding the Harper government’s highly creative approach to making up labour law on the run. Also posted is a graph showing the dramatic decline (of 95% or more) in the frequency of work stoppages in Canada since the mid-1970s. 

Canadian free trade negotiators are going all-out to get a deal with the EU on a new free trade agreement. The Harper government wants a deal badly for largely symbolic and ideological purposes, to show that the free trade agenda is back on track under this “stable majority government.”  Many valid concerns have been raised [...]

Here is a Globe and Mail commentary I wrote after attending the wonderful Occupy Toronto protests on the weekend. The media keep going off about how this movement has no “central demand.”  Go to a Tea Party event in the U.S. and see if you can find “one central demand.”  That doesn’t stop them from [...]

Just in time for the “Occupy Bay Street” protest this weekend, Canadian Business magazine has come out with its annual listing of the richest 100 people in Canada.  So in honour of the protestors and their noble cause (demanding more attention to the 99%, instead of the 1%), let’s peruse together the sordid details of [...]

Further to our recent discussions on this blog about the role of private finance and credit in our present crisis, we present a guest contribution from Ralph Musgrave, an economist in the U.K. National debts have risen recently, which has caused excessive and unnecessary consternation. The consternation is particularly unnecessary for countries which issue their own [...]

Conservative MP Russ Hiebert tabled his private member bill in the Commons yesterday, calling for changes to the Income Tax Act to require unions (which are income-tax-exempt under the Act … duh! since they are, after all, non-profit organizations) to publicly disclose their financial statements. Here are a few quick points that came to mind in [...]

The time since 2008 has been a crucial historical moment for progressive economists to pull back the green curtain that surrounds the operation of the for-profit banking system, and expose that system for what it is: a government-protected, government-subsidized license to print money. The problem is, as soon as you start saying things like that, people [...]

Today’s GDP numbers (a sprightly gain of 0.3% at basic prices in July) ensure that there will not be a so-called “technical recession” in Canada — at least, not yet. Economists have a perverted definition of “recession”, whereby it’s considered official only if real GDP declines 2 quarters in a row.  That’s hilariously arbitrary.  And [...]

Hugh Mackenzie of the CCPA has prepared a comprehensive comparison of the election platforms of the three major parties in Ontario’s election. It reveals an enormous fiscal “hole” in the Conservative platform, that will inevitably result in dramatic reductions in public spending if that party wins the October 6 election. The report, released yesterday, added [...]

There’s an interesting new research report from Statistics Canada, by Ping Ching Winnie Chan, Rene Morissette, and Marc Frenette, profiling the workers who were displaced in the recent recession, and comparing the outcomes to previous recessions in earlier decades (the downturns of the early 1980s and 1990s).  “Workers Laid Off During the Last Three Recessions,” [...]

The Ontario election is in full swing, and the Conservative party’s campaign is guided by a platform booklet called the “changebook.”  It’s an audacious manifesto for significant change in the policy and the philosophy of government in the province, mapping out a long agenda of measures to cut taxes, balance the budget, privatize government assets [...]

I was recently invited to speak to the annual management briefing conference sponsored in Michigan by the Center for Automotive Research, a fine outfit which does the best research work in the continent on auto employment, workers, and skills.  My slides are available here. My panel was addressing the current UAW negotiations with the Detroit [...]

CBC National News reconvened their “Bottom Line” economics panel (including yours truly) last night to discuss the twin debt crises (Europe and America) that are currently roiling financial markets.  Here’s the link to the webcast for aficionados. In the last segment, Pater Mansbridge asked all the panelists how the debt problems should affect individual Canadians’ personal [...]

The CAW has just released a 20-minute video featuring none other than yours truly giving a short lecture about the economics of the proposed Canada-EU free trade agreement (a.k.a. CETA). This link takes you to the film, which can be downloaded for free and shown at information meetings or any other organizing events.

I was invited back to serve as guest economics columnist all last week on Metro Morning, CBC Radio’s drive-in flagship show in Toronto, to substitute for the vacationing effervescent libertarian Michael Hlinka.  I did this once a couple of years ago (blogged about it here), when Andy Barrie was still the host.  Now he’s retired [...]

“The fact that the Clark government’s Frankenstein HST hybrid will significantly reduce provincial sales tax revenue at a time when public services are already under intense fiscal pressure is a powerful and principled reason to throw the whole package out in the referendum, and start the debate from scratch.” I may live in Ontario, but [...]

Does anyone else find it odd that a free-market-worshipping government can happily leap into the fray to micro-manage a labour market outcome (deciding, for example, that postal workers must get 1.75%, not 1.9%, in the first year of their new contract), yet pleads powerlessness when it comes to interfering with market outcomes that are genuinely [...]

My copy of the Globe and Mail the other day included the July edition of the Report on Business magazine, featuring its annual ranking of the top 1000 publicly-traded corporations in Canada.  The survey makes for fascinating reading.  In honour of Canada Day, I would like to present a few statistical factoids about these huge [...]

Even though labour relations is largely a provincial responsibility in Canada, we were worried about what would happen in this field under a Harper majority.  And it didn’t take long to find out. In the disputes at both Air Canada and Canada Post, the government waded into the fray in a pre-emptive and utterly one-sided [...]

How coincidental that the current number of the Canadian Investment Review arrived in my in-box today, just hours after CAW members at Air Canada hit the bricks to reject the company’s demand to abolish the defined benefit pension plan for new hires (and impose major cuts in pensions for the existing workforce).  The demand to [...]

CAW members at Air Canada are coming down to the wire in their bargaining with the company, with a strike deadline set for this Monday at midnight.  It’s really the first “normal” round of bargaining the workers have been able to undertake since 2000.  Since then, they’ve been through two rounds of CCAA court-supervised restructuring [...]

The ubiquitous Ish Theilheimer of the left-wing on-line news site Straight Goods has written a very generous profile of the Progressive Economics Forum. He hung out at last weekend’s CEA meetings at the University of Ottawa for a while, and caught a few PEF members (including myself, David Robinson, and Brendan Haley) on the way [...]