The Progressive Economics Forum

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 [...]

Machiavelli has nothing on these guys.  Let’s deconstruct for a moment the central message of today’s 2011 Federal Budget, Take 2:  “Storm clouds are gathering in the world economy.  We must rush to get our fiscal house in order, lest we be struck by another tempest.  We will advance our own ambitious timetable for balancing [...]

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was unusually blunt on CTV’s Question Period yesterday, saying he was worried about the possibility of another recession.  (Finance Ministers are usually very cautious about using the “r”-word, for fear that might worry consumers an dbring about a self-fulfilling prophecy.)  Maybe he had already seen today’s quarterly GDP numbers from Statistics [...]

Today’s Globe and Mail carried a story on the front of the business section about Jason Underwood, CEO of Whiterock REIT (a real-estate development income trust).  He earned $4.8 million compensation last year (an increase of 475% from the previous year), which is especially surprising since the entire fund has a market value of just [...]

Today marks the launch of a new global organization committed to plurality and ethics in the economics profession, the World Economics Association.

I was invited last week to serve as the substitute host for the indomitable Kevin O’Leary on CBC News channel’s “Lang-O’Leary Exchange.” Amanda Lang introduced the show by saying, “Hello, I’m Amanda Lang.” Then I said, “And I am definitely NOT Kevin O’Leary.” And the rest was history! Here’s the link to the full show [...]

PEF member Salimah Valiani is now the research economist at the Ontario Nurses Association.  Just in time for Mothers’ Day ONA released a most excellent paper by Salimah, titled: Valuing the Invaluable: Rethinking and respecting caring work in Canada   Here is the abstract: Using concepts of feminist economics, this paper demonstrates the range of [...]

“The choice for Canadians is crystal clear,” said Harper. “Continuing our low-tax plan to complete the recovery and create jobs, financial security, stability and certainty for Canadian families and businesses. Or the high-tax, reckless-spending Ignatieff-NDP-Bloc Québécois agenda that will stall our recovery, kill jobs and produce political instability and economic uncertainty by re-opening constitutional debates. [...]

The Public Policy Forum is a centrist NGO based in Ottawa whose mandate is to promote dialogue and engagement among the major policy stakeholders in Canada. Its current President is David Mitchell, former leader of the B.C. Liberals, who is a very decent, sincere, bridge-building person. Every year the PPF hosts a big dinner in [...]

Here is a link to the CCPA study we released yesterday, analyzing the determinants of business fixed non-residential capital investment spending in Canada on the basis of quarterly data from 1961 through 2010.  It formally tests for the direct significance of corporate tax variables and finds no such evidence (in either univariate or multivariate analysis). There [...]

I was one of the three judges for the inaugural Canadian incarnation of the Hillman Prize for Investigative Journalism.  Sidney Hillman was a founding organizer of the garment union in the U.S., and left a legacy that has been used to fund an annual U.S. award for reporters who take the time & risk to [...]

The Conservatives are stressing their supposed credentials as “economic managers” in their strategy to win a majority — combined with fear-mongering about a future coalition (although that latter part of the strategy may be backfiring on them). I’ve argued before that claims about Canada’s superior performance are not factually correct, especially when we correct for [...]

Amidst all the frenetic disarray of budget day, I had an interesting and informative exchange on CBC’s Power & Politics with John Manley, former Liberal Finance and Industry Minister, and now chief lobbyist for Canada’s corporate elite (as President and Chief Executive of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives).

           I recently debated Ottawa Citizen columnist and MacDonald-Laurier Institute honcho John Robson on BNN regarding the role of unions in society.  It was a rather nasty exchange, as these things go: he’s a smart, aggressive, neo-con who was on the offensive from the opening introductions:           A few days later, he lampooned me in [...]

I was at our neighbourhood leftie bookstore today and picked up a copy of the new book from John Loxley at the University of Manitoba: Aboriginal, Northern, and Community Economic Development: Papers and Retrospectives (Arbeiter Ring: 2010). It’s a collection of John’s work over the years in the area of first nations and northern economic [...]

I recently came across a fascinating working paper from the good folks at the Levy Institute, which provides some new data on Canada’s rather subservient role in world commerce: “Product Complexity and Economic Development,” by Arnelyn Abdon, Marife Bacate, Jesus Felipe (corresponding author), and Ustav Kumar.

The National Post ran a little pro-and-con debate on minimum wages in today’s paper.  I was the “pro” side; my argument was excerpted from a longer paper on “What determines wages and income distribution” that is available on the CAW’s web site. The “con” side was written by two economists at the Fraser Institute.

Here’s a short description of the methodology I used yesterday in explaining why allocating $3 billion of federal revenue to further corporate tax cuts (instead of other more effective stimulusmeasures) would actually destroy jobs (up to 46,000) on a net basis. It’s also available on the CAW site.

       American economist Emmanuel Saez has painstakingly assembled a century-long statistical series on U.S. income distribution.  On two occasions, the share of income captured by the richest 1 percent reached about one-quarter of the national total.  The first time was in 1928.  The second was in 2007.  As we all know, both peaks in wealth [...]

There’s a shockingly honest and accurate article about Canada’s deteriorating trade performance in today’s Globe and Mail by Barrie McKenna. It notes that Canada’s trade balance improved dramatically in November (almost completely closing October’s $1.5 billion).  However, it cited some Bay Street economists lamenting that this was for the “wrong reasons”: namely, a sharp slowdown [...]

Trade Minister Peter van Loan goes after Maude Barlow with a letter in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, responding to her fine recent op-ed on the Canada-EU free trade talks. Among other cheap shots, van Loan once again cited as “proof” the findings of a computable general equilibrium model that was commissioned by the EU and [...]