Canada’s incredible shrinking public sector

(Here’s a piece that will be in the next quarterly Economic Climate for Bargaining publication I produce, also posted on the CUPE website in pdf format.) There’s a widely held myth now accepted by many people—that public spending in Canada has increased steeply and is growing at unaffordable and unsustainable rates. In fact, the opposite is true.  The latest figures […]

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Garbage In, Garbage Out

Toronto’s new mayor Rob Ford and his brother/advisor Doug just announced they are planning to contract-out garbage collection for half of the City of Toronto as soon as possible as the first step to outsourcing everything we can by next year. According to Doug Ford, this will save the city millions and millions of dollars and ensure that they never […]

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Billions lost through tax loopholes and preferences

Finance Canada finally published its 2010 Tax Expenditure report this morning.  This annual report provides new estimates for the revenues the federal government loses annually from different tax measures, deductions, credits, and other tax preferences.  These tax preferences also affect provincial revenues to the extent that they piggyback on the federal government’s tax base.   The report includes estimates for the […]

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Economic Climate for Bargaining

The December 2010 issue of the quarterly Economic Climate for Bargaining publication that I produce is now on CUPE’s website in both English and French. In each issue I summarize developments and trends for the economy, labour markets, inflation and wages, and also include short pieces of 1-2 pages on related topical issues.  In this issue, the focus is very much on pre-budget […]

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Why we need public spending

David Hall at the University of Greenwich in the U.K. recently produced a really good report on Why we need public spending.  It’s over 70 pages in length, is well-written, has a great deal of really useful material from around the world (including charts and graphics and extensive references) making the argument for why public spending is so important from an […]

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The new Grecian formula: still toxic

The latest issue of the quarterly Economic Climate for Bargaining publication that I produce has just been posted on CUPE’s website. In this issue I have pieces about: the new spectre that is haunting Europe, this time of a public debt crisis impact analysis of Ontario’s HST tax reform by income group, already discussed below some analysis of recent employment, inflation and […]

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Federal Taxes and Inequality in the U.S. — and Ontario’s HST

Today the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published analysis and data on the incidence of different US federal taxes by income group.  They are a model of summary data and accessibility, with easily downloadable spreadsheet files, that Canada’s federal agencies (whether Revenue Canada, Statscan or the Parliamentary Budget Office) would do well to emulate.  The data show the incidence of individual income […]

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Ontario’s great HST tax shift

There have been clouds and clouds of smoke generated about the impact of Ontario’s impending introduction of its Harmonized Sales Tax.  Fortunately there is finally now some substance out there in terms of a detailed analysis conducted by Statistics Canada that was recently released by the Ontario NDP.  And what is shows is quite surprising. Much of the blame for all the […]

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Facts on public sector wages

The National Institute on Retirement Security in the U.S. produces some really excellent reports which should be more widely read, and not just on pensions or retirement income.  Last week they published a good report, Out of Balance?  comparing public and private sector compensation over the past 20 years, written by two professors at the University of Wisconsin.  This report […]

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Revere Award for Economics

The real world economic review is still accepting votes from the public for the “Revere Award for Economics”.  This is to be awarded to the three economists “who first and most clearly anticipated and gave public warning of the Global Financial Collapse and whose work is most likely to prevent another GFC in the future”. This is a follow up to […]

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Who’s paying for the party?

Earlier this month the Economist ran a leader (editorial) and longer article asking and then largely answering who should for the costs of the economic crisis (public services and workers of course!). That’s when I wrote the piece that leads the March 2010 issue of the Economic Climate for Bargaining publication that I produce quarterly.  (I was in a bit of […]

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CUPE federal budget analysis — and video!

I’ve been remiss in not posting information about and links to the federal budget analysis that we did at CUPE, as Paul Tulloch had urged on this blog.   In addition to the press release we issued, there’s an overview and summary that I prepared on budget day, and a dozen really good detailed issue sheets that different CUPE researchers prepared about the […]

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TD Bank on Changing Cdn Workplace

I was pleasantly surprised to see a report published yesterday by Don Drummond and Francis Fong at the TD Bank on the Changing Canadian Workplace.   It provides a short but decent summary of some different issues affecting labour: macro trends, educational requirements, changing composition, women, immigrants, aboriginal Canadians, older workers, widening income gaps, income security, etc.   These are a lot of […]

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The Xerox Budget

Analysis of the 2010 Federal Budget by David MacDonald, coordinator of the CCPA’s Alternative Federal Budget: If there was any policy recalibration due to prorogation, it was on their photocopier as 94% of this budget’s spending has already been announced.  The problem when you photocopy your work is that you don’t learn anything from the process.  That is certainly true […]

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Can P3s work?

Two weeks ago I wrote a critique of a very poorly done Conference Board of Canada report on P3s (public-private partnerships).    This conference board study ignored recent major criticisms by provincial auditors general and interviewed almost exclusively P3 proponents. I’m happy to say that two business professors from B.C., Aidan Vining of SFU and Anthony Boardman of UBC,  have recently written an […]

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Private sector just not getting it up

We’ve been told for years that corporate tax cuts would work like viagra to boost private sector investment and productivity, and no doubt we’ll hear much more about it in next week’s budget.  But it just ain’t working.  Today’s release by Statscan of private and public investment intentions shows just how limp private sector investment is expected to be in the coming […]

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The Conference Board on P3s: more myths

The Conference Board of Canada published a report late last month, Dispelling the Myths, which purports to show that public-private partnerships (P3s) have delivered major efficiency gains for the public sector, a high degree of cost certainty, and greater transparency than conventional procurement. While the report maintains it provides an impartial assessment of the benefits and drawbacks of using P3s, it is […]

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Reining in speculation in the housing market

This morning federal finance minister Flaherty announced a number of measures ostensibly aimed at reining in speculation in the housing market.  His announcement was typically well-timed to coincide with the Vanier Institute’s annual report on the state of Canadian family finances, which reports record high levels of household debt, growing inequality and housing prices increasingly out of whack with incomes. But […]

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Transactions tax on the front page

I was surprised to see the IMF highlighting the potential virtues of a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT) on the front page of its website.  The Bloomberg news service earlier had a good story about on the background of this idea, tracing it back to Keynes.   This is a proposal that progressive economists and unions have advocated for many years, so it is […]

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Canada’s Dirty Old Deal

Last week the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published an update for the G20 Summit on its call from earlier this year for a Global Green New Deal.  This update showed that Canada is close to the bottom in the stimulus funds it is committing to green economic areas. According to the UNEP, only 8% of Canada’s stimulus spending is […]

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The Good Ol’ Days

My two kids are still far too young to be farmed out to earn their keep in the labour market, but when they are (in about a decade), I really hope that the value of minimum wages in Canada improves.  If not, not only are they going to have to work harder and harder to get by along with millions of others young […]

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The Tortoise and the Hare

Some newspapers have paid some well-deserved attention to the multi-million dollar bonuses recently handed to the executives of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) after they lost $24 billion of Canadian workers’ pension savings with their investments last year. What has received less attention are the low long-term rates of return that the CPPIB has earned in the ten […]

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Drummond on public pensions

Last week economists at the TD Bank called for uniform entrance requirements for the Employment Insurance program (although not as low as we’d like).   This week in an article in the Globe and Mail, TD Bank’s chief economist Don Drummond has called into question the effectiveness of the RRSP system and suggested that we need stronger public pensions, such as higher benefits through the Canada […]

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More absurdity with P3s

Last week, the British Columbia government announced that its $2.5 billion public-private partnership (P3) deal for the Port Mann bridge expansion had failed and that it would now finance the project directly instead.   Despite the failure of the P3 financier, Macquarie, to put together a deal the Province is still going to pay them for financial advisory services, which […]

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Federal Budget Analysis and Issue Sheets

CUPE has a set of eleven a dozen really good issue sheets on-line with analysis on different topics about what was in the 2009 Federal Budget, what wasn’t in it, what it means, and what would have been better choices. The topics include: Employment Insurance, Municipal Infrastructure, Privatization, Pensions, the Environment, Aboriginal Issues, Post-secondary Education, Health Care, Early Learning and Childcare, […]

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Toby’s Budget Notes

Harper “stimulus” budget falls far short   Faced with the prospect of losing their grip on power, the Harper government has made a big show of taking action to address the economic and financial crisis, but it still falls far short of what is needed to revive the economy, create jobs and protect the vulnerable.  In particular, the budget fails […]

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