The Progressive Economics Forum

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 [...]

The front page of today’s Toronto Star reports, “The Ontario government is looking at creating a publicly held $60 billion ‘super corporation’ of assets such as the Liquor Control Board of Ontario and Hydro One and then selling a minority share to private investors.” It would also include the province’s other major Crown corporations: Ontario [...]

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.  [...]

I did not make it to the federal budget lock-up, and having pored over the document I am pleased to say I missed it. There is very little in this budget that one would expect of a budget in the midst of a recession (the GDP numbers have turned up, I know, but unemployment is [...]

[Notes from Marc and Iglika]

For a document titled Building a Prosperous British Columbia, the 2010 BC Budget is underwhelming in its ambition. Budget 2010 shows a government talking a lot about the legacy of the Olympics but lacking any coherent vision of how translate upbeat sentiments into real improvements in British Columbians’ standard of living.

This [...]

As the budget yak-fest approaches, the focus is on how we’re going to balance the books. People pointing out we have bigger fish to fry – like making a dent in the nation’s $125 billion infrastructure deficit, addressing growing poverty, or preparing for a massive wave of retirements – are viewed as off-topic. But simply [...]

Last Monday, I testified twice to the Ontario legislature’s finance committee: as an “expert witness” and then on behalf of the United Steelworkers.
I emphasized the provincial deficit’s manageability, the folly of trying to reduce it through cutbacks or privatization, the importance of maintaining tax rates to bolster future revenues, and the advantage of targeted measures [...]

Ontario’s pre-budget consultations include a session for which each party caucus selects an “expert witness.” This year, the Liberals invited Warren Jestin from Scotiabank, the Conservatives invited Catherine Swift from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) and the NDP invited me.
In general, my role was not to engage with the other witnesses. The Conservatives [...]

It’s shocking to think that the 2010 Winter Games are now exactly one month away. Yes, the banners are dropping down the side of downtown buildings; huge tents are being erected anywhere there is open space; advertising from any but the Olympic sponsors has all but disappeared (I hereby challenge any Olympic athlete to eat [...]

Both employment and unemployment edged down between November and December, reflecting a smaller total labour force. This news raises concern that some jobless workers are leaving the labour force altogether. However, the labour-force decrease was only 9,000, far smaller than the previous monthly increase.
Overall employment changed so little because private-sector payrolls stabilized. While stability is [...]

Nine days ago, I posted some back-of-envelope math on the proposal to privatize the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO).
Specifically, I noted that keeping its annual profit of $1.4 billion would be worth more than the estimated sale price of $10 billion, which would reduce provincial debt charges by no more than $0.5 billion per [...]

While The National Post typically supports privatization, today’s lead editorial correctly characterizes Premier McGuinty’s recent musings as “a desperate government trying to unload assets during a down market.”
The following paragraphs note the extreme difficulty in getting anything approaching fair value for the sale of huge, complex assets like electric power systems and the folly of [...]

As reported on the front page of yesterday’s Globe and Mail, the McGuinty government’s “deficit reduction” strategy involves not only cutting taxes, but also divesting revenue-generating assets.
Today’s Globe comment page features three sassy letters on the contemplated privatization. But the editorial strikes a seemingly pragmatic tone, arguing that the Ontario government should sell “if the [...]

This past week, Jack Mintz issued a report (PDF) praising Ontario’s last provincial budget.
I like East Side Mario’s because it features both all-you-can-eat bread and all-you-can-eat salad. So, it is not surprising that a corporate tax-fighter would love a budget featuring both corporate income tax cuts and the removal of sales tax from business inputs. [...]

During tonight’s Hockey Night in Canada I got to see the new ads for Canada’s Economic Action Plan (OK, I think they are new; I don’t watch TV except for hockey). Now that it is October, I find it interesting to hear the government trumpeting the plan they tabled back in … when was that [...]

Models are often invoked when talking about climate change. Skeptics argue that the models are not sophisticated enough and are therefore wrong, which is technically true about any model, but other scientists argue that what has not been included in the models would make the outcomes in the future much worse. Still, the debate often [...]

Further to my post of last week, I note that the Department of Finance Update of Economic and Fiscal Projections shows that the federal debt to GDP ratio will start falling after the next fiscal year … ie from 2011-12…. even though we will be running quite significant fiscal deficits — eg $27.4 Billion in [...]

The September BC Budget is a new look at a budget most have come to see as a fake. February’s budget was not passed through the legislature due to the May election, and up to E-Day the government maintained the fiction that it had a small-ish deficit of just under half a billion dollars. Since [...]

It’s the leading article in the BC section of national newspapers today: BC’s Finance Minister has finally admitted that next year’s budget deficit would be much larger than the $495 million number than our Premier swore by during the recent election campaign. Private sector economists have been saying it for a while and it was [...]

The BC Public Accounts for 2008/09 fiscal year were released yesterday, showing that the province posted a surplus of $78 million or $28 million higher than projected in the 2008 Budget. Oh, phew, now we don’t have to worry about cabinet ministers facing the fines associated with a budget deficit under the Liberals’ balanced budget [...]

During the CEA meetings, I engaged in some provincial election talk with colleagues from Nova Scotia. I had just come off a brutal BC election campaign, in which the opposition stuck to a rather bland platform anchored in fiscal conservatism and axing the carbon tax. The NDP lost, and amid the subsequent soul-searching, leader Carole [...]

In all the kerfuffle around Finance Minister Flaherty’s $50 billion deficit projection, the cost of the joint federal-Ontario support for the restructuring of GM and Chrysler has been getting a lot of attention.
But while that restructuring support is an important and expensive undertaking, there’s no way it should be fingered as the major cause (or [...]

Three-peat. Hat trick. The media is full of jubilation for the re-election of the Campbell Liberals.
But looking at the numbers, it was actually quite close: the BC Liberals got 45.7% of the popular vote, compared to 42.2% for the NDP. This slim margin validates the Angus Reid polling camp, which came closest on estimating the [...]

Canadian governments should revisit planned corporate tax cuts in light of President Obama’s proposals to more fully tax American firms operating outside the US.

The basic argument for lower corporate tax rates is that they will attract multinational firms to locate operations here as opposed to other jurisdictions. This argument assumes that profits are taxed only where [...]

A lot of people I meet these days ask about the risk of a future surge in inflation, or even a return to “hyperinflation,” as a result of government’s efforts around the world to stimulate spending and demand — in part through large deficits, and in part through very loose and unorthodox monetary policy (including, [...]

Below is an oped of mine that was done at the request of the Vancouver Sun and that ran in today’s paper. Unfortunately, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the last two paragraphs were cut off, leaving the oped hanging. I put them back in below, and have requested that the online version be [...]

Last week’s Ontario budget was quite momentous and challenging to digest. Budget analysis was initially overtaken by the Premier’s minimum-wage musings.
The budget featured a combination of large expenditure increases and large revenue reductions. Overall, I think that it embodies the proposal from bank economists for temporary spending and permanent tax cuts. While it provides proportionally more [...]

From Lynne Fernandez and Errol Black, of CCPA’s Manitoba office:
Budget day always presents an opportunity to contemplate the state of society, and this year in particular has most of us pondering the current economic mess we are in. How did this crisis happen? How and when will we move back to more stable times? This [...]

No, the West is not Alberta as everyone in Ontario seems to think (I’m from Toronto so I can say that). I mean BC, where an election is on in two months. You would not really know it walking around Vancouver, probably because the writ has not yet dropped, so we are in the calm [...]

In the last few months, governments here and abroad have made every effort to “turn on the taps” of credit — in Canada, we have more than half a dozen such programs (and counting) under the banner of the EFF (Extraordinary Financing Framework), including (but not limited to):

the IMPP (InsuranceMortgage Purchase Program);
the CSCF (Canadian Secured [...]