The Progressive Economics Forum

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre recently circulated a post on several social media platforms claiming that Canada’s manufacturing industry has atrophied under excessive regulation and high energy prices to an extent “unmatched across the industrialized world.” It purported to show that Canada’s manufacturing sector is now smaller than Ireland’s—a country with one-eighth of Canada’s population. This, he argued, is due to […]

Just in time for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s meeting with Donald Trump in Washington, the U.S. Census Bureau has released year-end 2024 data on America’s bilateral trade flows in goods and services. This data reconfirms that the U.S trade deficit is neither new, nor an “emergency” (as Trump has claimed in order to invoke special emergency powers to set tariffs). […]

Canada’s federal election has focused quite appropriately on the existential economic and sovereignty threat posed by Donald Trump. But there are other issues on voters’ minds, too, and continued concerns with ‘affordability’ rank high on that list. Incidentally, on that point the Centre for Future Work’s recent report, Counting the Costs: Impacts of the 2022 Oil Price Shock for Canadian […]

I confess: I was disappointed when the Justin Trudeau Liberals won the fall 2015 election.  I was hoping for an orange break-through. So, it comes with some irony that I find myself defending the economic policy legacy of the Justin Trudeau Liberal government nine years hence. The acute drama that unfolded in December with the Finance Minister’s resignation ahead of […]

In a previous post, I analyzed what Canadian corporations are doing with their profits. I described how across almost every sector of the economy, corporations are distributing more of their profits to owners than they are investing. In this brief post, I’m going to describe what Canadian corporations are doing with funds acquired through issuance of debt and equity securities. […]

The new UK government is signaling some reasonably ambitious reforms on the labour policy front (certainly more ambitious than most were expecting, given the Labour Party’s austere pre-election rhetoric and platform). They call the vision a New Deal for Working People . The policy framework is called A Plan to Make Work Pay. Broad features of the plan were mapped […]

After decades of lobbying and advocacy by Canadian trade unions, the federal Parliament unanimously passed legislation to ban the use of replacement workers (or ‘scabs’) during strikes and lockouts in federally regulated industries (covering about 1 million workers in industries like including finance, interprovincial transportation, and telecommunications). The legislation will take effect in June, 2025. It was supported by all […]

Armine Yalnizyan, Atkinson Fellow on the Future for Workers – Recipient of the 2023 Galbraith Prize in Economics This lecture was delivered on May 31, 2024, at the Canadian Economics Association Annual Meetings, Toronto Metropolitan University Thank you for the immense honour of being awarded the Galbraith Prize in Economics — and for agreeing to wait a year to hear this […]