Today at the Canadian Economics Association meetings, the PEF officially awarded the first John Kenneth Galbraith Prize in Economics to co-winners Mel Watkins and Kari Polanyi Levitt. We had a packed room for the event, which featured opening remarks by Jamie Galbraith, and a historical retrospective of their works by Jim Stanford. Below is the text of Mel Watkins’ Lecture. […]
Read moreCCPA submitted a brief to Vancouver City Council about the city’s EcoDensity Initiative, by myself and co-authors, Erick Villagomez, Penny Gurstein, David Eby and Elvin Wyly. We have been working on a bigger climate justice paper looking at affordable housing and EcoDensity, but a short window came up for written submissions on the revised and updated EcoDensity Charter, so we […]
Read moreHaving travelled north of 60 as part of the Yukon Federation of Labour’s campaign against TILMA, I appreciate the territorial government’s decision to not join the deal. I will again be travelling around Canada’s newest TILMA-free zone and not contributing to this blog during the next couple of weeks.
Read moreThrough the following op-ed in Thursday’s Toronto Star, the United Steelworkers’ Canadian Director makes the case for a carbon tariff. It is now widely accepted that the struggle against global warming will involve placing a price on carbon emissions.  An equivalent tariff would prevent corporations from evading this price by relocating their carbon-intensive activities to countries that choose not to price […]
Read moreThe CCPA have posted to their web site Armine Yalnizyan’s excellent presentation to last week’s CLC Convention: http://www.policyalternatives.ca/Reports/2008/06/ReportsStudies1900/index.cfm
Read moreAs highlighted in the most recent version of the OECD Jobs Study, Denmark has recently managed to combine a very egalitarian distribution of wages and incomes with excellent employment and economic performance. The Danish “flexicurity†model gives the great majority of workers decent wages and working conditions, achieved though very high levels of unionization, very high unemployment benefits as a […]
Read moreDenial with a capital “D”. That’s the only way to describe the reaction to Friday’s stunner from Statistics Canada: real GDP shrank 0.3% (at annualized rates) in the first quarter, and hence Canada is likely already in the recession that our fearless government leaders have been saying can’t happen here. For months economists have been wondering if Canada could escape […]
Read moreI have been critical of the Globe‘s business reporting practices in the past (especially its tendency to quote Bank economists as “objective” observers of economic events) but on Saturday, it ran one of the best business pieces I’ve read in a long time. The article, titled “Who is responsible for the global food crisis?” is a solid and thorough piece […]
Read moreEver wonder what the Bank of Canada might do in the event of staflation (high/rising inflation & high /rising unemployment)? Wonder no more. In an interview with LaPresse, our new Governor Mark Carney states, in no uncertain terms, that the Bank’s objective would remain the same as it has been since the early 1990s, namely keeping inflation on target at […]
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