With an agreement reached on the Trans Pacific Partnership, the 12-member trade and investment treaty, opinions began swirling about what the deal means for the future of Canada. Plenty of facts have been bandied about in an effort to clarify the TPP’s significance: 12 Pacific Rim countries, 800 million people, 36 percent of global GDP and 25 percent of global […]
Read moreToday 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 moreI’ve pasted in below my contribution to the latest issue of Canada Watch, edited by my old friend Danny Drache of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto. It’s part of a special issue on what Deep Integration of North America could look like with George W. Bush out of the way. Here’s the link to […]
Read moreOn Friday, the Finance Minister and the Treasury Secretary signed the Fifth Protocol of the Canada-US Income Tax Convention. The Canadian government lined up several business organizations in advance to provide endorsements, which have dominated the media coverage. One of these organizations, the C. D. Howe Institute, made the case for the amended treaty through an op-ed in Saturday’s Financial […]
Read moreJanice Kennedy has a pretty good assessment of the Afghanistan debate in today’s Ottawa Citizen. My only slight quibble is that she does not mention the Liberals, who got us into this quagmire.
Read moreThis post is in response to the following excellent comment from Stephen Moore, the man who will trounce Ralph Goodale in the next federal election (or at least do better than I did): April 2007 testimony before the parliamentary committee on International Trade saw Industry Canada, DFAIT reps and others stress the importance of the SPP (Security & Prosperity Partnership) […]
Read moreLinda McQuaig takes on the Security and Prosperity Partnership: Since the SPP initiative was officially launched in March 2005, the public has been effectively shut out of the process. There’s been little awareness, let alone public debate, about what’s going on. The key advisory body in the SPP is an all business group called the North American Competitiveness Council, made […]
Read moreVancouver political scientist Peter Pronzos emailed this review of Michael Byers’ new book, Intent for a Nation: “…so close to the United States†By Peter Pronzos Book review of Intent for a Nation: What is Canada For? By Michael Byers Douglas & McIntyre, 248 pages, $32.95 When former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien bowed to public opinion and refused to send […]
Read moreThe following column by Bruce Johnstone, The Leader-Post’s Financial Editor, does a much better job than I did of explaining the Conservative government’s flawed barley plebiscite. This column, which is particularly interesting coming from an ardent free-marketer like Johnstone, touches on a couple of the Harper government’s favourite tactics: 1. “The Thin Edge of the Wedge” – holding a plebiscite […]
Read moreFresh off of getting cut off mid-presentation by an uptight Conservative, who we discovered later was only following orders, Gord Laxer makes his case: Easterners could freeze in the dark GORDON LAXER … while Canada, as part of our bilateral Security and Prosperity Partnership initiative, supports U.S. efforts to wean itself off Middle Eastern oil, I noted that we do […]
Read moreBy walking out on Gordon Laxer’s testimony about the SPP’s potential impact on Canadian energy security, the Conservatives have given him far more media coverage than he otherwise might have received. Today, the following story appeared in The Montreal Gazette, The Ottawa Citizen and The Edmonton Journal: Tory chair storms out of SPP hearing Freezing in the dark ‘not relevant’ to […]
Read moreYesterday’s International Merchandise Trade Annual Review from StatsCan confirms the Mel Watkins thesis that Canada is rapidly reverting to its historical role as a commodity producer for the global economy. http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070508/d070508a.htm From 2002, the Canadian dollar began to appreciate rapidly against the US dollar (and Asian currencies tied to the US dollar) in response to a commodity price boom, itself […]
Read moreA new edited volume, Whose Canada?: Continental Integration, Fortress North America, and the Corporate Agenda, by Ricardo Grinspun and Yasmine Shamsie, has just come out, featuring many of your favourite left-wing writers. The full book is out from McGill-Queen’s University Press, and can also be purchased through the CCPA. The table of contents can be viewed here. The synopsis follows: […]
Read moreAt the conference a couple of weeks ago where Elizabeth May mused about income trusts, she also committed to make opposition to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) the centrepiece of the Green Party’s forthcoming election platform. The SPP is an arrangement between Canada, the US, and Mexico that seeks to accelerate tar-sands development, among other objectives. It is very […]
Read moreOn March 30, I attended the federal government’s conference on “Internal Trade: Opportunities and Challenges,†which was hosted by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and by Industry Canada. Other attendees included academics, federal and provincial civil servants, and representatives of business and professional organizations. The academic and policy people all agreed that the material costs of alleged inter-provincial barriers […]
Read moreAdvantage Canada is the “economic plan” released with November’s Economic and Fiscal Update. In reading through it yesterday, I was struck by its statements about a couple of “free trade” agreements. Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) Marc and I demonstrate that there are few tangible examples of trade barriers between provinces and no evidence that such barriers entail significant […]
Read moreAtlantica is the brain child of Brian Lee Crowley of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, and current senior advisor in the federal Department of Finance. I had thought that this was a case for some sort of deep integration between the Canadian Atlantic provinces and the US northeastern states – a case that would be hopelessly undermined by the […]
Read moreNews of this recent corporate/ state/ military elite forum on deeper integration of North America is gradually trickling into the media, and being widely circulated on the internet. I don’t usually tend to believe that our collective future is determined by secret corproate conspiracies, but the fact that this event was completely ignored by the mainstream media is as staggering […]
Read moreA new report by myself and Bruce Campbell for the CCPA was released today. It’s called Putting Canadians At Risk: How the federal government’s deregulation agenda threatens health and environmental standards. A lengthy title for a rather lengthy publication. In it we take issue with the government’s promotion of “smart regulation”, the current euphemism for deregulation (they discovered that deregulation […]
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