Transparency for Unions and other “Little People”

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I had a good old-fashioned knock-em-down drag-em-out debate with Ian Lee from Carleton University on CBC’s Power & Politics yesterday re C377. http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Politics/ID/2318279928/ There were a number of “zingers” from Prof. Lee that are worth considering: • He said “hundreds of thousands” of Ontarians have their salaries listed on the government’s sunshine list (reporting salaries of those who earn over […]

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New historical lows in EI coverage

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This  is a guest post by Paul Tulloch on the deterioration of Employment Insurance coverage, also responding Statscan’s release of EI figures for October 2012. The painful toll that job loss and unemployment can unleash on Canadian families has traditionally been managed with Canada’s once quite functional Employment Insurance (EI) program. However, today’s Statistics Canada’s EI report for October, confirms that […]

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Gender Wage Gap hurts Economic Growth

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BREAKING NEWS: Women are paid less than men across OECD (read: rich) countries. OK, it’s not breaking news.  Not even close.  In Canada the ‘Female to Male earnings ratio’ has hovered around the 70% mark for the past 20 years.  And for women with university degrees, the ratio peaked in the early 1990’s, and has been below 70% for 13 […]

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Coyne on Inequality

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Letter to the Editor Ottawa Citizen, December 18  Andrew Coyne (December 14) leaps on a study by TD Economics to claim that “income inequality in Canada has remained more or less flat since the mid 1990s” and that the big surge in the rising income share of the top 1% took place before 1998.  As Coyne himself says, “the reigning […]

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Marc’s Letter from 2040

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The following comes from a short talk on a vision for a zero-carbon BC that I gave at a couple events this Fall. Many have asked for the text so I’ve posted it here, and we may try and turn it into a video. That said, I have been reluctant to do so up to now because it was intended […]

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Nexen & Progress Takeovers Approved: What Next?

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The federal government’s announcement on Friday that it is approving two more big oilsands takeovers (by China’s CNOOC and Malaysia’s Petronas, both state-owned suitors) was political tap-dancing at its best.  Prime Minister Harper’s speech listed several reasons why takeovers by foreign state-owned firms are a problem … but then proceeded to approve $21 billion worth of them.  Future takeovers by […]

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State of the BC Economy

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As we close out 2012, BC finds itself in some precarious economic waters. To recap, a massive housing bubble that built up through the naughties (2000s) finally burst in 2008, feeding a financial crisis, as extremely loose (some would say fraudulent) lending practices pushed housing prices up to spectacular, never-seen-before levels, and created a plague of toxic mortgage-based assets. The […]

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The PQ budget

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On Tuesday, November 20th, the Parti Québécois released its first budget since taking office. This budget was widely anticipated in view of the many fiscal promises the PQ had made during the campaign, most of which where fairly progressive in nature. In the end, the exercise was (aptly) described by Marc Van Audenrode, who followed the proceedings and interviewed with […]

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The Default Option

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Here is an important op ed from the Irish Times by a former senior IMF official, arguing that the most heavily indebted euro countries will have to default on some of their public debt. If they do not, public debt will continue to rise to even more unsustainable levels as unemployment and output losses soar.

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The Harper Government’s New Math

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Every time this government crows about its job creation record, I cringe.  They have moved the finish line and declared victory.  No reason to worry about the unemployed here, folks.  Let’s move on to more public service cuts, and/or tax cuts. Never mind that unemployment has been in and around 7.4% since the spring of 2011, nowhere near the 6% […]

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Stay the course

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The Fall Economic Update was hosted this week by the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce. It seems Minister Flaherty wanted to be sure of friendly faces when he announced that the 2012-2013 budget deficit will likely be $5-$7 billion higher than forecast in March. The reason for the higher deficit is that nominal GDP will be lower than expected, which in […]

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Fiscal Cliff Notes

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The US federal budget is back in the spotlight now that the election is over. In one sense, not much has changed in that the Republicans continue to hold the House, the Democrats the Senate and White House. But what we are now witnessing is the culmination of budget deals going back to the first Bush II administration, right up […]

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Mulcair on the Economy

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Leader of the Opposition Tom Mulcair gave a fine speech on the Budget Bill on October 24 which can be found in its entirety in Hansard. I have posted some extracts of interest to progressive economists below. They echo many of the arguments made on this blog “What is more, the Conservatives are creating an economy where salaries will be […]

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Fewer Unemployed Eligible for Benefits

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The annual Employment Insurance Coverage Survey is out, here.  The rate of eligibility for regular benefits from Employment Insurance is the lowest since 2003, the earliest year that there is comparable data. To qualify, a person must have worked in the past 12 months and contributed to Employment Insurance, they must have left their job for a valid reason (layoff is valid, […]

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Welcome to the Wageless Recovery

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The Harper government likes to remind Canadians that we’ve done better than most developed nations in bouncing back from the global economic crisis. But digging into the data shows why many people might be having trouble cheering this news: wages have not kept pace with inflation, and new hires are making 40 per cent less than the average worker. Tiff […]

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Exchange Rates, the Price of Oil and the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project Joint Review Panel

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This is a guest post by Paul Tulloch, of LivingWork.ca and frequent commentator on this blog, reporting on some  significant and timely work he prepared for the northern gateway pipeline review panel, analyzing correlations betwen the price of oil and the Canadian dollar. Exchange Rates, the Price of Oil and the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project Joint Review Panel Paul Tulloch There is a […]

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The Limits of Demography

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Here is a piece I wrote for today’s Globe Economy Lab re the Department of Finance report on the costs of an aging society. The key point is that the mainstream doom and gloom projections of the costs of falling labour force growth  ignore the positive impacts which can be expected as and when we get to a situation of […]

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The Austerity Trap

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Below is a recent editorial from the New York Times that does an excellent job of summarizing the failures of austerity policies. The NYTimes also published a very good analysis of how austerity measures have actually increased debt loads in many countries, instead of reducing them:  “Despite Push for Austerity, European Debt has Soared” I made the same point in the […]

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FTA’s Assumed Benefits Can’t Be Found

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Last month’s over-the-top “celebrations”of the 25th anniversary of Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan’s signing of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement seemed strained, to my mind.  The self-congratulation and back-patting struck me as rather overdone, contrived even.  Remember, this wasn’t the 25th anniversary of the FTA’s implementation (that won’t occur until Jan. 1 2014).  It was only the anniversary of its signing – […]

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Effective Corporate Tax Rate Falling

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Further to my earlier post critiquing the recent  Mintz study -  which argued that cuts in corporate tax rates are not significantly denting corporate tax revenues – I looked up the effective corporate tax rate (income tax paid as a percentage of taxable corporate income.) Here is what shows up on CANSIM 180-0003.   2006 – 31.0% 2007 – 29.9% […]

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Ontario hiding savings from lower interest rates

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The Ontario government Fall Economic Statement and Fiscal Review ignores and hides billions savings the province will gain from lower borrowing rates in coming years. While this statement acknowledges that borrowing rates will be considerably lower in coming years–and more than 100 basis points lower in 2014–their forecast of debt interest costs (on page 85) is identical to what Ontario’s […]

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Household debt going from bad to worse

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Canadians are now more indebted than either Americans or the Brits at the peak of their housing bubble.  Statistics Canada today revised the national accounts.  The result on the household debt front was that instead of Canadian households having a debt to disposable income ratio of 154, it has now been revised upwards to 166. The new data allows better […]

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Is BC breaking its GHG law by pursuing natural gas development?

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Today CCPA’s Climate Justice Project released a new report by yours truly, BC’s Legislated Greenhouse Gas Targets vs Natural Gas Development: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. It was just five years ago that BC brought in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act, a signal that BC was serious about climate action. The Act calls for a 33% cut in emissions by 2020 […]

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