Statistics Canada is sometimes unfairly blamed for decisions made pursuant to budget cuts and to political direction, most notably in the decision to replace the long form Census with a much less reliable Household Survey. But the agency deserves tremendous credit for the decision, implemented just a couple of weeks ago, to provide universal free access to the cornucopia of […]
Read moreThe Drummond Commission reported today. The Good While the McGuinty government prevented the Commission from considering tax rates, it proposes some sensible measures to raise revenue. Chapter 18, “Revenue Integrity,†recommends combating corporate tax avoidance and cracking down on the underground economy. Businesses sometimes hire workers as “contractors†to avoid paying Ontario’s Employer Health Tax. Drummond advises the province to […]
Read moreThe Ontario government’s long awaited and much discussed report of the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services (aka, the Drummond report) was finally publicly released this afternoon. As was rumoured, the report says Ontario would need to increase program spending by no more than 0.8% per year for the government to reach balance by 2017/18.  Drummond has adopted […]
Read moreAn excellent commentary from Andrew Watt.
Read moreIf the National Post’s John Ivison wanted to agitate this blog’s authors, he could not have done much better than last week’s commentary on the census numbers. It was printed on the front page under the headline “Jobs in the West, jobless in the East; EI impeding labour mobility.†To paint a picture of eastern Canadians loafing around on Employment […]
Read moreA shorter version of this article appears today at Economy Lab, the Globe and Mail’s on-line business feature. Capitalism has entered an ugly new era, one that may work well for the shareholders of world, but not for the rest of us. I couldn’t help but notice that, on the very same day Caterpillar shuttered the doors of its London, […]
Read moreThe Prime Minister’s trip to China last week sparked a flurry of media coverage regarding prospects for “closer” economic ties between Canada and China. Some even speculated that another free trade agreement is in the works (as soon as the Harper government inks its planned deals, of course, with the EU, India, Korea, and the TPP!). The pandas are cute, […]
Read moreWhat is this thing called “globalization?” To be absolutely precise, it’s the word that took over discourse about the global economy and pretty much everything else for what seemed like an eternity but, in fact, labelled a phenomenon that lasted only for a single decade, that of the 1990s, from the end of the Cold War to 9/11. It’s the […]
Read moreThe top story in the Globe and Mail today reports on something I warned about a year ago: Statistics Canada is making changes to the way it calculates the Consumer Price Index. At that time, I suspected changes to calculations of the CPI would be introduced as part of the renewal of the inflation target with the Bank of Canada, […]
Read morePricewaterhouseCoopers’ biennial guide to Canadian mining taxation, Digging Deeper, features a comparative summary of royalties, mining taxes and corporate taxes for a hypothetical gold mine. This approach differs from the table I posted yesterday, which displayed royalty and mining tax revenue as a share of the minerals actually extracted from different provinces and territories in 2010. However, the conclusion is the same: […]
Read moreEmpires vary: of conquest, of settlement, of trade; contiguous and maritime. Empires abound: a long list, longer even than many books on empire admit to. Wikipedia lists over 200 empires from the Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great in the 24th century BCE to today’s American Empire. In terms of territory the largest are the Achaemenid, the Han and the […]
Read moreThere’s been some good public debate about the need for changes to the Investment Canada process in light of Caterpillar’s incredible actions in London. They showed up uninvited in 2010, took over a long-standing productive profitable plant, demanded money (from workers and government alike), then left — leaving behind a shuttered plant and a shattered community. Clearly something needs to […]
Read moreThis table displays the mining taxes and royalties paid for minerals – including coal, but excluding oil and gas – to Canada’s major mining jurisdictions in 2010. The ideal would be to compare these charges with economic rent, which varies by mine and is difficult to calculate. However, even a simple comparison to overall production values suggests that provincial governments are collecting […]
Read moreA bi-annual vehicle emissions test got me thinking about my personal carbon footprint. A lot broad-brush numbers and calculators exist out there to calculate one’s footprint, but I’ve never found them to be very reliable because they have to generalize across a very heterogeneous population in terms of location, type of dwelling and size, family size, and fuel sources. For […]
Read moreWith the spotlight on the federal government’s aggressive push to export tar sands bitumen via the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline to Kitimat, and from there by tanker on to China, the BC government reclaimed some attention on the energy file when it released its Natural Gas Strategy last week. With lots of glossy pages, but little detailed content, it is […]
Read moreSigh. Here we go again. More evidence-free corporate policy advocacy. The Chamber of Commerce put out a report today – actually I can’t find much in the way of background research on their web site – which points with alarm to labour and skills shortages, and calls for a less generous EI program to get workers to move to the […]
Read moreHere is an overview of today’s timely Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives paper on Old Age Security: Old Age Security (OAS) is the basic building block of Canada’s retirement income system. Canadians build on that foundation, saving for their retirement with benefits from the Canada or Quebec Pension Plan, a workplace pension if they’re lucky enough to have one, and […]
Read moreI have an opinion piece out on the City of Ottawa’s universal, student transit pass–also known as “the U-Pass.” Points raised in the op-ed include the following: -U-Pass programs exist for roughly 30 universities and colleges across Canada. -For a U-Pass program to be introduced, students typically must vote in favour of the program in student referenda. -When there is a […]
Read moreOn CTV yesterday, human resources minister Diane Finley said (45 seconds into this interview): “As we go forward, we’re going to have three times the expense in Old Age Security as we do now, but we’re only going to have half the population to pay for it.†That sounds pretty scary. If the total cost triples, with only half as […]
Read moreLast week (Feb. 2nd) I drove up to London, Ontario, to shoot some film footage of the locked-out workers picketing outside the Electro-Motive Diesel plant for a documentary I am working on. The company, the only one to make locomotives in Canada, is owned by Caterpillar Inc., the world’s largest equipment manufacturer. They’d locked out the entire workforce of 450 […]
Read moreIt is argued that eligibility for OAS/GIS discourages older Canadians from remaining in the workforce, and that we need to keep them working to avoid labour shortages and a sharp rise in the so-called dependency ratio. But the fact of the matter is that 65 is not the trigger for retirement that it used to be, and that an increasing […]
Read moreIt was not a happy new year for Canadian job seekers. Statistics Canada reported today that unemployment rose for a fourth consecutive month in January. Overall employment remained flat as Canada’s population and labour force grew at a normal pace, leaving more workers without jobs. The good news in today’s report is that 39,200 more Canadians reported being paid by […]
Read moreNo. Of course not. Even if the government waves around scary large increases in nominal dollar terms. As has been widely reported, the most recent OAS actuarial report shows that total program expenditures will rise from $38.8 billion in 2011 to $107.9 billion in 2030. However, the dollar figure reflects, not just an increase in the number of OAS beneficiaries […]
Read moreCanada’s job market continued to weaken in January as employment rose by a meagre 2,300 jobs, much less than the growth in the number of workers in the labour force. As a result, the national unemployment rate rose from 7.5% to 7.6%. The unemployment rate has been steadily climbing from 7.1% last September, since which time we have lost a […]
Read moreNow that the government is planning for an $8 billion cut,  the potential job losses could drive job losses to between 99,000 and 108,000 full time positions across Canada. At this much higher level, the federal government could be single-handedly responsible for pushing national unemployment from its current 7.5% to 8.0%. About half of those losses would be federal public […]
Read moreCanadian Press have put out a story based on a research paper by Richard Shillington which was commissioned by HRSDC from Informetrica, and obtained by the CLC through an Access to Information request. Receiving OAS is required to makes seniors eligible for the GIS top up, which provides one in three seniors with a supplement which ensures they have a […]
Read moreStatistics Canada reported today that the economy shrank in November for the first time in six months. This decline was driven by reduced energy production, which partly reflected maintenance shutdowns in the oil patch and unusually mild weather. While those factors may not affect future economic growth, their ability to turn it negative in November underscores how much Canada’s economic […]
Read moreTo reprise a now topical earlier blog, hiking the age of eligibility for OAS will have the biggest impact by far on future seniors who are in low income. Many if not most of this group are unable to work due to disability or ill health. If the age of eligibility for OAS and GIS is raised, low income seniors […]
Read moreThe Prime Minister’s speech at Davos was, I would bet, written by Stephen Harper himself. It bore the stamp of his long standing contempt for the European welfare state. He all but said that the Europeans had brought the crisis on themselves through trying to live beyond their fiscal means:  As I look around the world, as I look particularly at developed […]
Read moreTwo obvious but generally unstated details about the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline are climate change and that oil and gas companies stand to make mega-profits. An honest appraisal of the project would be something like, “yes, putting in the pipeline will facilitate even more greenhouse gas emissions from the Alberta oil sands, but our buddies stand to make bucketloads of […]
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