The Progressive Economics Forum

Still Progressive and family friendly: evaluating QuÃ©becâ€™s income tax policy

June 18, 2011 Eric Pineault One comment

University of Sherbrooke economist and fiscal specialist Luc Godbout with Suzie St-Cerny and MichaÃ«l Robert-Angers has just published a timely research paper evaluating the net fiscal impact on households of QuÃ©becâ€™s income tax system.Timely because, as discussed here be Armine Yalnizyan recent data from stats can shows that though globally income inequality has risen during the last recession, they have […]

Incomes in Canada – Booming and Busted

June 15, 2011 Armine Yalnizyan 2 comments

Today’s release of the annual Income in Canada report is Statistics Canada’s first word on the impact of the Great Recession on Canadians’ incomes. The report in The Daily was presented as a non-event, but the data reveal important stories about the winners and losers since the recession. What comes through loud and clear is the fractured nature of the […]

Is Capitalism Terminally Ill?

June 15, 2011 Bruce Livesey 19 comments

Today (June 15th) the Toronto Star broke news that the NDP was planning to drop the term â€œsocialismâ€ from its partyâ€™s platform. This was a mere formality of what had been in existence for decades: the party hasnâ€™t been â€œsocialistâ€ in any shape or form for a very long time. On the very same day, new data emerged from the […]

Incomes and the Recession

June 15, 2011 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

Today’s Statscan release “Incomes of Canadians” provides data for 2009 and a partial reading on the impacts of the recession. (I say partial because the 2008 annual average data were impacted by the onset of the recession in the last quarter of the year, and since these impacts continued well into 2010.) The data give some sense of the devastating […]

Defined Benefit and Defined Contribution: More Voices

June 14, 2011 Jim Stanford 6 comments

How coincidental that the current number of the Canadian Investment Review arrived in my in-box today, just hours after CAW members at Air Canada hit the bricks to reject the company’s demand to abolish the defined benefit pension plan for new hires (and impose major cuts in pensions for the existing workforce).Â The demand to eliminate DB plans is a […]

Evaluating Tax Cuts: You Read It Here First

June 12, 2011 Erin Weir 5 comments

Don Drummond has an op-ed in todayâ€™s Toronto Star concluding: Federal and provincial governments and the Canadian business sector should [establish] monitoring mechanisms that will permit regular reports to Canadians on whether the Canadian corporate tax revolution is producing benefits for them. As an advocate of corporate tax cuts, he believes that such benefits exist. I am more skeptical and […]

The Benefits of Higher Royalties

June 12, 2011 Erin Weir Leave a comment

The Canadian Union of Public Employees has launched a great new blog, Imagine What We Could Do, about the things Saskatchewan should accomplish by raising resource royalties. It draws upon this blogâ€™s analysis of how the province could collect more resource revenue and outlines public expenditure priorities for those funds.

Air Canada Bargaining and the Fight for Middle Class Jobs

June 11, 2011 Jim Stanford 10 comments

CAW members at Air Canada are coming down to the wire in their bargaining with the company, with a strike deadline set for this Monday at midnight.Â It’s really the first “normal” round of bargaining the workers have been able to undertake since 2000.Â Since then, they’ve been through two rounds of CCAA court-supervised restructuring bargaining, one arbitrated wage settlement […]

PEF at the 2011 CEA Meetings

June 8, 2011 Jim Stanford 4 comments

The ubiquitous Ish Theilheimer of the left-wing on-line news site Straight Goods has written a very generous profile of the Progressive Economics Forum. He hung out at last weekend’s CEA meetings at the University of Ottawa for a while, and caught a few PEF members (including myself, David Robinson, and Brendan Haley) on the way into various sessions. He filmed […]

Fix PSE System Before Building Addition!

June 8, 2011 Nick Falvo 4 comments

According to an article in yesterday’s Toronto Star, the Ontario government will create room forÂ 60,000 new students in its colleges and universitiesÂ by 2015-2016, 10% of which will be for graduate students.Â (I assume this means that, by 2015-2016, there will be 60,000 more students enroled in Ontario’s post-secondary insitutions than is currently the case, and that 10% of these new spaces […]

Municipalities, Procurement and Canada-EU Trade

June 7, 2011 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

There is an excellent post by Scott Sinclair at the CCPA blog.

The $0.3 Billion Question

June 6, 2011 Jim Stanford 11 comments

Machiavelli has nothing on these guys.Â Let’s deconstruct for a moment the central message of today’s 2011 Federal Budget, Take 2:Â “Storm clouds are gathering in the world economy.Â We must rush to get our fiscal house in order, lest we be struck by another tempest.Â We will advance our own ambitious timetable for balancing the budget by a full […]

Federal Budget Refried

June 6, 2011 Toby Sanger 2 comments

Was it worth the wait?Â Hardly.Â Â Today’s federal budget is about as appetizing as two month-old pizza warmed up in the microwave.Â I guess they deserve high marks for consistency, though not for economic policy or a long list of other things. The Harper governmentâ€™s June Budget is almost entirely a reprinted version of the budget they tabled two and […]

The Case Against Wage Insurance

June 6, 2011 Andrew Jackson 3 comments

Â At the CEA meetings I participated on a panel organized by IRPP to discuss a recent paperÂ – by Finnie and Gray – on older laid-off workers and the policy option of “wage insurance.” Â The paper shows that older laid off workers leaving stable jobs and finding new employment typically experience significant declines in earnings â€“ in the range of […]

Reduce Student Debt to Reduce Household Debt

June 5, 2011 Nick Falvo 5 comments

At this year’s Annual Conference of the Canadian Economics Association, Armine Yalnizyan gave a presentation entitled “Surviving the Recovery:Â The Distribution of CanadianÂ Household Debt.” The panel was co-sponsored by the Canadian Association for Business Economics and the Progressive Economics Forum. As Armine made clear in her presentation, household debt in Canada has steadily risenÂ over the past two decades.Â In 1990, […]

Mintz is Right on â€œSmallâ€ Business Tax

June 4, 2011 Erin Weir 5 comments

One of my main undertakings on this blog has been to debunk Jack Mintzâ€™s relentless advocacy of tax cuts for large corporations. However, I also give him credit when he proposes good policy, such as raising potash royalties and the small-business corporate tax rate. This past week, he was out with a paper on the latter subject. The small-business deduction […]

Scheer Success

June 4, 2011 Erin Weir 4 comments

Andrew Scheer has been elected House of Commons Speaker. I met him in 2004, when we were federal candidates in adjacent Regina ridings. I was the no-shot NDP candidate against then-Finance Minister Ralph Goodale and he was the long-shot Conservative candidate against veteran NDP MP Lorne Nystrom. At the end of that summer, we were both headed east. I drove […]

Does Capitalism Save Lives?

June 2, 2011 Erin Weir 11 comments

ï»¿I was watching CNBC and happened to see this panel about how the number of Americans killed by natural disasters has declined over time. It was also noted that, in early 2010, fewer people died in Chileâ€™s earthquake than in Haitiâ€™s earthquake. The discussion quite reasonably outlined how improvements in emergency preparedness, building codes, and infrastructure help to protect people […]

GDP Report: Awfully Weak Tea Leaves

May 30, 2011 Jim Stanford 18 comments

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was unusually blunt on CTV’s Question Period yesterday, saying he was worried about the possibility of another recession.Â (Finance Ministers are usually very cautious about using the “r”-word, for fear that might worry consumers an dbring about a self-fulfilling prophecy.)Â Maybe he had already seen today’s quarterly GDP numbers from Statistics Canada, which give lots of […]

CEOs and “Creating Value”

May 26, 2011 Jim Stanford 15 comments

Today’s Globe and Mail carried a story on the front of the business section about Jason Underwood, CEO of Whiterock REIT (a real-estate development income trust).Â He earned $4.8 million compensation last year (an increase of 475% from the previous year), which is especially surprising since the entire fund has a market value of just $373 million.Â (REITs, like other […]

BC to Raise Corporate Taxes

May 26, 2011 Erin Weir 2 comments

Amazingly, BCâ€™s government has joined its official opposition in proposing to restore the provincial corporate income tax rate from 10% to 12%. The same government that cut from 12% to 10% would now reverse itself as part of a last-ditch effort to save the HST. Revenue from a higher corporate tax rate would help finance a lower HST rate. According […]

Exiting from the Crisis

May 24, 2011 Andrew Jackson One comment

“Exiting from the Crisis: Towards a Model of More Equitable and Sustainable Growth” is a new book (over 270 pages) now available on line. This volume of essays from global trade union leaders and economists is the product of the Global Unions Taskforce on a New Growth Model, a joint project of the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) to the […]

Is Canadaâ€™s Economy Wage-Led?

May 22, 2011 Erin Weir 5 comments

The parenthetical reference to Canada in my last post prompted several good comments. This post attempts to summarize and address them. Dr. Stockhammer has co-authored a paper with estimates for Canada, but he would be the first to note that they are mechanical and not necessarily relevant to policy. He finds that Canadaâ€™s domestic economy is wage-led, with a higher […]

What Newfoundland & Labrador Can Teach the Rest of Canada About 21st Century Globalization

May 20, 2011 Armine Yalnizyan 15 comments

A shorter version of this analysis appears at the Globe and Mail’s Economy Lab. See article and comments here. Last fall Premier Danny Williams wondered what could drive anyone to let hundreds of millions of dollars slip through their fingers. Last week he got his answer. The Roil report on the 18-month strike at Voiseyâ€™s Bay nickel mine in northern […]

Do Wages or Profits Lead Growth?

May 18, 2011 Erin Weir 16 comments

Earlier this month, I served as the discussant for a presentation by Engelbert Stockhammer, an economics professor from Kingston University in London. He was speaking at a conference organized by the workersâ€™ representation to the International Labour Organization (ACTRAV). Stockhammer reviewed two antithetical strategies for economic growth. The pro-labour strategy aims to increase wages by promoting collective bargaining, raising minimum […]

World Economics Association Formed

May 16, 2011 Jim Stanford One comment

Today marks the launch of a new global organization committed to plurality and ethics in the economics profession, the World Economics Association.

The Lang-O’Stanford Exchange

May 12, 2011 Jim Stanford 7 comments

I was invited last week to serve as the substitute host for the indomitable Kevin O’Leary on CBC News channel’s “Lang-O’Leary Exchange.” Amanda Lang introduced the show by saying, “Hello, I’m Amanda Lang.” Then I said, “And I am definitely NOT Kevin O’Leary.” And the rest was history! Here’s the link to the full show for your amusement and edification. […]

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