With the Summer reading season at hand, here is a short list – in no particular order – of the best books I have read over the last couple of years on the roots and implications of the Great Recession – essential reading for all progressive economists. John Cassidy. How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. (Penguin, 2009.) An […]
Read moreBC Stats put out a release yesterday with the headline “Low Income Cut-Offs (LICOs) are a Poor Measure of Poverty” and author Dan Schrier gets in a dirty hit right in first paragraph: Despite protestations from Statistics Canada that LICOs are not meant to be used as a measure of poverty, there are many groups that insist on using them […]
Read moreStatscan have released an interesting paper, “The Income Management Strategies of Older Couples in Canada.” It looks at who controls the family finances in couples with one partner aged 45 and over. (They used the age cut off because a special question was added to the General Social Survey which is restricted to that age group.) This is important because […]
Read moreAs is well-known, young people are still bearing the brunt of the recession. The employment rate for youth aged 15-24 last month was 55.6%, well down from 60.3% back before the recession in September, 2008 due to an increase in unemployment and an increase in those not looking for work. And the proportion of youth in part-time jobs has risen. […]
Read moreEven though labour relations is largely a provincial responsibility in Canada, we were worried about what would happen in this field under a Harper majority. And it didn’t take long to find out. In the disputes at both Air Canada and Canada Post, the government waded into the fray in a pre-emptive and utterly one-sided manner. With both the timing […]
Read more(The following was sent by ITUC Washington representative Peter Bakvis and deserves wider distribution. While this action by the World Bank might reduce food prices at the margin, it would be far preferable for them to push for regulation of speculation in food instead of joining in a destructive game.) In partnership with Wall Street investment bank JP Morgan, […]
Read moreI have an opinion piece in today’s Toronto Star regarding Toronto’s Mayor, Rob Ford, and the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC). Mr. Ford would like to see a considerable number of units from TCHC’s existing stock sold off. For background on the issue, please my blog post of April 13, which can be found here. In today’s piece, I argue that it is more […]
Read moreUniversity of Sherbrooke economist and fiscal specialist Luc Godbout with Suzie St-Cerny and Michaël Robert-Angers has just published a timely research paper evaluating the net fiscal impact on households of Québec’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 […]
Read moreToday’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 […]
Read moreToday (June 15th) the Toronto Star broke news that the NDP was planning to drop the term “socialism†from its party’s platform. This was a mere formality of what had been in existence for decades: the party hasn’t been “socialist†in any shape or form for a very long time. On the very same day, new data emerged from the […]
Read moreToday’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 […]
Read moreHow 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). The demand to eliminate DB plans is a […]
Read moreDon Drummond has an op-ed in today’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 […]
Read moreThe 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 blog’s analysis of how the province could collect more resource revenue and outlines public expenditure priorities for those funds.
Read moreCAW 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. It’s really the first “normal” round of bargaining the workers have been able to undertake since 2000. Since then, they’ve been through two rounds of CCAA court-supervised restructuring bargaining, one arbitrated wage settlement […]
Read moreThe 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 […]
Read moreAccording to an article in yesterday’s Toronto Star, the Ontario government will create room for 60,000 new students in its colleges and universities by 2015-2016, 10% of which will be for graduate students. (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 […]
Read moreThere is an excellent post by Scott Sinclair at the CCPA blog.
Read moreMachiavelli has nothing on these guys. Let’s deconstruct for a moment the central message of today’s 2011 Federal Budget, Take 2: “Storm clouds are gathering in the world economy. We must rush to get our fiscal house in order, lest we be struck by another tempest. We will advance our own ambitious timetable for balancing the budget by a full […]
Read moreWas it worth the wait? Hardly.  Today’s federal budget is about as appetizing as two month-old pizza warmed up in the microwave. I guess they deserve high marks for consistency, though not for economic policy or a long list of other things. The Harper government’s June Budget is almost entirely a reprinted version of the budget they tabled two and […]
Read more At the CEA meetings I participated on a panel organized by IRPP to discuss a recent paper – by Finnie and Gray – on older laid-off workers and the policy option of “wage insurance.”  The paper shows that older laid off workers leaving stable jobs and finding new employment typically experience significant declines in earnings – in the range of […]
Read moreA guest post from Richard Pereira, a recent winner of the PEF Essay Contest… – Canadian Economics Association – The Town Without Poverty There were hundreds of speakers at this year’s CEA conference in Ottawa. About a dozen of these were designated “Special Lectures/Conférences spéciales†and among them were Jack Mintz on “The GST After Twenty Yearsâ€, Don Drummond on […]
Read moreAt this year’s Annual Conference of the Canadian Economics Association, Armine Yalnizyan gave a presentation entitled “Surviving the Recovery: The Distribution of Canadian 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 risen over the past two decades. In 1990, […]
Read moreOne of my main undertakings on this blog has been to debunk Jack Mintz’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 […]
Read moreAndrew 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 […]
Read moreI 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 Chile’s earthquake than in Haiti’s earthquake. The discussion quite reasonably outlined how improvements in emergency preparedness, building codes, and infrastructure help to protect people […]
Read moreFinance Minister Jim Flaherty was unusually blunt on CTV’s Question Period yesterday, saying he was worried about the possibility of another recession. (Finance Ministers are usually very cautious about using the “r”-word, for fear that might worry consumers an dbring about a self-fulfilling prophecy.) Maybe he had already seen today’s quarterly GDP numbers from Statistics Canada, which give lots of […]
Read moreToday’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). 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. (REITs, like other […]
Read moreAmazingly, BC’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 […]
Read moreI’m in Yellowknife all week attending events relating to the launch of a policy report on homelessness. The report is one of several articles coming out of a multi-year research project looking at affordable housing and homelessness in the Northwest Territories. The project is being supervised by Dr. Frances Abele (Carleton University) and our community partner is Arlene Haché (recent recipient […]
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