Blaming the Victims: Quebec Students

Last month, I blogged about a major new report on the living conditions of Quebec undergraduate students.  The report’s findings include the fact that 50% of full-time undergraduate students in Quebec report living on less $12,200 per year. On the heels of that report’s release comes the news that the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities (CREPUQ), which lobbies on behalf […]

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Happiness vs Inequality

Perhaps  the contradiction is more apparent than real. If  so please set me straight. The  inequality folks like Wilkinson and Pickett argue – convincingly, to my mind  – that those at the top of the income spectrum do hugely better on a wide range of objective well being indicators (eg longevity) than those at the middle and bottom. But the […]

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ECB vs. the speculators

I’d get popcorn to watch ECB vs. the speculators, if the whole sorry story weren’t so sickening. The European Central Bank is meeting today to figure out what the bleep to do about this mess in Europe (the press conference is happening as I write). In the lead-up to the ECB announcement, non-core bonds (like Spain’s) were doing well in […]

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McGuinty’s Post-Secondary Education Strategy

Many blog readers will remember that when Dalton McGuinty became premier of Ontario in 2003 he vowed to be the “education premier.” Yet, university students in Ontario–at both the undergraduate and graduate level–now pay the highest tuition fees in Canada.  Ontario is also in last place nationally in terms of per-student funding for post-secondary education, and has the lowest professor-to-student […]

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Worker Bargaining Power and the Crisis

Here is a keeper – an IMF study that argues that loss of working class bargaining power is an underlying cause of financial crises, and that retoration thereof is key to reducing debt. The abstract – “The paper studies how high leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and […]

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Memo to Energy Minister

Memo to Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert: Royalties are not taxes Already “under attack for allegedly being rude and dismissive when he was health minister,”[1] current Energy Minister Ron Liepert conceded he hadn’t read the Parkland Institute’s new report on vast oilpatch profits but that didn’t stop him from dismissing it: “This is a not unexpected sort of NDP/socialist view […]

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New report, old excuses

The Parkland Institute released its latest report yesterday morning, detailing the huge scale of oilpatch profits – Misplaced Generosity: Extraordinary profits in Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Many of the responses from government and industry were predictable – that’s why they were addressed in the report. Let’s run through the standard excuses offered for the string of royalty cuts Albertans […]

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CPP Expansion and Jobs

In a carefully timed intervention coming shortly before Finance Ministers meet to discuss retirement income reform, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business today released an econometric study by Peter Dungan of the University of Toronto on the economic impacts of the CLC proposal to double the Canada Pension Plan replacement rate, The CFIB regards CPP premiums as job-killing payroll taxes. […]

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Might the proposed new federal securities regulator weaken regulatory oversight?

The front page of today’s Globe and Mail reports the latest chapter in the federal attempt to create a national securities regulator. (Premiers push back against national securities regulator plan).   Part of the Harper government’s response to the financial crisis was to promise to remedy the patchwork of provincial securities regulators.  If securities regulators are going to avert future […]

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The Ins and Outs of Foreign Investment

To provide a little context for our current national debate on foreign investment, I did a little digging recently in the FDI data. Some of my findings surprised me.  Yes, Canada exports slightly more FDI capital than we import (that is, the net investment position in FDI is slightly positive).  But most of what we export is in banking; most […]

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CAW Commentary on the GM IPO

GM’s $22 billion IPO got off to a roaring start last week. It’s ironic, needless to say, that it was underwritten by some of the same financiers (JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and Bank of America) who brought us the global financial crisis — the same crisis that pushed GM over the edge into bankruptcy protection! That just goes to […]

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Debunking the Myth of the Lazy Student

Results of a major survey of post-secondary students were released on Thursday.  The 149-page report, entitled Sources et Modes de Financement des Etudiants the Premier Cycle 2009, was written by the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ).  It was done in collaboration with Léger Marketing, who suveyed almost 13,000 undergraduate students in Quebec, spanning 14 different post-secondary institutions in the province.  According […]

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Rejoice! Dividend Increases Await

An open letter to the world at large: “Bank shareholders rejoice.  Pension funds rebound.  Hark, the Globe and Mail comes bearing good news my brothers and sisters.   Yes, the drums beat steady.  The heart skips irregularly.  The palms sweat profusely.  Because soon, soon, the big banks will engage in our society’s number one passtime.  Well yes, of course, I speak […]

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Communities in Crisis

The full reports of the CLC Communities in Crisis project are now available  (links are at the end of each community summary.) Canada lost almost 500,000 full-time jobs between the Fall of 2008 and the Summer of 2009, with a particularly devastating impact upon industrial communities where a wave of layoffs and plant closures added to the toll of the longer […]

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Can Socialism be Revived?

Can socialism be revived? Does it have a chance to gain some traction ever again? Unfortunately, the two great experiments in socialism attempted during the last century – social democracy and the Stalinist model of state-controlled socialism – are now spent forces. In respect to sweeping capitalism into the dustbin of history, they both failed. And socialism as an ideological, […]

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Confusion Over Monetary Policy

It’s always been my understanding that left-of-centre economists, on the whole, like it when real interest rates are low (but not negative).  Among other things, this encourages more companies to borrow (and hire more workers), reduces unemployment, reduces debt-servicing costs for government, and increases the power of labour. In July of this year, I blogged over my concern that “important voices among Canada’s […]

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Austerity Canadian-Style, Now in Britain? Pity

This appeared in the Globe and Mail yesterday. You can add your comments to the discussion here http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/the-economists/austerity-canadian-style-now-in-britain-pity/article1796379/ Budget plans in the UK drove 50,000 students into the streets this week. They were protesting proposed public spending cuts that could double or triple university tuitions. We’ve seen this movie, and it does not end well for students.

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The Bicycle Metaphor

A propos of the launch of the Canada – India trade talks, Bill Robson resorted to the tired old bicycle metaphor on CBCs Power and Politics. He is not alone. This cliche gets voiced all the time. Like a cyclist who will topple if she or he slows down, the momentum of trade liberalization must be maintained, we are told,  or we […]

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Another EI Absurdity

Well under one half of Canada’s 1.5 million unemployed workers are collecting EI benefits today, even though the national unemployment rate is still almost 8%. Special EI measures introduced as part of the 2009 Budget, notably an extra 5 weeks of benefits for all claimants,  expired this fall, long before a real labour market recovery has taken place. The additional […]

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QE2

The Economist  judges that it is working . Long term interest rates have fallen since Bernanke announced the Fed was going to restart the printing press, usefully making the US government deficit a tad easier to finance. The stock market has been juiced, which may have a wealth effect on aggregate demand. And the US dollar has fallen against currencies that […]

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Silencing Student Dissent

Across Canada, university student associations–at both the undergraduate and graduate level–provide democratic representation to their members.  When students register for a term, memberhip fees are automatically collected by the university’s business office, much like an employer automatically collects union dues in a unionized workplace.  The university’s business office temporarily holds student membership fees “in trust,” and then remits them to […]

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Is Social Democracy Dying? – Part 2

I would venture there are three reasons why social democracy is pretty much kaput: 1) a flawed ideology 2) the power of capital and 3) a propensity for selling out and drifting to the right. 1) Flawed ideology Ever since people have exploited other people’s labour for their personal gain, it’s long been the dream of the slave, serf, peasant […]

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Pervasive market failures

Most people reading this blog already get it that neoclassical economics is deeply flawed. But I’m still amazed at its persistence in the classroom and in the blogosphere. My blood boils when I see the standard neoclassical workhorse brought out of the stable when really it ought to be put to pasture. In a nutshell, neoclassical modeling ignores market failures, […]

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