I recently had the pleasure of making a couple of presentations on public finances in Alberta. In February, I spoke at the “Remaking Alberta†conference in Edmonton. This past week, I served on an Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) panel in Calgary with Todd Hirsch from ATB Financial and Roger Gibbins from the Canada West Foundation. Like other provinces, Alberta […]
Read moreA recent letter from economists nicely summarized the two main theoretical arguments in favour of the HST: “Businesses, large and small, will face lower administrative costs from complying with one sales tax system instead of two. Lower business costs, especially on capital equipment, will encourage investment and economic activity.†Both arguments make sense in a stylized model of replacing retail […]
Read moreOne of the wonderful things about being away from the usual grind for a few months, is that I get to engage in this unusual activity called picking up a book and actually reading it. What a concept! It doesn’t happen much in the normal day-to-day life of CAW economist, engaged citizen, and co-parent of two lovelies. But it does […]
Read moreTwo weeks ago, the report of a government-appointed panel on Ontario’s social assistance system was made public. The report, entitled “Recommendations for an Ontario Income Security Review,” was written by the 11-member Ontario Social Assistance Review Advisory Council, which had been struck in December 2009 by the McGuinty government. The Council had been asked to make recommendations on the “scope and terms of […]
Read moreJune 30, 2010 Open letter to the Honourable Tony Clement, Ministry of Industry and Minister Responsible for Statistics Canada and Munir Sheikh, Chief Statistician, Statistics Canada Dear Sirs I am concerned by the Canwest report about the decision to restrict the upcoming Census, and the path the highly-regarded Statistics Canada and the Government of Canada seems to be headed down […]
Read moreFollowing a strong increase in March, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decreased slightly in April. Output edged down in both the goods-producing sector and the service sector. Annualized output stood at $1,229 billion in April, compared to a pre-crisis peak of $1,241 billion in July 2008 and a trough of $1,186 billion in May 2009. We are $12 billion below the […]
Read moreFrom the “fox guarding the henhouse” category comes news that the Bank of Canada has appointed Tim Hodgson, CEO of Goldman Sachs’ Canadian subsidiary, to be a special advisor for the next 18 months on financial regulatory reform. Hodgson worked with Governor Mark Carney when the latter was also at Goldman Sachs. (Don’t forget, Carney himself spent 13 years at […]
Read moreBill Watson might just be my very favourite right-wing economist. (He might disagree with that moniker. Or he might not. He probably thinks he’s just being “rational.”) Prof at McGill, punchy commentator for the National Post, and always game for a fair debate (unlike most of his ilk who just try to ignore us in hopes we’ll go away and stop […]
Read moreHow fascinating, and inspiring, to see China’s workers continuing to build their fightback against the low pay and grueling working conditions that have unfortunately been part and parcel of China’s recent development. And how appropriate that it was a fight against a global auto giant, Honda, that finally put the global spotlight on this struggle. Finally, how ironic that Honda […]
Read moreI’m happy to be in Vancouver not my home town of Toronto right now. Turning Toronto into a police state for a few days at the cost of $1 billion hardly seems like a good use of public funds, especially when we know the final communique will preach fiscal belt tightening. But what does $1 billion of security look like? […]
Read moreThat the HST will take a bite out of family budgets is clear to everyone. The main question right now is just how big of a bite. Two studies released in BC earlier this week asked this exact question but came to very different conclusions. On Monday, the Fraser Institute released a paper arguing that lower and middle income families […]
Read moreI spoke yesterday at a well-attended pre G20 conference in Toronto organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto. My comments as part of a union researchers panel were based on a short paper I wrote for the Foundation on the need for a new labour market model , posted below. The other […]
Read moreJohn Richards tells us “tough love” was the right public policy stance for governments to take in the mid 1990s. In his report released today by the C.D.Howe Institute, Reducing Lone Parent Poverty: A Canadian Success Story,Richards tells us that the tightening of access to welfare and the imposition of workfare was the kick-in-the-butt that lone parents needed to move […]
Read moreBrian Lee Crowley used to run the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies. Through the new Macdonald-Laurier Institute, he is now (to paraphrase ZZ Top) not only bad, but also nationwide. So far, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute has released two papers. I missed the first one in March. The second paper, released on Monday, is entitled Citizen of One, Citizen of the […]
Read moreThe Parliamentary Budget Office today released its report showing that just one legislative change by the federal Conservatives – the Truth in Sentencing Act, which came into effect on February 23 – will double the costs of correctional services in this country over the next five years, from $4.4 billion to $9.5 billion. Most of these costs will be borne […]
Read moreEarlier this month, the Bank of Canada raised interest rates ahead of its original schedule to head off inflation. Some commentators are calling for further rate hikes in the near future. But today’s Consumer Price Index suggests that inflation is not an impending threat. Adjusting for seasonal factors, consumer prices were lower in May than they had been in April. […]
Read moreThe title for this post borrows from an article by Robert Rowthorn (my old Cambridge professor) and Terry Ward in the 1979 Cambridge Journal of Economics, titled “How to run a company and run down an economy.” It’s still a classic on the difference between private cost-benefit accounting and social cost-benefit accounting (showing how the logic of coal-mine closures had […]
Read moreI could not make head nor tail of the unsourced numbers in last week’s National Post editorial on the Canada Pension Plan (CPP): If workers were able to take the more than $3,000 they and their employers pay into CPP on their behalf each year and invest it in a conservative private fund, at the end of their working lives […]
Read moreIn his column today in The Guardian, Will Hutton is the latest pundit to suggest Canada’s example from the mid 1990s is the right way to tackle austerity. Hutton’s aim is true. He knows the current proposals for balancing the books will unleash “the needless squandering of [British] lives.” In his effort to point to a more sensible path he makes […]
Read moreAfter watching yet another 0-0 draw, my excitement for the World Cup is more muted than when things kicked off a week ago. In part, it was dismal play by my home squad, England, but it’s deeper than that. Coming right off the Stanley Cup playoffs, even the drama of international competition can only somewhat backfill a gaping hole: this […]
Read moreLast Thursday’s Statistics Canada release of individual and household income data for 2008 marks a new era in the study of poverty in Canada. Instead of reporting only on the Low Income Cut Offs (LICO), as they used to, Statistics Canada reported on three of the most common measures of low income in the same publication (LICO, the low income […]
Read moreThe latest issue of the quarterly Economic Climate for Bargaining publication that I produce has just been posted on CUPE’s website. In this issue I have pieces about: the new spectre that is haunting Europe, this time of a public debt crisis impact analysis of Ontario’s HST tax reform by income group, already discussed below some analysis of recent employment, inflation and […]
Read moreToday the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published analysis and data on the incidence of different US federal taxes by income group. They are a model of summary data and accessibility, with easily downloadable spreadsheet files, that Canada’s federal agencies (whether Revenue Canada, Statscan or the Parliamentary Budget Office) would do well to emulate. The data show the incidence of individual income […]
Read moreToday’s Employment Insurance (EI) figures for April indicate essentially no change in the number of Canadians receiving benefits or in the number filing claims. To put these flat EI numbers in context, April was the strongest month yet of labour-market recovery. Indeed, it saw the largest percentage increase in employment since August 2002. In one sense, today’s numbers confirm what […]
Read moreThis article ‘More pay and more jobs: how Brazil got both’ by Paulo Eduardo de Andrade Baltar outlines how collective bargaining together with progressive government policies in the Lula years have improved the livelihood of many Brazilians. The minimum wage has risen significantly faster than inflation as have bargained wages, significantly raising pay at the bottom and middle. Increased spending […]
Read moreI have an online opinion piece on the federal government’s “innovation strategy.” My piece focuses on how the strategy directly impacts university students. I argue that the federal government’s current strategy creates winners and losers.
Read moreOn Monday, Catherine Swift of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) was on TV expressing outrage that doubling the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) would entail mandatory contributions equal to 20% of earnings. Her logic is that a self-employed person currently contributes 9.9% of pensionable earnings. That figure doubles to 19.8%. This argument misses a couple of points: Employees Pay Half […]
Read moreFurther to my earlier post on the turn to fiscal austerity on the part of the IMF, OECD and G20, it increasingly strikes me that there is a fundamental contradiction between G20 goals going into the Toronto summit. At Pittsburgh, the G20 called for a “Framework for Strong, Sustainable, and Balanced Growth.” “We will need to work together as we […]
Read moreAlex Usher is a frequent commentator on post-secondary education in Canada. He regularly blogs for the Globe and Mail at globecampus.ca. Yesterday, he wrote an open letter to leaders of Canada’s three major political parties in which he offered advice on post-secondary education policy. I found the following passage to be particularly provocative: First, scratch anything that vaguely resembles a […]
Read moreOn Tuesday, the Ministry of Finance released “Ontario’s Tax Plan for Jobs and Growth: Technical Paper on How the Tax Changes Affect People.†This study is an attempt to counter the Statistics Canada study released by the NDP a month ago. Until recently, proponents were claiming that the HST will simultaneously deliver huge savings to business, create loads of new […]
Read more