The heads of Canada’s largest industrial unions just presented the following appeal to use government procurement policy to maintain and create Canadian jobs. UPDATE: It seems that Peggy Nash (from CAW) and I (from USW) will be taking calls about Buy America and Buy Canadian policies on CP24, a Toronto news TV station, between 9pm and 10pm on Wednesday. UPDATE (Feb. […]
Read moreMy hot water tank blew out just before Christmas. I had no idea, just went down to the crawlspace to get some wrapping paper and found the floor flooded around the old tank. We’d been expecting this for a while, having never had to change the tank since we moved in seven years earlier. Contemplating my replacement tank I got […]
Read moreToday’s Statistics Canada release of January employment numbers reveals staggering job losses: Employment fell by 129,000 in January (-0.8%), almost all in full time, pushing the unemployment rate up 0.6 percentage points to 7.2%. This drop in employment exceeds any monthly decline during the previous economic downturns of the 1980s and 1990s. More jobs were lost in January than in […]
Read moreInternational Trade Minister Stockwell Day is claiming credit for an amendment to the US stimulus bill affirming that its Buy America provisions will be “applied in a manner consistent with US obligations under international agreements.” Canada tops the list of countries to which the US has such obligations. However, Day and his colleagues demanded the complete removal of Buy America […]
Read moreIn a column in The Tyee, former BC Socred cabinet minister Will McMartin reviews the ups and downs of BC’s three strikes at balanced budget legislation. Each time this legislation has been repealed, although when the latest BC legislation is “amended” next week it will mark the first time this has been done by the same government and premier that […]
Read moreHousing has been one of the major drivers of the BC economy in recent years. Low interest rates led to rising home prices and a psychology of “must get in before being locked out forever”; leading a housing bubble that had everyone in town swapping jaw dropping stories of bidding wars and outrageous prices paid. The economic driver was not […]
Read moreOver at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Stephen has posted a nice graph comparing the average projections from the private sector (as compiled by the Parliamentary Budget Officer) and the Bank of Canada with the paths of the last two recessions. He is poking a hole in a story that there is a gap between the more optimistic Bank view and the […]
Read moreI admit to not keeping up with all of the progressive reaction to the new Liberal-Conservative coalition. But among mainstream political pundits, there seem to be two main explanations for Igantieff’s decision to not substantively amend the budget. First, he was unwilling to go through with the progressive coalition or risk an election, so he tried to sound tough without proposing […]
Read moreIn his latest rabble.ca column Duncan Cameron takes on a piece of the federal budget that got little play in the media: Budget 2009 and the Bay St. bailout Duncan Cameron Why did the Liberals support the Conservative budget when the analysis is clear: the Finance Minister ignored the vulnerable, punished women, did not provide a serious stimulus to a […]
Read moreThere have been a lot of media stories about freak weather lately, all tacked on with comparators like “worst in 18 years” or several decades or ever. The latest from London is a snowstorm that shut down the city. Here in Vancouver we had a few weeks of heavy snowfall bookending the Christmas period that brought our rainy city to […]
Read moreNow that the federal budget is over, I’ve been girding myself for the Feb 17 BC budget. My concern to date has been bold statements from both parties that they would never run a deficit, and that therefore we were in for a rerun of last Fall’s federal election where all parties kowtowed to the alter of fiscal conservatism. BC’s […]
Read moreAlarmist media reports on “Buy America” rules for steel used in US public infrastructure projects have emphasized the value of Canadian steel exports allegedly threatened, but have largely ignored the similar value of American steel imported by Canada. In fact, in the most recent month for which data is available (November 2008), Canada bought more steel from the US than […]
Read moreFrom Kathleen Lahey, a Law professor at Queen’s University: Budget 2009: Designed to Leave Women Behind – Again The big picture:   Women make up slightly more than half the population of Canada, and are directly responsible for caring for the majority of minor children in the country on a day to day basis. The expectation:   As an ‘economic recovery’ and […]
Read moreCUPE has a set of eleven a dozen really good issue sheets on-line with analysis on different topics about what was in the 2009 Federal Budget, what wasn’t in it, what it means, and what would have been better choices. The topics include: Employment Insurance, Municipal Infrastructure, Privatization, Pensions, the Environment, Aboriginal Issues, Post-secondary Education, Health Care, Early Learning and Childcare, […]
Read moreFigures released by Statistics Canada this morning reveal that Canada’s real GDP dropped by 0.7% in November 2008, its largest monthly decline since a 1.0% drop because of the August 2003 power outage. With the exception of that unique event, November’s decline was the largest since at least February 1997, the oldest month for which precisely comparable figures are available. […]
Read morePEF people are not the only ones who correctly anticipated some of our recent economic and fiscal events. Jamie Galbraith also saw a lot of this coming in his book The Predator State. With no further ado, I’m posting an enthusiastic review of the book by fellow traveler and Sorbonne PhD economics graduate Henry Sader:
Read moreFor the “we told you so” file. The BC government has been insisting on P3s (so-called “public-private partnerships” where the private sector builds and operates infrastructure) all over the province. We at the CCPA have consistently argued that this practice is foolish: more complicated, more expensive, and leaving taxpayers holding the bag if anything bad should happen. As a companion […]
Read moreAngry Bear has an excellent synopsis of the state of macroeconomics, and its relationship to the central monetary and fiscal policy debates of today. The post plays on a division of US economists into right-wing “fresh water” economists (epitomized by Chicago) and left-wing “salt water” (Princeton, MIT, Berkeley) that is perhaps a bit simplified (for example the Post-Keynesians at U […]
Read moreThis is a revised and more complete version of last night’s post: Impact on Jobs and the Economy What We Wanted The most important priority for the Budget was to stop the unemployment rate from rising to at least 8% this year and to double digit levels next year. “Fiscal stimulus†is not the same thing as running a deficit. […]
Read moreMarc Lee predicted a deficit a year ago (in a paper that graciously acknowledged comments from Toby and me.) Our blog was also ahead of the curve on some other aspects of Budget 2009. I flagged the Equalization cuts the morning after the November 2008 Economic Statement, when they received little attention. These cuts have since become a Budget hot potato because […]
Read moreThe more I read Budget 2009, the less stimulus I see. The very first page of text in the Budget Plan commits to “inject fiscal stimulus of 2 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP)†(page 9). For 2009-10, the Budget introduces new spending and tax cuts worth $18 billion, about 1.2% of GDP (page 217). But it accounts for […]
Read moreHarper “stimulus†budget falls far short  Faced with the prospect of losing their grip on power, the Harper government has made a big show of taking action to address the economic and financial crisis, but it still falls far short of what is needed to revive the economy, create jobs and protect the vulnerable. In particular, the budget fails […]
Read moreIts amazing how much a budget can contain while avoiding addressing the most critical questions of an economic crisis: How are we helping the most vulnerable, particularly those who have lost their jobs? Â With over $2.6 billion in spending on additional EI and retraining programs in 2009, the government has managed to not allow one additional unemployed person to […]
Read moreThe leakiest budget in Canadian history is now in the public domain, and will not lead to the fall of the Harper government. The budget was preceded by numerous press conferences held by Ministers (with the PM uncharacteristically out of sight), leaving some details to be filled in on budget day, largely tax measures, but in the end it featured […]
Read moreJanuary 26, 2009 The Honourable James M. Flaherty Minister of Finance Department of Finance Canada 140 O’Connor Street Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0G5 Dear Mr. Flaherty: I write regarding the 2009 federal budget on behalf of the United Steelworkers union, which represents 280,000 men and women working in every sector of Canada’s economy. To address the worst economic crisis since the […]
Read moreThe existing pot of infrastructure money offered up by the feds in last year’s federal budget has been criticized for being contingent on a P3 model, aka public private partnership, where design, build and subsequent operation of infrastructure was undertaken by the private sector, and leased back to the public sector over the lifetime of the asset. P3s have been […]
Read moreI’ve just read an excellent paper “From Financial Crisis to Depression and Deflation” by Hansjorg Herr of the Berlin School of Economics, circulated by the Global Union Research Network (but not yet posted to their web site.) Herr argues that demand deflation is inevitable in a downturn like the one we are in, but this becomes really dangerous for the […]
Read moreWhat a difference a year makes. A year ago anybody who proposed nationalizing the banks in Canada, the United States or the U.K. would probably have been dismissed as a looney lefty. Now widescale nationalization of major banks is being raised as a serious alternative in leading articles in the Economist and the New York Times. An on-line debate of […]
Read moreWatching the news last night, there was a lot on the pros and cons of tax cuts versus public spending. As one who has been following the debate on both sides of the border, it is interesting to note the convergence. The Canadian debate, up to the near-fall of the Harper government, was about whether the Canadian economy is actually […]
Read moreWe are repeatedly told in the press that getting out of deficit was oh so difficult, and so we need to proceed cautiously down that road in the 2009 budget. In fact, Paul Martin’s landmark 1995 budget that took aggressive measures (1995/96 fiscal year) turned into a surplus of $3 billion in the 1997/98 fiscal year. So it took exactly […]
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