The Fraser Institute released its annual report on economic freedom yesterday. As always, the report attempts to establish a causal relationship between its measure of “economic freedom” and economic growth. The first major problem is that economic growth is clearly driven by other more important factors. With respect to Newfoundland and Labrador, the Fraser Institute acknowledges, “the province has benefited […]
Read moreI’m pleased to see the federal government are taking action to modestly reign in the wilder excesses of the Canadian mortgage lending industry. They propose to insure only loans with a 5% downpayment and 35 year or less amortization period – compared to tnhe status quo which permits insurance of no down payment 40 year loans. My recollection is that […]
Read moreAs reported yesterday and today, the Government of Quebec has lifted its ban on margarine coloured to look like butter and the province’s dairy farmers do not seem inclined to put up much of a fight. This story has provided excellent fodder for witty headline writers: “Can’t believe it’s not yellow?” – Globe and Mail “Quebec margarine goes mellow yellow” […]
Read moreI was a delegate to the United Steelworkers’ triennial Constitutional Convention in Las Vegas last week. Video of Obama’s speech and other highlights is available through the union’s revamped website. The 2008 convention will likely be remembered for three historic decisions. First, a new position was added to the union’s International Executive Board. (Semi-regular news stories about western Canada’s rising […]
Read moreThe New Brunswick government have proposed and are conducting hearings into a dreadful proposed “tax reform” package, centred on a flat personal income tax of just 10% and corporate tax cuts, to be financed mainly by a higher harmonized sales tax. I have written a short piece quantifying the benefits to high income New Brunswickers of reducing their effective personal […]
Read moreLightning should surely have struck the offices of the Fraser Institute last week when it released a study co-authored by Mike Harris, the former Ontario Premier, on the supposedly declining state of the City of Toronto.  The study itself (“Is Toronto in Decline?â€, available at http://www.fraserinstitute.org/researchandpublications/publications/5696.aspx)  was nothing to write home about. It consisted solely of rehashed results from […]
Read moreOne key feature of Dion’s carbon tax proposal – among others – is that revenues are recycled back almost exclusively to households to maintain living standards, especially at the lower income end, while still preserving incentives to save on energy consumption. That’s reasonable as far as it goes. But what about the public sector and public consumption? What is the […]
Read moreBack in the 1960s and 1970s there was a big Canadian pensions debate, centred mainly on the issue of how to address the then pressing problem of poverty and income security in old age. It resulted in the launching of the contributory CPP/QPP and the improvement of the demogrant Old Age Security/ Guaranteed Income Supplement. Public pensions in tandem now […]
Read moreHigher oil and natural gas prices are here to stay and that may be a good thing in terms of helping us move to a more energy-efficient economy and averting catastrophic climate change. But we need a plan to safeguard jobs and the living standards of working families in the transition. Rather than leave it all to the market, we […]
Read moreCUPE has published the June 2008 issue of the Economic Climate for Bargaining publication that I put together on a quarterly basis. Previous issues are also available through this link at our website.   In addition to regular items on national and provincial economic forecasts and analysis of recent employment, inflation and wage developments, this latest issue includes: A very brief primer on […]
Read moreThe Liberal Green Shift aims to bring federal taxes on all fossil fuels up to $40 per ton of carbon emissions, in line with the existing federal tax on gasoline. The Handbook provides a detailed costing of the $15.4 billion in accompanying tax cuts, tax credits and contingency funds, but no breakdown of the $15.3 billion in new carbon-tax revenues (page […]
Read moreYesterday, the BC government released its updated Climate Action Plan. A glossy affair, it nonetheless puts text to all of the myriad actions the BC government is taking on climate. Looking at it all, it is hard to say they are just “greenwashing”, though personally I would like to see even more aggressive action now. But as the government, they […]
Read moreThe front page banner headline from the Vancouver Sun: B.C. prefers NDP’s Carbon tax plan: Tax industrial polluters, not consumers, 82% tell pollster It is painful to keep reading because the poll in question is based on inaccurate information about how the carbon tax actually works. Industrial polluters are subject to the tax to the extent that they burn fossil […]
Read moreThe Vancouver Sun ran an opinion piece by yours truly that revisits the recent Statistics Canada release of income and earnings numbers for 2006 … Denying income inequality won’t make it go away Iglika Ivanova, Special to the Sun Published:Â Tuesday, June 24, 2008 The May release of the 2006 Census data on earnings and incomes sparked a heated debate about […]
Read moreI wrote a paper for a volume on the OECD and competition policy last year, but the editors ultimately wanted less policy analysis and more on the inner workings of the OECD, so it got dropped. But a lot of the content is relevant to today’s release of the Competition Policy Panel report, so I’ve excerpted the relevant bits below. […]
Read moreRoutledge has just published a book comparing Australian, Canadian, and Mexican experiences of free trade with the United States. There are three chapters on each country examining long-run socioeconomic development prior to free trade, the specific free trade deals, and future policy alternatives. I wrote the Canadian chapter on the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA. A “pre-print” version follows. […]
Read moreThe report has been released: http://www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/cprp-gepmc.nsf/en/h_00040e.html This corporate dominated panel has put forward a set of highly pro business recommendations. Given the circumstances in which it was set up – major concerns over foreign takeovers of Canadian resource giants like Inco and Falconbridge – this is actually slightly surprising. The key recommendation is that only very large foreign takeovers worth […]
Read moreThe BC NDP’s environment critic, Shane Simpson, wrote me to tell me why he disagrees with the BC carbon tax. With his permission, I quote: The more I learn the more clear it becomes what a regressive and inept tax it is and why it needs to be opposed as vigorously as possible. It hurts public services – burnaby schools […]
Read moreHaving already eaten the NDP’s lunch on the climate change file, the BC Liberals (the second-term, more moderate Liberals) threaten to do the same on early learning and child care. In the 2008 Throne Speech, the government said that it would study expansion of full-day kindergarten to five-year-olds, then to four- and three-year olds. But they are smart: having resisted […]
Read moreFurther to today’s release on ecological footprint by income decile for Canada, Stephen Pacala of Princeton has done some calculations on who is most to blame internationally for CO2 emissions (conference speech and presentation available here). An excerpt: All 3 billion of the lowest emitting people emit a total, all together, of a half a billion metric tons of CO2. […]
Read moreThe CCPA released today a really important contribution to our understanding of climate change and inequality. The study focuses on Bill Rees’ concept of the ecological footprint, which is not exactly the same as greenhouse gas emissions, but highly correlated. Some key findings: The richest 10% of Canadian households create an ecological footprint of 12.4 hectares per capita – nearly […]
Read moreTranscripts are now available of my appearances before the House and Senate Finance Committees regarding Bill C-50 (Budget Implementation). I critiqued the Budget’s general direction and its particular changes to (Un)Employment Insurance. The following remarks to the House committee duplicate what I said to the Senate committee, although MPs asked different questions than Senators. Mr. Erin Weir (Economist, United Steelworkers): […]
Read moreJohn McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, appeared in Ottawa on Friday to praise NAFTA. The Canadian media has almost uniformly assumed that Democratic proposals to renegotiate this deal threaten Canada. In yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen, Ken Neumann, Canadian Director of the United Steelworkers, points out that most Canadians are rightly open to changing NAFTA.  Let’s renegotiate NAFTA The Ottawa Citizen […]
Read moreThe United Steelworkers union has published a new edition of our Canadian membership magazine. It includes the following column by yours truly and reports on the SPP counter-summit in New Orleans, our alliance with Environmental Defence, the Dofasco organizing drive, BC’s forest industry, and much more. The High Cost of Low Corporate Taxes The 2008 federal budget, entitled Responsible Leadership, […]
Read moreThe 2008 OECD Survey of Canada incorporates a long and surprisingly critical overview of developments in the energy sector, with a major focus on the tar sands. (Chapter 4). It is, in many respects, far closer to the views of the Pembina Institute and the Parkland Institute in Alberta than to those of the Alberta and federal governments, and even […]
Read moreThere is a lot of the colour green all over Dion’s Green Shift plan. But after reading it, the greenery appears almost as superficial as the green shift caps that Liberal MPs wore awkwardly with their business suits at the launch yesterday. Dion’s plan is really a proposal for a tax shifting budget and doesn’t contain any new proposals to […]
Read moreI’m surprised that Jim Stanford has not made a plug for his new book on this site. A modest one, our Jimbo. So let me say a few words about Economics for Everyone: A Short Guide to the Economics of Capitalism. Jim has outdone himself on this one. So many times I have had people ask me for a straightforward […]
Read moreThe Bank of Canada is currently considering, through research, a shift from inflation targeting to price level path targeting. For previous blog commentary and a good critique by Jim see http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2006/12/03/bank-of-canada-inflation-targeting/ The general idea is that if inflation exceeds the target of 2% in any given year, the future price level path should be kept on course by keeping inflation […]
Read moreI went trawling through the detailed trade by commodity data on the Industry Canada (Strategis) web site the other day in search of examples of potential job creation from raising the Canadian content of public sector procurement (as called for, not just by the labour movement but also, recently, by the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters.) As a very rough rule […]
Read more… is people like me, who have made spectacular capital gains as home owners. Through the dumb luck of having bought real estate at the right time, before the current boom, my family has reaped a windfall profit that only an oil executive could sneer at. It is not particularly accessible. We need to live somewhere and could only really […]
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