Transcripts 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 […]
Read moreMarc Lee’s most excellent paper to the PEF session on carbon pricing at the CEA meetings in Vancouver got me thinking. (That whole session was awesome, by the way — including Lars Osberg’s provocative analysis that the vast majority of Canadians, whose real consumption has not grown in recent years, have already met their personal Kyoto targets. It’s only the […]
Read moreHow about those productivity numbers that StatsCan released last week? Wow: another nail in the coffin of Jim Flaherty’s claim that Canada’s economic fundamentals are in “great shape.â€Â There’s not much more fundamental in economics than how efficiently people produce stuff (except, of course, for what we do with what we produce – that’s even more fundamental). And by that […]
Read moreWas it just me or did others get a nagging feeling about the intent behind Air Canada’s surprise announcement of 2,000 layoffs yesterday? The media coverage played along the lines of their press release, with a strong focus on the rising cost of fuel. This is certainly an issue, together with the impact of the higher Canadian dollar and the […]
Read moreThe 2008 OECD Economic Review of Canada http://www.oecd.org/document/3/0,3343,fr_2649_201185_40732867_1_1_1_1,00.html contains most of the standard neo liberal policy prescriptions we have come to expect – including a proposed shift to a consumption based tax system. However, they do have the good grace to devote two pages (84-85) to “equity considerations” and even concede that ” efficiency considerations come at a cost – […]
Read moreWith the Conservatives’ “Born in the USA” Copyright Act now tabled, the fur is flying. A year after leaping to the defence of the oil and gas industry, Terrance Corcoran has got Big US Media’s back (does Terry ever stand up for anyone but the wealthy and powerful?). As always, Michael Giest, who knows way more about copyright than yours […]
Read moreIt is with considerable disgust that we watch the Conservatives introduce the US entertainment industry’s wet dream of legislation to amend copyright laws in its favour. Without any evidence that the super-profits being reaped by Big Media have been adversely affected by file sharing. Without any consultation with Canadians. Without any demonstrable benefit to Canadians as consumers, artists or content […]
Read moreIt’s not often that I get my hopes up about a potential volte-face in the way we talk and think about economics at the policy and political level but this is by far the best news I’ve heard in a long long time. It seems that our very own Jamie Galbraith, scion of John Kenneth Galbraith and keynote speaker for […]
Read moreAt the recent PEF annual general meeting, we announced the winners of the 2008 PEF student essay contest. Thanks to Brenda Spotton Visano for coordinating this year’s contest. Graduate winner ($1,000 prize): “Healing a Crisis of Overaccumulation: How Canada’s Public Health Care System is Being Undermined through Accumulation by Disposession” by Heather Whiteside (Simon Fraser University) Honourable Mention : “Swedish […]
Read moreIt is disappointing that the Bank of Canada left the Bank Rate unchanged today at 3%. Many economists had expected a quarter point interest rate cut today, on top of the half point cut announced on April 22nd. The job market has clearly continued to weaken over the past two months because of the high Canadian dollar and the manufacturing […]
Read moreToday at the Canadian Economics Association meetings, the PEF officially awarded the first John Kenneth Galbraith Prize in Economics to co-winners Mel Watkins and Kari Polanyi Levitt. We had a packed room for the event, which featured opening remarks by Jamie Galbraith, and a historical retrospective of their works by Jim Stanford. Below is the text of Mel Watkins’ Lecture. […]
Read moreCCPA submitted a brief to Vancouver City Council about the city’s EcoDensity Initiative, by myself and co-authors, Erick Villagomez, Penny Gurstein, David Eby and Elvin Wyly. We have been working on a bigger climate justice paper looking at affordable housing and EcoDensity, but a short window came up for written submissions on the revised and updated EcoDensity Charter, so we […]
Read moreHaving travelled north of 60 as part of the Yukon Federation of Labour’s campaign against TILMA, I appreciate the territorial government’s decision to not join the deal. I will again be travelling around Canada’s newest TILMA-free zone and not contributing to this blog during the next couple of weeks.
Read moreThrough the following op-ed in Thursday’s Toronto Star, the United Steelworkers’ Canadian Director makes the case for a carbon tariff. It is now widely accepted that the struggle against global warming will involve placing a price on carbon emissions.  An equivalent tariff would prevent corporations from evading this price by relocating their carbon-intensive activities to countries that choose not to price […]
Read moreThe CCPA have posted to their web site Armine Yalnizyan’s excellent presentation to last week’s CLC Convention: http://www.policyalternatives.ca/Reports/2008/06/ReportsStudies1900/index.cfm
Read moreAs highlighted in the most recent version of the OECD Jobs Study, Denmark has recently managed to combine a very egalitarian distribution of wages and incomes with excellent employment and economic performance. The Danish “flexicurity†model gives the great majority of workers decent wages and working conditions, achieved though very high levels of unionization, very high unemployment benefits as a […]
Read moreDenial with a capital “D”. That’s the only way to describe the reaction to Friday’s stunner from Statistics Canada: real GDP shrank 0.3% (at annualized rates) in the first quarter, and hence Canada is likely already in the recession that our fearless government leaders have been saying can’t happen here. For months economists have been wondering if Canada could escape […]
Read moreI have been critical of the Globe‘s business reporting practices in the past (especially its tendency to quote Bank economists as “objective” observers of economic events) but on Saturday, it ran one of the best business pieces I’ve read in a long time. The article, titled “Who is responsible for the global food crisis?” is a solid and thorough piece […]
Read moreEver wonder what the Bank of Canada might do in the event of staflation (high/rising inflation & high /rising unemployment)? Wonder no more. In an interview with LaPresse, our new Governor Mark Carney states, in no uncertain terms, that the Bank’s objective would remain the same as it has been since the early 1990s, namely keeping inflation on target at […]
Read moreWe now have the official schedule for the CEA meetings. Please note that in addition to the sessions below, the PEF annual general meeting is on Saturday June 7 at noon. All paid-up members are welcome to attend. Also, the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize will be awarded on Sunday June 8, 10:30 am. The 2008 co-winners, Mel Watkins and Kari […]
Read moreIf you have visited this blog before you probably know that Erin Weir and I have it in for bogus arguments about alleged but unproven interprovincial trade barriers. Give us some examples, we say, but the rhetoric of trade barriers always seems to trump any actual evidence. And I’m not even talking about empirical evidence with a high degree of […]
Read moreGas prices are way up and look to continue that way looking forward. So what does this mean in terms of behavioural change? Todd Litman does a major review of all kinds of transportation elasticities. An excerpt: As it is usually measured, automobile travel is inelastic, meaning that a percentage price change causes a proportionally smaller change in vehicle mileage. […]
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