The spirit of Paul Martin’s budgeting practices lives on at the BC Ministry of Finance. Today, Finance Minister Carole Taylor published the audited public accounts for 2006/07, with a jaw-dropping $4.1 billion surplus, the largest in provincial history. To put this in context, BC’s estimated GDP in 2006 was $179 billion, so the surplus amounts to 2.2% of GDP. Back […]
Read moreBenjamin Tal of CIBC produces a quarterly Canadian Employment Quality Index. The releases from today (July 11) and February 11 provide amazingly different spins on amazingly similar figures. The basic facts are virtually unchanged: -Â Most new employment has been self-employment as opposed to jobs paid by an employer. – Most new employment has been full-time as opposed to part-time. – […]
Read moreDespite our protests on this blog, and Erin Weir chaining himself to the central staircase of the Bank of Canada, our hawks at the Bank raised interest rates today. That is, it raised the overnight rate by a quarter point to 4.5%. The Bank’s press release is a bit unusual in that there is no obvious reason why this move […]
Read moreThe OECD have released a modestly interesting, highly empirical report on the changing nature of the manufacturing sector in advanced industrial economies. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/44/17/37607831.pdf It speaks, somewhat tangentially, to the issue of whether “deindustrialization” should be of concern to policy-makers. As is well-known, the declining share of manufacturing employment has been pervasive across OECD countries since 1970… though the study finds […]
Read moreFurther to my and David Green’s posts on the strange economics of temporary foreign workers .. http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2007/02/08/the-strange-economics-of-temporary-foreign-workers/ http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2007/06/28/the-economics-of-temporary-foreign-workers/Â it is strking to observe that such workers are NOT overwhelmingly concentrated in the Western provinces with well below average unemployment rates. In fact, data presented to an Alberta consultation on the program by the Alberta Federation of Labour show that almost […]
Read morehttp://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/sweden_unemployment_2007_06.pdf Right-wingers have countered social democratic citation of the Swedish model as a success by claiming that Sweden has high but hidden unemployment – a claim that recently helped defeat the Swedish social democrats. True, active labour market policies do provide a fair bit of government subsidized employment in Sweden, but, on the other hand there is a lot of […]
Read moreIn a number of areas of health care, the rapid advance of technology may pose challenges to public systems, as technology tends to increase to costs associated with care by expanding both the realm of the possible and the number of people who can avail themselves of it (I review some cases of this in a CCPA paper). I argue […]
Read moreOne of the key contradictions of neo liberalism is between the ideology of free markets and limited government, and the reality that transnationals can and do seek to enhance their competitive position in the global order by presenting themselves to ‘their’ home states as champions of national economic development. This contradiction has been relatively subdued in Canada given the supine […]
Read moreToday’s Globe and Mail (Report on Business, p. B4) reports that when (technically, if) BCE Inc goes private as a result of the sale to the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan led group, interest-bearing debt will likely rise from $12 Billion to some $38 Billion, according to Chris Diceman of the Dominion Bond Rating Service. That would more than triple BCE’s […]
Read moreMy assessment of today’s Labour Force Survey follows: Manufacturing Crisis Deepens • The loss of a further 31,000 manufacturing jobs in June pushed total manufacturing employment losses to 95,000 positions since the beginning of February 2007. Since employment in Canadian manufacturing peaked in November 2002, this sector has lost 308,000 jobs. Construction and Resource Employment Falls • In June, CIBC […]
Read moreThe Bank of Canada goes to great pains to tell us that they have only one goal – namely to keep inflation at the mid point of the 1-3% target range – and have no view on the appropriate exchange rate of the Canadian dollar except insofar as it relates to this one goal. This stance is more than […]
Read moreVancouver political scientist Peter Pronzos emailed this review of Michael Byers’ new book, Intent for a Nation: “…so close to the United States†By Peter Pronzos Book review of Intent for a Nation: What is Canada For? By Michael Byers Douglas & McIntyre, 248 pages, $32.95 When former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien bowed to public opinion and refused to send […]
Read moreAn interesting story in The Tyee that picks up on evidence from the Conrad Black Trial (from a story in the Globe as blogged here), and runs with it. It is a telling insider story, one that nicely clears up the difference between the notion of competitive markets and the real world of capitalism and Big Media conglomerates: How Black […]
Read moreThe Wellesley Institute blog compares and contrasts a recent CCPA publication with the World Wealth Report: Two days, two reports, two very different worlds The World Wealth Report 2007 released on Wednesday by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini reports that the very rich (so-called high net worth individuals – HNWI) are getting even richer. And the forecast is the extremely […]
Read moreWriting an intervention in the NY Times, as NYC contemplates a congestion charge of its own, London Mayor Ken Livingstone makes the case based on London’s experience. A key success factor is the channeling of revenues from the tax into enhancing public transit, another example of offsetting regressive tax impacts on the spending side: … In 2003, London put in […]
Read moreIt’s great to have publications like The Western Standard keeping us on our toes. The following excerpt is from an article in today’s edition, “New Economy, Old Prejudices; Big Labour’s jobs campaign flies in the face of employment and wage growth,” that does not (yet) seem to be available online: The CLC contends that Canada’s loss of a quarter-million manufacturing […]
Read moreA dispatch by email from McMaster’s (and PEF member) Roy Adams on last month’s ruling: In a dramatic and entirely unexpected decision, the Supreme Court of Canada on June 8th “constitutionalized” collective bargaining in Canada. From its inception, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has had a freedom of association clause but in a series of decisions in the 1980s […]
Read moreIn today’s Leader-Post, Bruce Johnstone makes the same point as I did about the Saskatchewan Party’s reversal on TILMA: that it is intended to minimize the agreement as a potential election issue. He also makes the oft-heard argument that, since a couple of other “free trade” agreements allegedly worked-out fairly well, TILMA must also be pretty good. If the AIT was […]
Read moreCount me among those pleasantly surprised by the right-wing Saskatchewan Party’s rejection of TILMA, a complete reversal of its previous position. I think that labour’s extensive participation in the legislative-committee hearings helped to convince the Saskatchewan Party that (1.) there is significant opposition to signing TILMA and (2.) there are genuine problems with the agreement. During the first week of hearings […]
Read moreOn Wednesday, The Globe and Mail ran the headline, “Taxes Are Falling, But Not Here: Global Business Tax Rates Are Dropping, But Canada’s Remain High, KPMG Report Finds,” immediately above a table showing Canadian corporate taxes to be within the lower half of G8 countries. Today, The Globe printed the letter from yours truly that is pasted at the bottom […]
Read moreFurther to my previous post, today’s Ottawa Citizen reports that Walter Robinson is stepping down as Larry O’Brien’s chief of staff.
Read moreThe WTO talks have collapsed. Wait, did I not report that last year? Alas, talks are never really over, the Doha Round never really “dead” as reported in the papers. Just stalled. But as Cameron points out in his rabble.ca column (thanks to Duncan and rabble for sharing columns with RPE), this recent impasse has a lot to do with […]
Read morehttp://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/opinion/story.html?id=6c433a24-f12a-4584-9706-9f123ded8234 A good piece from today’s Ottawa Citizen. I’ve been similarly struck by the concern re foreign state involvement in our resource sector, combined with evident lack of concern about loss of domestic control of resource development. Whether we would get that from greater Canadian capitalist ownership of resource companies as opposed to more public owneship and regulation is a […]
Read moreare high, according to a new report, summarized by Gordon Laird in the Toronto Star: According to a new report from the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership, Shelter: Homelessness in a Growth Economy, homelessness is costing Canadian taxpayers $4.5 billion to $6 billion a year. Canada in 2007 collectively spends more managing homelessness than it spends on international […]
Read moreRecent commentaries from CIBC and Export Development Canada argue that the manufacturing crisis is not eroding job quality. Both note that a surge in construction employment, added to the relatively few new jobs in non-renewable resource extraction, nearly equals the number of manufacturing jobs lost in recent years. As emphasized on the front page of yesterday’s Financial Post, this argument […]
Read moreStephen Gordon’s presentation from our PEF “taxation and social democracy” session at the CEA meetings is now online at his blog, here. The other presenters on the panel were Andrew Jackson, Erin Weir and Marion Steele. I was the discussant for the session, so I will take Stephen’s cue and jot down some of the things I thought most noteworthy […]
Read moreTraffic on our old blog has slowed since we stopped posting there. Nevertheless, that website passed an important milestone in the past couple of hours: someone viewed it for the 100,000th time. Since WordPress excludes views by those of us who post, this statistic is significant. I have no idea how many hits most blogs garner, but 100,000 seems not bad […]
Read morehttp://www.ituc-csi.org/spip.php?article1231 Brussels, 21 June 2007: Launching a new report “Where the house always wins, Private Equity, Hedge Funds and the new Casino Capitalism†the world’s peak trade union body, the 168 million-member International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), today issued a global warning to pension funds over investment in private equity and hedge funds. At its biannual General Council meeting, top […]
Read moreWhile the Saskatchewan government’s decision to take the federal government to court over Equalization has captured more headlines, the Saskatchewan government is also helping to finance legal action against the federal government’s handling of the Canadian Wheat Board: Sask. backs CWB lawsuit The Leader-Post (Regina) Thursday, June 14, 2007 Page: D1 / FRONT Section: Business & Agriculture Byline: Angela Hall A group […]
Read moreUnder the headline “IMF Admonishes Canada,” the Financial Post reported on Wednesday: The IMF added its voice yesterday to the growing chorus of observers urging Canada to undertake a 21st-century overhaul of its financial system, saying it should create a single securities regulator, open its banking system to foreign competition and mergers and tear down interprovincial trade barriers. . . . […]
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