Progressive municipal governments in Canada should consider developing and implementing wage ordinances to boost campaigns for higher statutory minimum wages, and to help the working poor. More than 130 municipal living wage ordinances have been passed in the US since 1994, including in many big cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, San […]
Read moreAs noted yesterday, Canadian advocates of corporate-tax cuts have proliferated alternative measures of corporate taxes. The C. D. Howe Institute’s “Tax Competitiveness Program,” which largely consists of papers by Jack Mintz and Duanjie Chen, has focused almost exclusively on marginal effective tax rates (METRs) on capital, expressed as percentages of pre-tax rates of return. There have been a couple of […]
Read moreIn recent years, about one-quarter of Canada’s corporate profits and business investment have been in Alberta. The following figures are from Statistics Canada’s Provincial Economic Accounts. As corporate profits have ballooned in Alberta, business investment has not increased as a share of the province’s economy. More than half of this investment has been in non-residential structures (e.g. tar-sands development), leaving […]
Read morePublic hearings proved to be an effective defence against TILMA in Saskatchewan. The following editorial from yesterday’s Halifax ChronicleHerald appropriately concludes, “Nova Scotia should hold public hearings, just like Saskatchewan, if it is toying with joining TILMA or a regional version thereof.” Published: 2007-07-16 Talking trade WHEN corporate Canada thinks of TILMA, it pictures a Chinook – a warm wind […]
Read moreThe New York Times has an interesting piece on the New Gilded Age, with many a multi-millionaire interviewed. Below is a rather unbalanced clipping of some of the more interesting (and progressive) parts of the article: “I don’t see a relationship between the extremes of income now and the performance of the economy,†Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve […]
Read moreCanada’s corporate-income-tax rates are fairly low compared to other G-7 countries. Advocates of further Canadian corporate-tax cuts have responded to this reality in two ways. First, they promote alternative measures indicating that corporate taxes are higher in Canada than elsewhere. Second, they compare Canada to a much broader range of countries. In the latter vein, The Globe and Mail’s Report on […]
Read moreSome sobering data from the Canadian Community Health Survey http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/surveill/nutrition/commun/income_food_sec-sec_alim_e.html#lex It is recognized that “food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” (Food and Agriculture Organization 1996). This report reflects the characteristics of food […]
Read moreI’ve pasted in below a letter to Ministers Bernier and Flaherty re the just-announced review of the Foreign Investment Act and foreign take-overs of large Canadian corporations. Links to the two research studies cited in the letter showing that foreign ownership of large internationally-oriented corporations does matter in terms of impacts on the Canadian economy can be found at the […]
Read moreAsks Paul Krugman: [S]hould we even be giving preferential tax treatment to true capital gains? I’d say no, because there’s very little evidence that taxing capital gains as ordinary income would actually hurt the economy. Meanwhile, the low tax rate on capital gains is one main reason the truly rich often pay lower tax rates than the middle class. A […]
Read moreBack in the 2001 BC election, the Liberals repeatedly made the voodoo economics claim that “tax cuts pay for themselves” as a means of heading off concerns that their tax cuts would inevitably lead to spending cuts. The Liberals won in a landslide, implemented a 25% across-the-board personal income tax cut and dramatically cut corporate income taxes – about $2.3 […]
Read moreThe Atlantic Institute for Market Studies has been calling for the Atlantic provinces to join TILMA. Yesterday, I discussed this proposal with the Halifax ChronicleHerald’s editorial board. The following report was printed in today’s edition. Also yesterday, the CCPA posted a paper based on my submission to the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly’s Standing Committee on the Economy. Published: 2007-07-12 Labour group […]
Read morehttp://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070711.wcomment0712/BNStory/Front/home Asks Michael Mendelson from Caledon
Read moreThe 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 […]
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