The Taxpayers Federation Releases the Reins of Power?
Further to my previous post, today’s Ottawa Citizen reports that Walter Robinson is stepping down as Larry O’Brien’s chief of staff.
Read moreCameron: Why the WTO talks have collapsed (again)
The 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 moreMel Watkins on Foreign Take-overs
http://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 moreThe hidden costs of homelessness
are 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 moreManufacturing and Construction
Recent 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 morePEF session on taxation and social democracy
Stephen 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 more100,000 Anonymous Readers Can’t Be Wrong
Traffic 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 morePrivate Equity and Casino Capitalism
http://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 moreLawsuits Galore
While 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 moreWhat Did the IMF Say?
Under 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. . . . […]
Read moreAlberta Opposes Rate Hike
Relatively high inflation in Alberta seems to be the only justification for raising Canadian interest rates. In this context, it is tremendously significant that the Government of Alberta itself opposes increasing rates. Of course, higher interest rates imply a higher Canadian dollar. Alberta sells oil and gas, the prices of which are denominated in US dollars. As the Canadian dollar […]
Read moreCIBC and Oil Royalties
More fascinating stuff from that CIBC report follows: While many of the big names in the mining and metal processing industry have been spoken for, there are even larger capital inflows potentially still ahead in the energy sector. Thanks to the oil sands, and a still laissez-faire attitude towards ownership of those resources, Canada represents anywhere from 50-60% of the […]
Read moreMarxists at CIBC?
The following excerpt is from the much-reported study released by CIBC last week: The Bank of Canada, eying an economy operating above its non-inflationary speed limit, will welcome the dampening influence of an even stronger currency on both economic growth and inflation. A couple hundred thousand additional factory job losses, while far from derailing domestic economic growth, might be a […]
Read moreNotes on a potential Telus-BCE merger
The big news story (Globe article here and political analysis here) of the day is the proposed merger between Telus and BCE (aka Bell), and what the government should do about it. Below are a few notes to add some context, and an alternative, to merger mania. First, was it not just a year ago that both BCE and Telus […]
Read moreThe Green Party Climate Plan
Elizabeth May and the Green Party can take credit for putting forward a serious climate change plan, based on a $50 per tonne carbon tax, with some revenues from this directed to a reduction of other taxes. http://www.greenparty.ca/en/releases/06.06.2007?origin=redirect Today, they placed in the public realm a study by Marc Jaccard suggesting minimal economic disruption from such a strategy- which I […]
Read moreCore Inflation: A Closer Look and a Tentative Forecast
The “core inflation” rate’s jump to 2.5% for April 2007 (released in May 2007) was great cause for concern among many economic pundits and seemed to prompt the Bank of Canada’s announcement that it intends to raise interest rates. Of course, 2.5% must be regarded as quite moderate inflation and falls well within the Bank’s own 1%-3% range. However, this […]
Read moreMinimum Wages Raise Productivity
The 2007 OECD Employment Outlook incorporates a study (Chapter 3) finding that higher minimum wages raise productivity. In fact, a sophisticated quantitiative study finds that an increase of 10 percentage points in the ratio of the minimum wage to the median hourly wage raises the level of labour productivity in the long-run by between 1.7 and 2.0 percentage points. One possible explanatation cited […]
Read moreGenerous Unemployment Insurance Systems Raise Productivity
The annual OECD Employment Outlook – the product of the Directorate for Employment. Labour and Social Affairs (DELSA) can usually be relied upon to provide a well-reasoned counter point to the extreme neo liberalism of the Economics Directorate (ECO) — and the 2007 issue is no exception.) For a summary and details on how to access the report (full document […]
Read moreHe’s the Maaaap!
Avi Lewis, son of Stephen, hubby of Naomi, has a new show on CBC Newsworld. It is now halfway through a four-week run, with 22 minutes of content Monday to Thursdays (at 7:30 ET and 11:30 PT, to be precise). It is called On the Map, which is a great title except for the fact that it reminds me of […]
Read moreOECD praises “flexicurity”
Just in from Paris, some fascinating quotables from the OECD: Governments must do more to help workers adapt to new global economy, says OECD Rather than seeing globalisation as a threat, OECD governments should focus on improving labour regulations and social protection systems to help people adapt to changing job markets. That is the message from the 2007 edition of […]
Read moreSurpluses. Then what?
The Globe and Mail ran an editorial last Friday (now subscriber only content)Â Their summary reads:Â “We have grown used to the notion that our governments can run up budget surpluses. If only they could show some vision for putting the money to work.Statistics Canada reported yesterday that all levels of Canadian government posted a combined surplus of $29-billion […]
Read moreWages and Inflation by Province, May 2006 – May 2007
Relative to inflation, Albertans are being paid less per hour than they were a year ago. Today, Statistics Canada released Consumer Price Index figures for May 2007. Comparing these figures with the latest Labour Force Survey reveals that Canadian wages grew only 0.8% more than Canadian prices from May 2006 through May 2007. As always, the national figure masks significant […]
Read moreMonbiot, Stern and climate change strategies
In New Left Review, Clive Hamilton writes a review and critique of George Monbiot’s Heat. There are a number of interesting passages. First, he gives this doozy as an indicator of how grave the issue is in the USA: In recent years wealthy Texans have discovered the joys of sitting in front of a log fire. As it is usually […]
Read moreCanada’s New Government is getting old
An article in the Globe wonders what comes next for a Harper government that seems stuck: unable to move up in the polls despite delivering on its most populist proposals, but unable to deliver the goods for its core supporters because of, well, the polls. And interestingly, its best moves have come by doing the right thing and breaking its […]
Read moreCaveat emptor: natural gas deregulation
Around lunchtime I got a knock on the door, and a good-looking young woman was there to make a sales call for Univeral Gas. She was seeking to convert my natural gas supply under a newly deregulated market. I asked her if she would leave behind materials so that I could think about it. No dice. She wanted me to […]
Read moreWading through the Equalization Swamp Armed Only With 1105 Words
This post was inspired by my wife, a non-economist (thankfully) who asked me the other day for my opinion on the endless equalization debate. My answer was simple: follow the politics. As every insider knows, the excommunication of Bill Casey, an MP from Nova Scotia, is only the tip of the iceberg of discontent over the Conservative government’s proposed equalization […]
Read moreInequality and progressive taxation
As Andrew Jackson points out, there are some interesting musings in the US about progressive taxation. In a recent post, Mark Thoma cites four good reasons for progressive taxation: Personally, I’m not much on redistribution simply to make outcomes more equal. But there are (at least) three reasons to depart from this. First, when there is change such that makes […]
Read moreContext on the Canada Post v. UPS NAFTA ruling
The Globe’s story, Canada Post NAFTA win sets precedent, for UPS vs the government of Canada with respect to Canada Post, is a bit misleading. It comes across as “see, those whiners about investor-state were wrong all along”: Chapter 11 was controversial from NAFTA’s inception because critics charged it would allow foreign investors to challenge, and alter, government policies and […]
Read moreThe Bank of Canada and Alberta’s boom
In the Globe and Mail it is reported: A flurry of increases in the past month has sent Canadian mortgage rates to their highest level in more than five years, and consumers shouldn’t expect a return to the low interest rates they enjoyed in the first half of the decade. The story quotes Benjamin Tal of CIBC World Markets, commenting […]
Read moreRandy Burton on TILMA
Hopefully, the radio interview that I just did with Saskatoon’s News Talk 650 will help to counteract Randy Burton’s column in today’s StarPhoenix. Burton claims: There is one overarching reason why we should be cautious about accepting the predictions of doom that await Saskatchewan if it joins a trade agreement with Alberta and B.C. The people who tell us less […]
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