A year ago, I was concerned that the Harper government, in the name of “fixing” the “fiscal imbalance”, would endorse ideas coming from the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the CD Howe Institute for a radical decentralization of fiscal federalism. This would have entailed eliminating the non-equalization transfers to the provinces (that fund health care, post-secondary education and social […]
Read moreThe Saskatchewan NDP Caucus has just posted an appropriately critical description of TILMA followed by a catalogue of the Saskatchewan Party’s support for this agreement. The Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly will soon begin public consultations on TILMA, but the material posted makes it fairly clear that the governing NDP will not sign the agreement.
Read moreHaving just finished arguing that inequality is an inevitable result of personal marriage decisions, William Watson has declared Canadians the “strike champs” of the OECD in today’s Financial Post. A new British study suggests that labour disputes cost about 200 days per 1,000 workers per year in Canada, which is apparently far more than in most OECD countries. Four thoughts […]
Read moreLarry O’Brien’s train wreck of a mayoralty, which continues to play out on the Ottawa Citizen’s front pages, is an instructive microcosm of how things might look if the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) were running a government near you. O’Brien’s Chief of Staff is, of course, Walter Robinson, the CTF’s long-time Federal Director. UPDATE (May 26): Today’s National Post includes […]
Read moreBased on conversations among Canada’s top capitalists (and their heirs), the Conrad Black trial revealed this interesting insider look at their rather incestuous dealings. Much of the article is written around takes on then-PM Chretien, but I find most interesting what this tells us about the real economics of media empires (original here). In the end, Black and Asper turned […]
Read moreHugh Mackenzie’s piece on gas price gouging set off a chain reaction in the mass media. The oil execs were scrambling to come up with any and all excuses to justify their outrageous abuse of market power, and their even more outrageous profits. The lame response essentially boils down to this: it’s just market forces. Indeed, it is just “the […]
Read moreFor once the headline-writers at the Globe gave my latest column (on continuing job losses in manufacturing) a better headline than the one I suggested (which in this case was a bland one: “Why manufacturing matters” zzzzzzzzzzz). Mind you, even their “blood on the floor” headline was not as eye-grabbing as Philip Cross’s year-old quote about carcass-hackers in Brandon Manitoba. […]
Read moreBack when I worked for Industry Canada in the mid-1990s, I sat on an internal panel that reviewed the applications for digital cellular telephony (what was then called PCS, or Personal Communications Systems). It was an interesting experience, including getting fingerprinted by the RCMP to get Secret security clearance. We basically chose to license a number of new carriers to […]
Read moreThe Canadian Economics Association annual conference is just ten days away. Writers are furiously writing up their papers for presentation (or like me, are procrastinating until the pressure builds); discussants are plotting clever things to say in response to those papers; and others are just figuring out where they will be sleeping in Halifax. As in the past, the Progressive […]
Read morePaul Krugman takes on deregulation in the US, sounding a lot like a CCPA research associate. In a research paper released last year, Bruce Campbell and I contemplated deregulation in the Great White North (dubbed “smart regulation” by the previous Liberal government) and a current obsession of our policy elites, regulatory harmonization (dubbed “cooperation”). We made the case that harmonizing […]
Read moreWhile William Watson and Margaret Wente are shrugging their shoulders at growing inequality in Canada, and endorsing policies that would make our income distribution more like that of our southern neighbour, concerns in the US about rising inequality are actually getting a better hearing. An example is the following article in Business Week (The Poverty Business: Inside U.S. companies’ audacious […]
Read moreI spent the better part of this morning sifting through the latest release of Statcan’s Employment, Earnings and Hours release to get a bit of a fix on what’s happening to all of those displaced manufacturing workers. We in the labour movement tend to see a big shift from reasonably good manufacturing jobs to bad private service jobs – which […]
Read morehttp://canadianlabour.ca/index.php/Our_Economy__The_rea Here’s the link to a popular pamphlet produced by the CLC for a series of community forums leading up to a national event at the end of the month,
Read moreFurther to my earlier post re Margaret Wente on Inequality http://progecon.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/margaret-wente-and-inequality/ the Ottawa Citizen ran two letters today, from Armine Yalnizyan and myself, responding to Bill Watson’s similar view that we can’t do anything about inequality since it is driven by personal marital choices. The Ottawa Citizen Tuesday, May 22, 2007 Re: Why we need more Pretty […]
Read moreI tend to be supportive of proportional representation for the usual reasons. However, there are some significant advantages to electing federal MPs (or provincial MLAs)Â from geographic ridings: individual MPs represent, and are accountable to, a defined group of citizens; these citizens have “local” MPs to whom they can raise concerns and from whom they can seek assistance; local issues are […]
Read moreIt is good to see that the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association is paying attention to this issue: AUMA Wants Full Consultation on new Alberta-BC Trade Agreement Watch for upcoming public consultations on the recently signed Alberta-British Columbia Trade, Investment, and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA).
Read moreThe Ottawa Citizen endorsed TILMA on Tuesday. I drafted an op-ed in response to the editorial, but Larry Brown of NUPGE beat me to the punch with an excellent letter printed in yesterday’s Citizen. For posterity, my op-ed follows: What Internal Trade Barriers? The Ottawa Citizen has endorsed the Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) without specifying any of […]
Read moreSome more interesting factoids about congestion charging as NYC contemplates on of its own. Critics are correct to point out the regressive aspects of congestion charges, that they have the potential to price out all but the most affluent. On the other hand, the poorest do not own cars and are much more reliant on public transit. Ultimately, we have […]
Read moreIn assessing the Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report, John McCallum asked whether “the budget, with its large increase in spending, might be contributing to an overheating of the economy at this time?” Similarly, in commenting on the Labour Force Survey, Doug Porter of BMO seemed concerned that a supposedly tight labour market and higher wages would spur inflation. Today’s […]
Read moreAlbertans are being paid less per hour, on average, than they were a year ago. It seems that the resource boom has increased prices more than wages in that province. Relative to inflation, wages also fell slightly in Ontario. Today, Statistics Canada released April’s Consumer Price Index. Although inflation is down slightly and wages were up in the last Labour […]
Read moreBoth Erin Weir and I gave testimony to the Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce in the past 24 hours, and I think we made an impression by challenging their assumptions about “interprovincial trade barriers” and bogus “solutions” like TILMA. My testimony follows: Presentation to the Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce By Marc Lee, Senior Economist Canadian […]
Read moreHere’s a communique (posted about 9 pm) from Peter Bakvis of the Global Unions office in Washington who has been closely observing this fiasco. One wonders if Canada is caving along with the Bushies or will stand as the last defenders of this nepotistic ultra neo con.., (And you read it here first — was it a coincidence that Paul […]
Read moreAll economists are always in support of “free trade” all of the time, right? Some interestings conversations are happening in the econo-blogs about international trade theory and reality. First, I love how Dani Rodrick is challenges the conventional wisdom on international trade: One of my favorite stylized facts about development is contained in the graph below, which comes from a […]
Read moreI get the Daily from Statistics Canada in my email each morning, and periodically they report on “crushing statistics”, which I believe refers to the production of vegetable oils and such (I’m no farmer). Statistics Canada today released its Census of Agriculture, and it probably should also bear the title “crushing statistics”. Between the lines of the summary in The […]
Read moreCopyright has always been pitched as striking a balance between the rights of creators to make a living off their work and the rights of the general public and future generations to benefit from that work. In recent decades, as big corporations have replaced actual creators as owners of many copyrighted works, the balance has been lost, tilted heavily towards […]
Read moreAn Ontario citizens’ assembly on electoral reform has come out in favour of a form of proportional representation known as mixed-member-proportional voting, or MMP. The Ontario Premier says it will be put to the people and will require a popular vote of more than 60%, which arguably makes sense for something as important as changing the voting system (though PR […]
Read moreEarlier today, I appeared as a witness before the House of Commons Finance Committee regarding “Tax Havens and Tax Avoidance”. The panel included a representative from Barbados who contended that it is not a tax haven. A business-school professor supported him by arguing that low-tax conduits for Canadian investment abroad benefit Canada. A couple of tax specialists from Quebec made the […]
Read moreTwo articles below look at two major items exempted from the Kyoto Protocol: air travel and deforestation. First, the Independent looks at the emission impacts of deforestation in poor countries (though emphasizing that air travel accounts for only a very small percentage of global emissions). Second, the Globe comments that despite its small share of the total, air travel is […]
Read moreI highly recommend a new StatsCan (Andrew Heisz) study of income inequality and redistribution – with one significant quibble. Heisz confirms a great deal of what we know – family after tax income inequality has been growing apace in the 1990s, driven above all by increased inequality of market income. http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/11F0019MIE/11F0019MIE2007298.pdf This is a methodologically sophisticated study. It confirms the […]
Read moreAs foreshadowed last week and reported below, Flaherty has narrowed non-deductibility to apply only to interest already deducted abroad and delayed its implementation for five years. In other words, corporations will generally be allowed to deduct foreign-affiliate interest costs in Canada even though they generally do not pay Canadian tax on their foreign-affiliate income. Flaherty retreats on tax measure, but […]
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