Tomorrow I jet to Toronto for my 20th anniversary high school reunion. Like any such reunion, it will be interesting to see just how far the hairlines have receded and bellies expanded. But I cannot help feeling that my reunion will be different. See, I went to Upper Canada College, our country’s most elite private school. I was an outsider […]
Read moreFor a document that weighs in at close to 500 pages, the federal budget contains precious little information about much of what the federal government does. The revenue side of the ledger is not bad, but the expenditure side is just plain awful. Try it yourself: the 2007 federal budget is here. Now tell me: What is the budget for […]
Read moreFrom the New York Times (thanks to Price Tags for leading me there): The blue and yellow sign along Main Street in Ridgefield looked a lot like a historical marker, but something wasn’t quite right. Rather than commemorate a famous person who had stood there, or an event that had shaped history, the marker honored the role of dissent in […]
Read moreFrom Joseph Stiglitz’s NYT review of The Shock Doctrine: Klein is not an academic and cannot be judged as one. There are many places in her book where she oversimplifies. But Friedman and the other shock therapists were also guilty of oversimplification, basing their belief in the perfection of market economies on models that assumed perfect information, perfect competition, perfect […]
Read moreAt budget time this year, Stephen Harper delivered a Paul Martin budget, with more spending than tax cuts. With the release of the Annual Financial Report and Fiscal Reference Tables for 2006/07, we see even more of old blue eyes. Back when this budget was tabled, the projected surplus (mostly earmarked for debt reduction) was $3.6 billion. A year later, […]
Read moreA dispatch from Nick Falvo, the winner of the undergraduate prize in the 2007 PEF essay contest. Nick works for Street Health in Toronto, and speaks to a newly released report: In 1992, Street Health conducted a groundbreaking research study on homeless people’s health and access to health care. The updated 2007 study finds that the shocking rates of violence, […]
Read moreThis week in Vancouver, the annual meetings of the Union of BC Municipalities are talking TILMA. The BC government signed the deal without consulting municipalities, and it is now in effect. Over the next two years, however, municipalities have an opportunity to seek exemptions from the agreement, although their appeals would go to Economic Development Minister Colin Hansen who would […]
Read moreMy office window looks out over Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an area notorious for being Canada’s poorest postal code. Back when Vancouver was awarded the 2010 Olympics, we pointed out that the world’s media would be stationed just ten minutes walk away from truly abject poverty, and when the cameras started rolling, it may not be gorgeous mountain backdrops they would […]
Read moreThe Seattle-based Sightline Institute offers this tidy and accessible overview of carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade (in two flavours), with some scoring as to who supports what. Canada’s New Harperment supports none of the options below, and Harper has been on the international stage telling everyone else to be “flexible”. Climate Pricing 101 A primer on cap and trade, carbon taxes, […]
Read moreStatements like this drive me nuts. This quote is from an otherwise excellent article in The Tyee by Matt Price of Environmental Defence, speculating on the meat for the climate change action bones, expected from BC Premier Gordon Campbell later this week. Price falls into the same simplistic trap a lot of environmentalists get stuck in: On the revenue side, […]
Read moreThe Canada West Foundation today released an economic profile and forecast for BC. Most of the report is numbers-based, and it looks at a wide variety of topic areas. But in the conclusion is this chestnut: Public policy developments such as the implementation of the BC-Alberta Trade, Investment, and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) will also contribute to a positive future. […]
Read moreI overheard on the radio that Mattel has made an apology to the Chinese government for its recall of numerous products – a huge symbol of just how mighty China is. At the time of recall mania there was a lot of China-bashing for its lax regulatory oversight (not so much what it meant for Chinese workers but for the […]
Read moreKeith Reynolds, a researcher with CUPE-BC, has been following the BC government’s transactions with the Conference Board through access to information requests. Below is his summary of how this deal went down: Conference Board contract on TILMA I put the following notes together from about eight FOI requests over the last eight months and thought you might be interested in […]
Read morePaul Krugman has a new blog through the NewYork Times (and it is not subscriber only!). Here’s an excerpt from his first post, about the story on inequality over the past century: The Long Gilded Age: Historians generally say that the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era around 1900. In many important ways, though, the Gilded Age continued […]
Read moreErin’s post that Liberal leader Stephane Dion wants more corporate tax cuts reminded me of a recent backgrounder from the Library of Parliament on corporate taxes. The primer has a nice table (that will not reproduce nicely in this space) showing federal corporate income tax rates going back to 1960. In both 1960 and 1970 – back when Canadian productivity […]
Read moreI released a study today, How Sustainable is Medicare? A Closer Look at Aging, Technology and Other Cost Drivers in Canada’s Health Care System, available for download here. This essentially a national version of one I did last fall for BC only. With national data I was able to make projections 50 years into the future. The CP wire story […]
Read moreAlex Davidson of forbes.com, in an article published by the Globe and Mail, comments: Canada has bragging rights as the world’s second-largest country, but when it comes to number of billionaires, they are few and far between. In March, we pinned down the fortunes of just 23 Canadian billionaires — outnumbered by the U.S.’s 415 billionaires by a ratio of […]
Read moreThe Levy Institute, a Post-Keynesian think tank housed out of Bard College in NY state, has some new working papers up on its site that are worth a mention. The first two are from Randall Wray and the third from Dimitri Papadimitriou: The Continuing Legacy of John Maynard Keynes This working paper examines the legacy of Keynes’s General Theory of […]
Read moreIn Ontario, the election campaign is on. A topic of note is public dental care. Back in July, the NDP started the ball rolling: Calling poor dental health a “silent epidemic,” the leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party said Tuesday that the provincial government should provide care for children and low-income earners. Howard Hampton said an initial four-year program […]
Read moreI always thought so, but apparently this is not the case, according to an oped in the Nationial Post by Sean McPhee, president of the Vegetable Oil Industry of Canada, and Carole Pressault, a VP with the Certified General Accountants. It is one thing for business interests to call for deregulation – that is to be expected – but to […]
Read moreIn a Vancouver Sun feature article, UBC’s Hillel Goelman reviews evidence on early childhood education and makes the case for universal pre-kindergarten for three- and four-year-olds. Dollar for dollar this is probably the best investment would could make as a society. But progress has been slow, as it has been framed as a family issue by both sides. The educational […]
Read moreYesterday, I picked up Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine. It is something I’d been hearing about for some time, as I work with her brother, and Naomi gave a teaser with the keynote at our annual fundraising dinner this past February (video here). I’ll leave the summary to what is on the website, and point only to an […]
Read moreI have to renew my mortgage in a couple of weeks, but am wrestling with whether to go with a fixed or variable rate. A few months ago, when my credit union called, they guaranteed me a 5.8% fixed rate for three years, with the caveat that if rates went down by the time the current term expired they would […]
Read moreThere is a point in a good party when you decide either to stop and get home at a decent hour, or you throw caution to the wind and decide that there is no time like the present. In the current mess of the financial markets, how is it possible that any sane banker would not have noticed until now […]
Read moreThe term “hedge fund” sounds so innocent because hedging is protecting against risk. But hedge funds are precisely the opposite: largely unregulated, they are pools where millionaires put their cash, to then have it leverage (borrow) lots more money, in order to make speculative bets in the financial markets in a way that makes the whole financial system a lot […]
Read moreThe premiers cannot agree on how to cooperate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One might think that ten middle-aged white men might have more in common, but no. In all cases, vested economic interests trump climate goals, even though, as the Stern review points out, the cost of doing nothing will be much greater than the cost of action. Apparently, […]
Read moreMoonlighting from his CCPA gig, Ben Parfitt has this to say about airlines, climate change, forests and offsets in a feature article for the Georgia Straight: The airline industry, among others, is banking heavily on offsets taking flight. So, too, it appears, is the British Columbia government. No fewer than three people currently report directly to Premier Gordon Campbell on […]
Read moreSharpen your pencils, open your spreadsheets, everyone. It’s contest time! Following up on a recent post noting the major financial conflict of interest of the Canadian Medical Association calling for more private health care options, we can expect more ideological rhetoric to come in the next year as new CMA President Brian Day takes the helm next week. But as […]
Read morePEF Steering Committee member Mathieu Dufour passed along this message: For the French readers amongst you, there is a debate currently going on in Le Devoir about the disconnect between wage and productivity growth. I first wrote an Op-Ed stating said disconnect and asking how long we were going to ask people to increase their productivity without paying them more. […]
Read moreLinda McQuaig takes on the Security and Prosperity Partnership: Since the SPP initiative was officially launched in March 2005, the public has been effectively shut out of the process. There’s been little awareness, let alone public debate, about what’s going on. The key advisory body in the SPP is an all business group called the North American Competitiveness Council, made […]
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