The federal government has announced it is prepared to pay wages subsidies of up to 75% of employee wages for all private businesses and other employers, including non-profits, partnerships and charities that expect a 30% drop in revenues, up to a maximum of $847/worker per week and $11,011 over the three months. The previously announced 10% wage subsidy was only available […]
Read moreWith the federal government is increasing its temporary wage subsidy to 75%, other reforms are needed to ensure the public funding goes to maintain workers, and not pad the profits of businesses. In the face of the COVID19 crisis, the Canadian government has done a very good job of both limiting the spread of the virus and putting in place […]
Read moreThere’s an exceptional opportunity for a bright and critical-minded economist who is as passionate about social justice and working on behalf of unions and working people as they are about working with spreadsheets: CLC Senior Economist. Application deadline September 21st. More details and job posting here.
Read moreOntario Conservative leader Doug Ford finally released a partially costed version of his election promises in his Plan for Ontario in the last week before the election. This includes approximately $7.6 billion in tax cuts and revenue reductions and a net $500 million reduction in annual spending.[I] At the same time, Ford has also promised that “we will balance (the […]
Read moreThis is a third guest post by Edgardo Sepulveda, who is a Toronto-based expert in telecommunications and regulatory economics. Twitter: @E_R_Sepulveda By Edgardo Sepulveda In my previous post of January 29 I described how decisions by different Ontario governments gave rise to excess electricity generation with an inflated cost structure, leading to higher electricity prices and increased inequality. Since […]
Read moreThis provocative guest post submitted by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, was published earlier this year on their bnarchives website. Nitzan, professor of political economy at York University, and Bichler, who teaches political economy in Israel, are authors of Capital as Power, a Study of Order and Creorder and numerous related articles. To quote from the statement of purpose of the […]
Read moreWe’re pleased to present this very topical post by Edgardo Sepulveda examining what has caused Ontario’s rising high electricity prices. This is Edgardo’s second guest post as a PEF member, following his, first, which was an analysis of the impact of fiscal policy changes on post-tax income distribution. Edgardo has been an international consulting economist and expert advising Governments and operators […]
Read moreFinance Minister Bill Morneau tables his Fall Economic Statement on 1 November. We’ll likely find out then whether he has some has real treats, or if they’re planning more privatization tricks for provincial and municipal governments, as his business-dominated Advisory Council on Economic Growth proposed in the form of a public-private infrastructure bank (and through their new term for privatization, creating a […]
Read moreA version of this originally appeared in rabble. Conservative ads have focused on the NDP’s fiscal and economic record, claiming that the “NDP Can’t Manage Moneyâ€. These include another round of staged interviews with people who repeat “the NDP can’t manage moneyâ€, “the cost of their plans is hugeâ€, that “business will be under attackâ€, they’ll be “reckless spenders†and […]
Read moreHere’s a link to the longer analysis I prepared of the federal budget, now on-line at CUPE’s website, to accompany the press release and notes we put out immediately following the budget. The entire document may be too long to post here, so here’s the 1st two paragraphs. The Big Picture: more tax cuts for the rich: nothing for jobs and […]
Read moreThe Fredericton Daily Gleaner published an op-ed I wrote about how the province doesn’t have a structural deficit, despite the government claiming it does. The commentary piece is behind a pay wall so I’ve copied it below. Last month, CUPE New Brunswick also published a paper I wrote on this issue, Deficit Déjà Voodoo: is New Brunswick really headed off the […]
Read moreI started producing an e-weekly earlier this year, Eye on the Economy: making sense of recent economic events, as a more regularly complement to the quarterly Economy at Work I also produce. Each issue contains a main commentary/analysis piece on a topical issue and also a curated round up with about five shorter briefs.  In an age of info overload and never […]
Read moreThe Ontario Auditor General’s 2014 Report includes a chapter on Infrastructure Ontario’s P3 program that is particularly damning–and corresponds with many of the criticisms made on this blog and elsewhere by myself and others. While the headlines were that P3 projects cost the province an additional $8 billion than if they were procured traditionally, the report documents numerous other problems […]
Read more(The following is something I’ve prepared for the next issue of CUPE’s Economy at Work, a popular economics quarterly publication I produce.) In his annual Economic and Fiscal Update (EFU), finance minister Joe Oliver told Canadians that while the federal government will finally record a surplus next year after seven years of deficits, we can’t expect the economy to grow […]
Read moreIn a little noticed comment, Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently was reported to say: “Dropping our tax rate has not caused the government’s corporate income tax revenues to fall, which indicates that it does in fact attract business.” No one seems to have questioned his statement, even though it was made on the same day Canada dropped to 15th place […]
Read moreToday the Ontario Federation of Labour and CUPE Ontario published calculations I prepared of how Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak’s promise to eliminate 100,000 public sector jobs will be felt at the local level, on cities and communities across the province. The original OFL release provides info on the magnitude of these impacts for the 15 largest census metropolitan areas across Ontario, for which […]
Read moreIt’s a bit of a headscratcher. First, Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak builds his whole campaign around a promise to create one million new jobs in Ontario over eight years, then one of his first campaign commitments threats  is to reduce the number of Ontario government employees by 100,000, together with a wage freeze for every government workers and lower spending […]
Read moreHere’s the first section of the budget summary and analysis I’ve prepared for CUPE. The full version is on-line on CUPE’s website at http://cupe.ca/economics/missing-action-federal-budget-2014 together with CUPE’s press release at: http://cupe.ca/economics/federal-budget-2014-help-hurt-canadian Missing In Action: Federal Budget 2014 CUPE Federal Budget 2014 Summary and Response  Conservatives ignore pressing economic needs with a Do-little budget Using more of their doublespeak, the Harper […]
Read moreAnother column by Gwyn Morgan in the Globe and Mail and another case of a 0.1 percenter telling the rest of us to “Do as I say, not as I do.” This time, it’s Gwyn recycling trash from the CFIB and Fraser Institute to claim defined benefit pensions for public sector workers are too generous and are simply unaffordable, and […]
Read moreTim Hudak is sounding — and looking — even more like Scott Walker these days. The Ontario Conservative leader’s pledge to create one million new jobs sounds like a direct rip-off of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s promise to create 250,000 new jobs in his four year term.  Only the state, er province and numbers are different. And how is the […]
Read moreBuried in the federal government’s recent Update of Economic and Fiscal Projections are figures showing the Harper government is set to squeeze federal government’s role to the smallest it has been in seventy years.   (Bill Curry at the Globe also just wrote about this, but without figures further back than 1958). Total federal government spending as a share of the economy is projected […]
Read more(The following is slightly adapted from a short piece on page 3 in the new issue of Economy at Work, the quarterly publication I produce for CUPE, which also covers a lot of other relevant issues.)  It’s been a little over four years since Canada’s economy bottomed out in mid 2009. While we didn’t suffer as deep a recession as many other […]
Read moreMost of us know the old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Â Â That’s why we’re told by teachers to keep our kids home from school when they’re sick, so they get better and they don’t get others sick as well. Â It’s why there’s increased focus on leading healthy lives, prevention and wellness. However, the benefits […]
Read moreThe City of Regina is engaged in a controversial debate about a proposed public private partnership (P3) for the city’s wastewater plant. Residents formed a Regina Water Watch group to keep the facility public. They collected enough names to take the issue to a municipal referendum on September 25th, despite attempts by the city to disallow signatures on spurious grounds.  […]
Read moreCanada is now the second biggest market for public private partnerships (P3s) in the world, as a recent Conference Board report showed (on page 30, see my initial critique here). P3s are big business: Canadian governments closed deals on a reported $7 billion in P3 contracts in both 2010 and 2011. This was the highest in the world in 2010 […]
Read moreUnfortunately the following note to readers from today’s release of the third and final set of data from the National Household Survey by Statistics Canada speaks for itself: Note to readers Comparability of low-income estimates Low-income estimates from the 2011 National Household Survey (NHS) compared with previous censuses show markedly different trends than those derived from other surveys and administrative data such as […]
Read moreThe Conference Board of Canada has produced another report on P3s, funded by the federal and provincial P3 agencies and the Canadian Council for Public Private Partnerships (CCPPP). Unfortunately and sadly predictably, it’s another exercise in largely blissful ignorance promoting P3s, while glossing over or ignoring their major problems. For instance, there’s no mention of the problems with the McGill […]
Read moreThere has appropriately been a lot a criticism about Bill C-377 at House of Commons committees and the Senate. Â Hugh Segal has been particularly eloquent as have the many submissions. Graham Cox has a good selection of them on his Citizens’ Press website. Here’s a short summary with a dozen reasons why it’s so bad: Twelve Reasons why C-377 is […]
Read moreAfter analyzing “research reports†issued by the Fraser Institute or the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), I usually end up shaking my head in disbelief. Do they really need to so grossly distort and manipulate the statistics to make their arguments? The answer is invariably “yesâ€. That’s because the underlying facts are often so at odds with their claims, […]
Read moreStatistics Canada’s release on the escalating incomes of the top 1 per cent gained a lot of media coverage — and also provoked some very defensive reactions by major organs of the Canadian media. This included an almost rabid column by Financial Post editor Terence Corcoran accusing Statistics Canada of engaging in class warfare and, in a McCarthyite manner, personally attacking […]
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