The Task Force on Older Workers appointed by HRSDC Minister Solberg did endorse – in a limited way- labour’s call for severance pay to be ignored for EI purposes – but only for long tenure workers with a record of no prior EI claims in the previous 5 years. (My earlier post on this is http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2008/04/09/employment-insurance-and-severance-pay/ Similarly, they endorsed our […]
Read moreFriday’s eye-popping employment numbers (55,000 lost jobs, the worst one-month toll since the 1991 recession), combined with the previous week’s negative GDP numbers (down 0.1% in May, the fourth decline in six months), have raised once again the spectre that Canada’s total economy is teetering on the edge of “official” recession. The suspense is growing as we head toward the […]
Read moreI was recently trolling through Statistics Canada (LICO – After Tax) data on CANSIM and discovered to my slight surprise that the incidence of poverty (or low income as StatsCan politely prefers to describe it) has fallen very significantly among the elderly (age 65 and over.) I knew the rate was relatively low and had been falling, but it has […]
Read moreWith this whole Internet thing, I have not cracked a copy of The Yellow Pages in years. Somehow I assumed that at some point they would just stop delivering them in favour of online distribution or give me the option for a CD-ROM. Alas, no. So after receiving the bulk that is the Yellow Pages on my doorstep this week, […]
Read moreHere’s my self-indulgent Summer vacation blog. John Kenneth Galbraith is rightly renowned for the contrast he drew between private affluence and public squalor in the US. Yet he also argued that public investment is needed to sustain private affluence. What the US has generally – but not always – got hugely wrong is the balance between investment in the public […]
Read moreMarc Lee took me gently to task a couple of weeks ago for being too modest and not promoting my new book (Economics for Everyone, meant to be a “primer” on economics for trade unionists and other rank-and-file folk) on this blog: http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2008/06/20/economics-for-everyone/ Thanks for your highly kind words Marc, and the prod. Instead, I will draw to your attention […]
Read moreHere is the latest from the Conference Board: Its outlook projects Canada’s economy to grow 1.7 per cent this year – a far more bullish prediction than the Bank of Canada, which on Tuesday revised downward its growth forecast to one per cent this year. What is interesting is how the CP report calls them “bullish”. Back in February, I […]
Read moreThe CCPA released today a really important contribution to our understanding of climate change and inequality. The study focuses on Bill Rees’ concept of the ecological footprint, which is not exactly the same as greenhouse gas emissions, but highly correlated. Some key findings: The richest 10% of Canadian households create an ecological footprint of 12.4 hectares per capita – nearly […]
Read moreI went trawling through the detailed trade by commodity data on the Industry Canada (Strategis) web site the other day in search of examples of potential job creation from raising the Canadian content of public sector procurement (as called for, not just by the labour movement but also, recently, by the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters.) As a very rough rule […]
Read moreIt’s not often that I get my hopes up about a potential volte-face in the way we talk and think about economics at the policy and political level but this is by far the best news I’ve heard in a long long time. It seems that our very own Jamie Galbraith, scion of John Kenneth Galbraith and keynote speaker for […]
Read moreCCPA submitted a brief to Vancouver City Council about the city’s EcoDensity Initiative, by myself and co-authors, Erick Villagomez, Penny Gurstein, David Eby and Elvin Wyly. We have been working on a bigger climate justice paper looking at affordable housing and EcoDensity, but a short window came up for written submissions on the revised and updated EcoDensity Charter, so we […]
Read moreI have been critical of the Globe‘s business reporting practices in the past (especially its tendency to quote Bank economists as “objective” observers of economic events) but on Saturday, it ran one of the best business pieces I’ve read in a long time. The article, titled “Who is responsible for the global food crisis?” is a solid and thorough piece […]
Read moreSummer is coming and so is my favourite band, the Drive-By Truckers. A rare Vancouver appearance at a small venue, the Biltmore Caberet, walking distance from my house. Heck, last year I drove to Portland to see what turned out to be one of the best live shows of my life. I would make the case that DBT are currently […]
Read moreWith credit to Edward Sussex who sends this summary ” This UNDP-IPC paper concludes that the real per capita income of the vast majority or the first eighty per cent of any nation (vast majority income – VMIpc), is of particular interest in comparing the income levels and income inequality of countries. It finds that average income measures are not […]
Read moreOK this is silly, but whatever… I was invited to participate in a most excellent annual fund-raising project sponsored by Creative Works Studio — a Toronto initiative that uses art therapy with the mentally ill. They invite a number of so-called “celebrities” (definitely stretching the definition in my case) to actually paint a picture, that gets auctioned off at a […]
Read moreAh, the confluence of the events! The tabling of a “prudent†federal budget for uncertain times, followed a week later by news of slowing economic growth. Of course, rumors of the economy’s imminent decline may be greatly exaggerated, given January’s jobs report and trade data. But let’s carry forth with the economic accounts data. Earlier, Erin and Toby drew […]
Read moreMark Weisbrot and his colleagues at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Analysis have just released a report that estimates the economic impact of a U.S. slowdown on the Americas, including Canada.   They estimate the impact simply through trade adjustment, assuming in the low adjustment scenario that the U.S. trade deficit falls from 5.2% of GDP in 2007 to […]
Read moreThe New York Times has an article today about how, unlike households, American corporations are piling up cash. Unlike most American consumers, whose failure to save has exasperated economists for years, the typical American corporation has increased its savings so sharply that it probably has enough cash on hand to completely pay off its debts. While I haven’t looked at […]
Read moreAnd so, as we recover from Tuesday’s budget and recoil at the spectacle that is the Cadman affair, let us all pause and mark this moment for it may be the last of an era, one we may come to know as the “pre-PBO” era, an era where, in the context of contrived “budgetary scarcity,” the political goal is to […]
Read moreFinance Minister Jim Flaherty set very low expectations for the Harper government’s third budget – and managed to deliver even less.     There is nothing in this budget for public health care, childcare, poverty or homelessness, very little for the environment or for Aboriginal Canadians, nothing for working Canadians, nothing for women, nothing to improve public pensions, no long-term solutions for […]
Read moreThe government has announced in the Budget that it is creating a new, independent Crown Corporation, the Canada Employment Insurance Financing Board (CEIFB) to manage a separate EI bank account, and to set premiums from 2009 on. This responds to employer concerns re paying EI premiums which are “too high” as opposed to worker concerns over access to and the […]
Read moreThanks Adrew, Erin, Marc for the nice budget analysis. Far from my mind to take people’s attention from it but while I was listening live to its delivery on CBC, I remembered an article I had read a couple of weeks ago on Cyberpresse (sorry, in French, am looking for the English counterpart). It stated the results of a survey […]
Read moreWith recession on everyone’s lips south of the border, how much longer can Canada hold out before we begin to feel the nasty effects in the Great White North? I am guessing that the Tories want to go to the polls now because they know the economy is slipping and they do not want to have to wear the downturn […]
Read moreConservative Senator Hugh Segal is actively promoting the very old new idea of a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) and Senate Committe hearings may soon follow. I’m all for providing more money to low income families and would willingly scrap social assistance as we know it for something that is more generous and less punitive – and will concede that Segal […]
Read moreA lot of US progressives, including Dean Baker, and Larry Mishel from the Economic Policy Institute, are weighing in on the need for a significant fiscal stimulus package, in the range of 1% of GDP. http://www.epi.org/subjectpages/stimulus.cfm Citing – entirely reasonably – the need for measures which will have a quick impact on a slowing economy, these packages tilt to income […]
Read moreFrom today’s Observer – http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2247583,00.htmlÂ
Read moreWhere is Finance Minister Flaherty? by Doug Peters and Arthur Donner. (from today’s Toronto Star) (Doug Peters is the former Chief Economist of The Toronto-Dominion Bank and was Secretary of State (Finance) from 1993 to 1997. Arthur Donner, a Toronto economic consultant, began his career as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of NewYork.) “The credit problems […]
Read moreNiels Veldhuis of the Fraser Institute takes me to task today in a Letter to the Editor in response to the story, ‘Tax the rich more in Canada, study urges” (Nanaimo Daily News, Dec. 12). He claims that “the story focusing on the report by Canadian Labour Congress economist Andrew Jackson is seriously misleading… the report conveniently ignores the impact […]
Read moreEarly this morning I finished The Road and cannot resist a plug. A friend of mine who shares a concern for the end of humanity brought it to my attention. I picked up a copy intending to read it over the holidays, but before I knew it I was 50 pages in and could not put it down. Like other […]
Read moreIf only the news could be this good every week: Serial killer Robert Pickton gets 25 years. Disgraced tycoon Conrad Black gets 6.5 years. Former President of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, gets six years for abuse of power (with more charges pending). Karlheinz Shreiber tells of dirty dealings with the Mulroney government. The Mayor of Ottawa is charged with fraud. And […]
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