Keith 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 moreIn successfully seeking the 1980 Republican nomination for President, Ronald Reagan embraced the Laffer Curve theory that tax cuts would increase tax revenues. At the time, rival candidate George Bush Sr. derided this notion as “Voodoo economics” and it has been since been discredited many times. Jack Mintz struggles to revive the theory in today’s 2007 Tax Competitiveness Report, declaring […]
Read moreThe Canadian Labour Congress sent the following letter to the Bank of Canada today. September 20, 2007 David A. Dodge Governor Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0G9 Dear Governor Dodge: I write to urge you to reduce interest rates by 0.5% on October 16th to match the recent US rate cut. My letter of June 27th […]
Read moreThere’s a piece by Heather Scoffield in today’s Globe on the issue of the impact of exchange rate appreciation on consumer prices. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070920.wdollar20/BNStory/Front TD Bank argues that only a modest portion of the fall in import prices is being passed on, while Philip Cross from Statscan argues there is a much tighter link. On the face of it, he has […]
Read moreA clear contradiction has emerged in John Tory’s election promises. It reflects an existing tension in the McGuinty government’s position. As noted previously on this blog, the Conservative Party’s election platform proposes that Ontario join TILMA. As reported in today’s Globe and Mail, Tory has pledged to require that provincially-funded institutions buy their food and beverages from Ontario producers. Such […]
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 moreCIBC World Market recently put out quite an interesting report on the future of world oil supply and demand and the implications for Canada. ( OPEC’s Growing Call on Itself.) http://research.cibcwm.com/economic_public/download/occrept62.pdf The major point is that OPEC countries plus other major oil producing countries such as Russia and Mexico are consuming a fast-rising share of their own oil output at […]
Read moreUpon returning from Montreal, where I volunteered for the NDP on by-election night, I discovered that the US Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a whopping half point. I do not have a fully-formed analysis of either Mulcair’s victory or the rate reduction, but would like to kick-off some discussion on this blog. Mulcair’s win strikes me as an important […]
Read moreI’ve pasted in below quite an interesting analysis of the current financial crisis, by Pierre Habbard of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD. The Charts have gone missing but are not essential. Financialisation and the “sub-prime†financial crisis – Issues for future regulation TUAC Secretariat Paris, 5 September 2007 The phenomenal growth of the derivative […]
Read moreHuman Resources and Social Development Canada have posted a research report http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/en/publications_resources/research/categories/inclusion/2007/sp_680_05_07_e/sp_680_05_07e.pdf It is no secret or surprise that new immigrants (86% of whom are workers of colour) face more significant labour market barriers than other working-age Canadians, and that they are at greater risk of experiencing poverty. But more empirical detail is always useful. This study uses StatsCan (SLID) […]
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 moreSeveral of us regularly provide media commentary through our jobs at the CCPA, CAW and CLC. Once in a while, reporters quote statements posted on this blog in that capacity. However, the Progressive Economics Forum itself rarely receives media coverage. The excerpts below are from page L4 of today’s Globe and Mail. This story drew upon my “Levitt’s Been Thunderstruck” post.  For […]
Read more“Dion Would Wield Tax Axe to Spur Growth” was the headline in Tuesday’s Financial Post. The story reported that “Mr. Dion said his party would look to cut taxes across the board” but that “He would not elaborate on which taxes he would cut.” However, Monday’s Liberal press release seemed quite clear about which taxes would be on the chopping […]
Read moreErin’s recent post http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2007/09/12/government-size-canada-us/ prompted me to read Ferris and Winer’s interesting piece on the size of government in Canada and the US. The underlying data for the article have been usefully posted by the authors at http://http-server.carleton.ca/~winers/ (You’ll have to find the spread sheet posted at that site under author’s papers, and then look at the sheet for functional […]
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 moreOn Monday, Ontario’s Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity released a paper entitled, Prosperity, Inequality, and Poverty. As Andrew Sharpe pointed out in a review of Jack Mintz’s book, free-market “policy entrepreneurs” often completely ignore the distributional consequences of their recommendations. The Institute deserves credit for trying to grapple with distributional issues (and also for quoting Sharpe extensively). The Institute observes […]
Read moreThere are several interesting articles in the most recent (June 2007) issue of Canadian Public Policy, but the one that grabbed my attention examines the size of government in Canada and the US. Most commentators assume that the Canadian public sector is significantly larger. A few point out that the huge reduction of Canadian-government spending (relative to GDP) since the […]
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 moreStatistics Canada today released a study on immigrants in the job market, based on the recent inclusion of questions identifying immigration status in the Labour Force Survey. It’s no surprise to learn that unemployment levels are significantly higher among recent immigrants. In 2006, the unemployment rate among very recent immigrants (in Canada 5 years or less) was 11.5%, and it […]
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 moreThere’s no question that the Financial Post, as the National Post’s business section, tilts heavily to the right. However, today’s letters section (FP15) could almost have been copied and pasted from this blog. In the first letter, Shalom Schachter responds to the whiny Labour Day op-ed from John Mortimer of LabourWatch. In the second letter, Kris Larson notes that continued […]
Read moreThe Canadian Labour Congress news release follows: Employment statistics: no plan for coming layoffs, Georgetti says OTTAWA – “With so many high profile layoffs announced recently that have yet to come into effect, it is hard to find consolation in the modest employment creation statistics for the last month,” says Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress in regard to […]
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 moreHere’s the link to a major empirical study on the impacts of the Liberal cuts to the Employment Insurance program, with a specific emphasis on impacts on women workers. The study is by Monica Townson and Kevin Hayes and was commissioned by Status of Women Canada , and quietly posted to their web site a couple of weeks ago.
Read moreThe Fraser Institute’s latest study of North American labour markets intends to demonstrate that public-sector employment, minimum wages, unionization, and labour laws that facilitate collective bargaining damage labour-market performance. However, its “Index of Labour Market Performance” measures the quantity of jobs with almost no regard for quality. Even this questionable index is not negatively correlated with the policies criticized by […]
Read moreJanice Kennedy has a pretty good assessment of the Afghanistan debate in today’s Ottawa Citizen. My only slight quibble is that she does not mention the Liberals, who got us into this quagmire.
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