I’m not one of those who are inclined to see sovereign wealth funds as especially dangerous creatures, especially if the alternative is private transnational corporations. I’d like Canada to have more funds of our own, on the model of the Norwegian oil fund, though we do have one large one in the form of the CPP Investment Fund. Still, real […]
Read moreA nice commentary by Kristian Weis in the OECD Observer http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/printpage.php/aid/2229/Corporate_tax_warning.html
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 moreJim Stanford and I appeared before the Industry Committee yesterday to speak to the impacts of the high dollar, particularly on manufacturing. Chaired by James Rajotte, the Committee has done some good work on manufacturing and has worked in a relatively constructive and not totally partisan way to develop some useful reports and recommendations. Their report last year did urge […]
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 […]
Read moreCanWest ran a good summary of my study for the CCPA, “Why Charity Isn’t Enough: The Case for Raising Taxes on Canada’s Rich” released today. (pasted in below) Adding to Marc Lee’s recent work on tax incidence, my piece documents the fact that recent changes to personal income taxes in Canada have compounded rather than offset increased ‘top tail’ driven […]
Read moreI’ve posted below a link to a column in the Guardian by Polly Toynbee re the child poverty target in the UK. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2225566,00.html If you follow the comments below her column, it is striking how the response from the right precisely matches the recent discourse in Canada and comes with the same manifest untruths (eg that relative poverty must always […]
Read morehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgNCFsXGUa0 Freeman is the US’s leading liberal/left moderately pro union labour economist – best known for his book What Do Unions Do? and for a sustained critical engagement with the deregulated labour market model. Here’s an hour long interview on You Tube, as progecon goes multi media!
Read moreCanada’s Environment Minister, John Baird, is in Bali doing his best to undermine any progress towards a new pact on climate change. One of his arguments is that everyone needs to be on board, especially the US and China, the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases. However, it is worth thinking about who is responsible for the current problem before […]
Read moreFrom the Latin Americanist: Bank of the South launched Representatives of seven South American countries met on Sunday to formally launch the Bank of the South– a new regional development bank. In a ceremony in Buenos Aires, the bank was established with an initial capital of $7 billion and with the goal of acting as a viable alternative to other […]
Read moreWhat I find so remarkable about Conrad Black’s sentencing to six-and-a-half years in the big house is that none of it needed to happen. Black essentially fell victim to his own hubris: he had a fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and could easily have paid himself for the lavish lifestyle he and Babs thought they deserved. But […]
Read moreA theme I’ve posted on many times before but perhaps worth repeating once again, thanks to this post: How Laissez Faire was Adam Smith?Greg Whiteside writes in The Condo Metropolis Blog (7 December) here: “ADAM SMITH MUST BE ROLLING OVER IN HIS GRAVE RIGHT NOW†“Arguably the father of modern economics, Adam Smith was a proponent of a Laissez-Faire style […]
Read moreLast week, Scott Sinclair released an excellent briefing paper on efforts to attach $5-million penalties to the existing Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT). The debate about interprovincial barriers has become a four-ring circus: TILMA, the Ontario-Quebec negotiations, proposals to amend the AIT, and federal threats to invoke the trade and commerce power. In all of these areas, progressives need to […]
Read moreJust came across this interesting article relating comments by Frank Dobson, former UK health minister under Blair, on the plan by BC liberals to bring in the private sector in health care. Essentially, he thinks it was a fairly bad idea for Britain and advises BC not to go ahead. The following well represents his conclusion: [T]he changes made to […]
Read moreI have accepted a position in the United Steelworkers’ public policy department and will begin working at its Toronto office in February 2008. The Steelworkers are the largest industrial union in North America and one of the two largest industrial unions in Canada. (Jim works for the other one.) The Steelworkers strongly support the NDP and are trying to build a global […]
Read moreAs I mused yesterday about Facebook’s lack of respect for privacy in a bid to make billions, along comes a story putting Facebook’s valuation at $15 billion. But I’m not convinced Facebook is poised to take over the world just yet. Myspace once sat on top of the social networking world, and I’m wondering whether Facebook’s greedy compulsion to disregard […]
Read moreThe following Canadian Press story is an hilariously accurate report of what happened on Wednesday when the Finance Minister appeared before a Senate committee to pontificate about supposed interprovincial barriers: Flaherty’s remarks came shortly before a senior Finance Department official told a Senate committee that interprovincial trade rules cost the country about one quarter of one per cent of its gross […]
Read moreI’ve been on Facebook for almost a year now and have a love-hate relationship with it. For connecting me with old friends, feeling the daily pulse of people I know through status updates, and being a means of coordinating an event or party, thank you Facebook. But I am increasingly disturbed by the callous attitude taken by Facebook with regard […]
Read moreMy take on today’s Labour Force Survey follows: Unemployment Although November’s 42,600 increase in employment is striking, the 25,100 increase in unemployment deserves as much attention. While the number of workers employed grew by 0.3%, the number unemployed grew by 2.4%. Proportionally, unemployment growth in the last month nearly equals employment growth over the past year (2.7%). The higher unemployment […]
Read moreMy recent paper that found the top 1% of earners actually pay slightly lower tax rates than the bottom 10%, and much less than those in the middle- to upper-middle range, seems to have touched a nerve with my proposal that the rich actually pay more in taxes. For the defenseless and concerned wealthy out there, worry not, because Randall […]
Read moreDown in Seattle, at the Sightline Institute, Clark Williams-Derry chews on those bones of cap-and-trade and carbon tax options. Clark gets it that the Devil is in the details when it comes to design of such instruments to avoid adverse distributional impacts. Carbon Taxes: The Good and The Bad Last week’s Washington Post carried an interesting op-ed that argued for […]
Read moreA dispatch from PEF member (and essay contest winner!) Nick Falvo in Toronto: Just last week, the United Way of Greater Toronto released a report entitled “Losing Ground: The Persistent Growth Of Family Poverty In Canada’s Largest City.” Some of the findings are very disturbing. -After-tax median family income in Toronto is $41,500 ($6,100 less than in 1990, in constant […]
Read moreNouriel Roubini takes a dig at the Bank of Canada: [Yesterday] the Bank of Canada started to get it by, unexpectedly, cutting its policy rate by 25bps; but 25bps is puny given the liquidity crunch in global markets that has also spread to the Canadian markets. 50bps or more was the minimum necessary to deal with a Loonie that is […]
Read moreGeorge Monbiot gives us a good briefing note for the UN’s climate change conference in Bali. While the issue’s should not be understated, I do wonder whether we really need 10,000 people FLYING to Bali to meet “face-to-face”? Surely there is a better technological answer than that. What is Progress? When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, […]
Read moreSeeing more downside to the Canadian economy compared to worries about inflation, the Bank of Canada lowered overnight interest rates today by a quarter-point. The Bank has apparently been reading the PEF blog, as we have been calling for a rate cut for more than two months. (This is also personally reassuring as I decided to go with the variable […]
Read moreFrom Today’s (December 3) Toronto Star Canada’s economy is on the cusp of some very tough times, and it will require enlightened and timely central bank action to ensure that our economy avoids a recession next year. The crux of Canada’s economic problems is related to the slowing U.S. economy which threatens to fall into a recession, the huge increase […]
Read moreI was a testator (if I was a woman I’d be a testatrix!) to the Senate Special Committee on Aging today, along with national treasure, Bob Evans, a couple reps from the Canadian Institute on Health Information, and UNB’s Joe Ruggeri. We all pretty much agreed that aging is not the issue it is made out to be. As Evans […]
Read moreScott Sinclair, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Opening Statement, Re Proposed Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement Standing Committee on International Trade. Thursday, November 29, 2007 Thank you for the invitation to appear today and for the opportunity to raise some serious concerns about the proposed Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement and Canada’s current approach to bilateral trade agreements. In the time allotted, […]
Read moreA significant challenge in the TILMA debate has been that journalists often uncritically accept the premise that alleged inter-provincial barriers are a serious problem. Murray Campbell bucked this trend in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, where he drew the link between TILMA and last week’s Ontario-Quebec initiative. Electronically, his column appears under the headline “Premiers try to fix something that isn’t […]
Read moreThis morning, someone viewed Relentlessly Progressive Economics for the 200,000th time. Since reaching 100,000 views in June, our previous website has crept up to nearly 122,000 even though we added nothing to its 600 classic posts. Since being created in June, the current website has added 259 posts (including this one) and been viewed almost 79,000 times. Because the old […]
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