The Saskatchewan Party won 37 seats with 51% of the popular vote and the NDP won 21 seats with 37% of the vote. Obviously, the Saskatchewan Party’s victory is bad news for progressives. The provincewide figures mask significant regional variations. Outside of the main cities, the Saskatchewan Party won 27 seats with 62% of the rural vote. Two of the […]
Read moreSome of the knee-jerk commentary in response to my paper has been about what an ideal, or fair, tax system should really look like. These people question progressive taxation. To them, I quote Adam Smith from The Wealth of Nations (from Wikipedia): The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, […]
Read moreThe CCPA today released my paper, Eroding Tax Fairness: Tax Incidence in Canada, 1990-2005. The Toronto Star ran a front-page story on it that is quite good. This paper was a long time in the making – while it might seem fairly straightforward to calculate the share of taxes in income for different groups, there are many tricky data and […]
Read moreIn yesterday’s Ontario Farmer, the federal Minister of Agriculture, Gerry Ritz, railed against “tremendous inter-provincial trade barriers.” His example was restrictions on moving beef between provinces. My understanding is that, to the extent such restrictions exist, they arise from federal regulations rather than from provincial policy. Ritz claimed, “I have no problems with Quebec beef coming into Ontario as long […]
Read moreIn an op-ed printed today, John Mortimer of LabourWatch applauds an Ontario court’s decision not to enforce the Public Service Alliance of Canada’s fines against members who crossed picket lines. One wonders how his inane rhetoric about “human rights” slipped past the Financial Post’s editors. To an economist, this issue is a classic “free rider problem.” Collectively, the workers benefit […]
Read moreYay, we’re winning the war on poverty, says Margaret Wente. Her recent column is based around the fact that the poverty rate has fallen in recent years. Wente uses this to go on a latte-fuelled SUV romp over the bodies of people who work with (and give a shit about) the poorest in our society. The sum total of statistics […]
Read moreHeather Scoffield had an interesting little “how-to” guide in Saturday’s Globe and Mail on the macroeconomic effects of the improvement in Canada’s terms of trade (the result of soaring global prices for the resources which Canada increasingly exports). The terms of trade, for the blissfully uninitiated, is the ratio of a country’s export prices to its import prices. You can […]
Read moreThe whole idea of the free-market is that the relentless pursuit of self-interest leads people to do greedy things that ultimately benefit all of us. That’s what makes it so humorous to see that appeals to voluntarism have become one of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s major policy tools. At least there was a bit of poetic justice in his phony, […]
Read moreIntroduction The Canadian Labour Congress, the Ontario Federation of Labour, the Quebec Federation of Labour (FTQ) and the United Steelworkers recently commissioned a major, technical report on the manufacturing sector from the economic consulting firm Informetrica. (The study “Economic Effects of Structural Changes in Manufacturing: A Retrospective View†is available from http://www.informetrica.com/IL_ManReport1_Final.pdf). The study confirms a great deal of what […]
Read moreLike other disciplines, economics tends to organize material into narratives. It is worth scrutinizing the “stylized facts” that underlie these narratives, as page B15 of Saturday’s Globe endeavoured to do. One piece of conventional wisdom is that the Canadian dollar’s value is driven by the skyrocketing price of oil. David Wolf argued, and Heather Scoffield reported, that the loonie is probably […]
Read moreWhile reading a recent issue of l’Aut’ Journal, I came accross a story claiming that the Montréal municipal police offers privately some of its services (e.g. bodyguards). Well, a rapid visit on the website of the municipal police verified that claim. In fact, there is a whole brochure on the site which details all the services that can be privately […]
Read moreAs Andrew, Bruce, Marc, Ish and others have correctly argued, last week’s Economic Statement wastes money that could otherwise have financed vital public programs. Two tables in the Statement are critical to this case. Table 2.2 (page 45) estimates the costs of newly-announced tax cuts. Table 3.1 (page 73) estimates the costs of all tax cuts adopted since the Conservatives came to power. The […]
Read moreMy take on this morning’s Labour Force Survey follows: Goods-Producing Industries Cut Jobs Canada’s beleaguered manufacturing sector lost a further 3,500 jobs in October. Employment also fell by 1,900 in natural resources, 1,900 in agriculture, and 700 in construction. Saskatchewan Bucks the Western Trend Although more part-time jobs increased total employment, western Canada lost full-time jobs in October. Specifically, British […]
Read moreToday’s Survey of Employment, Payroll and Hours doesn’t seem to support the rosy view that our labour market is turning out better jobs and higher wages. Of the 285,000 payroll jobs created over the past year (August 06 to August 07, seasonally adjusted), almost half (46% or 130,000) were in the two lowest-paid broad industrial sectors, retail trade (85,000 net […]
Read moreAlthough I generally disagree with Andrew Coyne’s take on economic issues, I enjoy his commentary because it is almost always articulate and well-informed. Last Saturday’s column, which may be his second-last at the National Post before moving to Maclean’s, was a glaring exception. In particular, it contradicted Coyne’s own previous contentions. When the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador took an equity […]
Read moreThe Globe and Mail’s mini-budget coverage was such that, even after Marc’s thoughtful and thorough critique, a couple of important criticisms remain to be made. It identified Bruce Campbell as “executive director of the left-wing Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives” (page A5). In addition to several economists from banks and finance companies, it quoted representatives of the C. D. Howe Institute, […]
Read moreI spoke to a senior Department of Finance official who tells me that the $6.1 Billion annual revenue loss number for 2012-13 when the rate moves to 15% is calculated relative to the already announced reduction in the rate to 18.5% in 2011-12, NOT relative to the current rate of 22%. To my mind this means that the “real” annual […]
Read moreToday’s Globe features nothing but gushing praise for the Tory tax cuts, and complete antipathy towards obvious social spending measures that would actually improve people’s lives. This cave-in to the self-interested perspective of corporate Canada is really quite scary (I was going to say alarming or troubling, but hey, it’s Halloween). Those who favour tax cuts are fortunate to have […]
Read moreIt’s not often that you can detect even a nuance of difference between Finance and the Bank on key economic issues, but do I detect a hint of greater alarm on the part of the former over the recent super-rapid appreciation of the Canadian Dollar? In yesterday’s Economic Statement (Chapter 1, p.19) “If the Canadian dollar were to remain close […]
Read moreThe Economic Statement announced a cut in the federal corporate income tax rate from 21% today (22.1% including the corporate surtax, which is being phased out), to 19.5% in 2008, to just 15% by 2012-13. The new 15% rate is well below the already announced reduction to 18.5% by 2011-12. The revenue cost in 2012-13 when the rate cut is […]
Read moreThe surprise Economic and Fiscal Update delivered today demonstrates how politically clever the Harper government is, and at the same time, how out of touch they are. At a time when there are major challenges facing the country, this update, as predicted, squanders the opportunity. Tax cuts will not build any affordable housing, they will not reduce poverty, they will […]
Read moreThe significance of this Economic Statement is political in much more than the narrow partisan sense of the word. It does set up the Conservatives nicely for an election (to the extent that the GST and Personal Income Tax cuts timed to be felt in 2008 resonate with the public.) More importantly, it implements a right-wing agenda in a fashion […]
Read moreAs reported in yesterday’s Globe ROB p.1, Merill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal seems set to be the fall guy for his firm losing Billions on asset-backed securities. That sounds like bad news for him. But news of his pending departure drove up Merrill shares, giving Mr O’Neal a paper gain of $16 Million on his stock and option holdings of […]
Read moreSwelling federal surpluses provide a real opportunity for the federal government to get serious about the priorities of most Canadians: for aggressive climate change action, including major new public transportation projects; fighting poverty and homelessness in our cities, including big investments in non-market housing; in building a world-class early learning and pre-school system. This opportunity will be squandered by the […]
Read moreEconomists tend to be remarkably circumspect about racial discrimination in employment, and Statistics Canada is similarly loath to attribute differences in employment and earnings to racial status in other than the most nuanced way. Yet the evidence increasingly shows that racial discrimination is a matter of empirical fact in Canada, and not just a matter of perception on the part […]
Read moreA recent debate on strategic voting between Erin Weir and Matthew Bergbusch prompts me to wonder the extent to which liberals are more progressive than conservatives in the federal political arena. I think we can mostly agree that on social issues, such as gay or women’s rights, the liberals do stand on the left of the conservatives. And this is […]
Read moreA group of BC-based academic economists have joined together to call for a carbon tax in a letter to BC Finance Minister Carole Taylor. BC is taking suggestions towards a climate change action budget this February. I’m not holding my breath that a carbon tax is likely; from what I’m hearing out of Victoria this stage of the game is […]
Read moreNotwithstanding the usual doom and gloom from the oil industry and its cheerleaders, Premier Stelmach’s decision to increase oil and gas royalties by $1.4 billion in 2009 is an unduly timid move in the right direction. The provincial NDP leader summed it up as follows: “The premier has compromised yet again a report that represented a compromise in the first […]
Read moreCBC recently reported that Conrad Black was acquitted on most of the charges against him because a lone juror dug up critical evidence that his own lawyers did not present. This revelation seems to support Mark Steyn’s criticism of these lawyers.
Read moreYesterday, the C. D. Howe Institute released a Backgrounder supporting TILMA by Kathleen Macmillan and Patrick Grady. They make the most sensible case for the deal that I have read, but give short shrift to its pitfalls. They previously co-authored papers on internal trade and labour mobility for a federal conference that I attended. Days after this conference, Grady largely […]
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