FORMER NDP premier Ed Schreyer blasted the current NDP government yesterday for its plan to force Manitoba Hydro to use its electricity exports to keep its natural gas rates unnaturally low. Energy Minister Dave Chomiak, who yesterday said Schreyer is his best friend,...
Year: 2005
Even With Gas at 4¢ Per Litre, Venezuelans Still Complain
While the rest of the world complains about soaring gasoline prices, Venezuela has a different problem: gasoline is almost free and its price is dropping.
The Man Who Created A Scorecard on Ottawa
“Any objective assessment of our past success in shaping Canada’s future must conclude that we have a great opportunity to make a future that continuously improves, and I think that we are going to get better and better at that.” Big government, take cover!
The Alberta Teachers’ Association responds to our work on Edmonton’s public schools
Alberta’s largest teachers’ union didn’t like what the Frontier Centre had to say about the Edmonton Public School Board.
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Timeless Wisdom – The Politics of Successful Structural Reform
It’s a well-known pattern in public policy – profligate politicians damaging their economies with out-of-control spending, massive borrowing and higher taxes – inevitably leading to fiscal crisis, sharp declines in growth and ultimately rapidly falling currency value...
Canada’s National Hysteria in the 21st Century
Mass hysteria is the spontaneous manifestation of a particular behaviour by many people. There are numerous historical examples: Middle Age nuns at a convent in France spontaneously began to meow like cats; at another convent, nuns began biting one another. In...
If It’s Broke, Don’t Fix It
Equalization should not be a political issue that pits region against region. It should be a national economic issue that pits Canadians against their governments.
Searching for a Miracle Solution
This might seem an odd moment for a senior doctor to call for a switch in the way that the NHS is financed. Yet that is what Bernard Ribeiro, the new president of the Royal College of Surgeons, has done. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph published on August 13th, he argued that a tax-based system will be unable to cope with future health-care demands. Instead, Britain ought to emulate the social-insurance model of Germany and France, in which the main source of finance is contributions levied on workers’ pay.
Living in Interesting Energy Times
If Manitoba priced its hydro-electric resource at market rates, it would garner about a billion dollars more in annual revenues.
Getting Results from Markets
One of my favorite movie quotes is Hayley Mills’s line in Pollyanna, “When you look for the bad in mankind, expecting to find it, you surely will.” And that’s what Mr. Stracher and many others do. While you’re busy looking for the bad, you miss so much of the good.
Fretting over a U.S. decline? Fear not
OTTAWA -- In the 1960s, it was Germany. In the 1980s, Japan. Throughout the postwar years, until the 1990s, it was the Soviet Union. Now it's China. A devastated nation starts from nothing, introduces market-economy reforms, goes to double-digit growth -- and people...
The Free-Marketeers Rise Up
Even when the economy is in bad shape more and more think tanks get launched
Always Low Tactics. Always.
What Wal-Mart’s opponents can’t win through organizing or in the marketplace, it seems, they now seek to achieve through the raw exercise of political power. One can hardly blame them for sticking with what works.
Overtaxed in Manitoba
The Doer government should take a good look at this report, and many others that draw similar conclusions, before drafting its 2006 budget.
We Need 250 States
Terry Anderson and Peter Hill make an argument that suggests that democracy does not scale well. As the size of the constituency group gets large, the politician becomes less accountable. Politicians find it easier to extract rents and abuse powers