Year: 2006

Ethanol’s Dirty Little Secrets

How do you convince consumers that what's bad for you is good for you? You feed them a load of bull, and hope they don't catch on. So it is with the Ontario and federal governments, which are spinning their pro-ethanol campaigns as consumer-friendly solutions to our...

Featured News

The Renewable Part of Hydrogen is the Hype

Once again, the world is staging ClimateFest 26, aka the United Nations Conference of the Parties, where peddlers of alternative energy schemes try to plunge their dippers into the river of climate change funding that flows around the world. This funding is generated...

Equalization should be Scrapped

In the debate on how best to reform "equalization" -- the system by which Ottawa transfers cash from the richer provinces to poorer provinces -- nobody is asking the obvious question: Has the time come to scrap it? Yes, the principle of equalization was, unwisely,...

Tax Me Out to the Ballgame

Art Modell, owner of the NFL Baltimore Ravens, observed during one of his struggles to get local taxpayers to build him a stadium that “The pride and presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries, and I say that with all due respect...

Urban Legend

Jane Jacobs took her pen to my draft and crossed out one phrase, then another. "This isn't clear," she said in her matter-of-fact way, writing in her revisions. "And why isn't the post office mentioned? Or railways?" It was 1994 and I had brought Jane a fund-raising...

The Shape of Health Care to Come:

The Canadian Health Care Consensus Group have come together to provide a platform for bold, reasoned and practical plans for genuine reform of the health system and to demonstrate that there is an emerging consensus among reform-minded observers about the direction that real reform must take.