Breakfast on the Frontier
Year: 2010
Bureaucrats Swindle Greens In Cancun
As green negotiators in Cancun ended their two-week junket it’s clear that the bureaucrats did what bureaucrats do: they kept a ‘process’ (job-creating bureaucratic gravy train) alive while doing little or nothing about the problem they were supposed to solve.
There Will Be Fuel
The same high prices that inspired dire fear in the first place helped to resolve them. High oil and gas prices produced a wave of investment and drilling, and technological innovation has unlocked oceans of new resources. Oil and gas from ocean bottoms, the Arctic and shale rock fields are quickly replacing tired fields in places like Mexico, Alaska and the North Sea.
Federalism’s Free Lunch: Why should Alberta taxpayers have to pay for PEI to provide students with free college?
“Maxime Bernier is right: End transfer payments to the provinces. Let Ottawa give them greater room to tax their own residents, but let provincial legislatures also have to make the tough choice to increase taxes on their own citizens if the politicians want to spend more on health, education, welfare and other provincial functions Ottawa is now subsidizing.”
Featured News
Our Health Ministers Need to Take a Lesson from Hockey Coaches
Those of you who are tired of my rants about the demise of our once great health system will be pleased to know that this is my last editorial. I am retiring from the BCMJ Editorial Board; currently, I am the longest-serving member (more than 20 years). I have been a...
Zinchuk: Oilpatch Only Spending Half What It Spent in 2014
Back in the lofty, pre-Justin Trudeau government days of 2014, back when oil was booming, pipelines were planned to east and west coasts, and Alberta and Saskatchewan were swimming in money, around $81 billion was spent in capital expenditures (CAPEX) in the Canadian...
Beyond Potash: Future of the potash industry
Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan (PCS) controls more than one-fifth of the world’s reserves of potash; its home province of Saskatchewan sits on roughly half of that amount. As we move forward, an assessment of our agricultural policies and marketing practices in the context of the rapidly changing world of agricultural commodities is long overdue. The strategy should make sense to all Canadians, both politically and economically.
Did 2010’s Man of the Year Die in 1897?
“If you’re a renter who reads the newspapers, you have spent the last few years in a constant state of low-level anger at this “bizarre spectacle”—the unexamined assumption that perpetually escalating housing prices are the natural state of human affairs, and certainly a good enough proxy for economic health that the two quantities are freely interchangeable. How much more bizarre must it look in England?”
Just Another Brick?: Brad Wall finds himself in an interesting position after the BHP Potash takeover rejection
With his political stocks riding high in Saskatchewan and across Canada, Brad Wall is now in a position to move on tax reform and use his influence against the policies of supply management and single desk wheat marketing.
Rejecting Subsidy, Shunning Dependency: Maritime Provinces wish to sail to self-reliance.
Ben Eisen’s study of “stealth equalization” provides further evidence for the new movement of Atlantic Canadians who understand that federal subsidies undermine their economic capacity for self-reliance and foster dependency.
Stealth Equalization: How Federal Government Employment Acts as a Regional Economic Subsidy in Canada
Federal government employment is distributed unevenly across Canada. These jobs are found in high concentration in four out of the five major recipients of equalization – Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Such uneven distribution amounts to a hidden form of wealth transfer worth more than $2 billion.
Media Release – Stealth Equalization: How Federal Government Employment Acts as a Regional Subsidy in Canada
Federal government employment is distributed unevenly across Canada. These jobs are found in high concentration in four out of the five major recipients of equalization – Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Such uneven distribution amounts to a hidden form of wealth transfer worth more than $2 billion.
Yellow Brick Road to Green Serfdom: You would expect CEOs to have a few good words to say on free markets
“Ayn Rand famously remarked that the only certain consequence of occupying the middle of the policy road is that you get run over. The Canadian Council of Chief Executives appears determined to stick to the dotted white line. This week the CCCE released “Clean Growth 2.0,” its second call for more policy co-ordination — and more policy — on energy and the environment.”
Water New Target as Climate Change Hysteria Falters
“Water is the latest target. More and more stories about running out of water appear. Most are linked to the false claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that droughts will increase in severity with global warming.”
The Two Left Coasts: Why the GOP wave didn’t wash over New York and California
“Tuesday’s GOP landslide didn’t spare many Democrats, but it did stop at the state lines of California and New York. These coastal exceptions deserve some explanation, because they illustrate the difficulties Republicans will face if they fail to reform entitlements, taxes and public spending.”