Inter-city bus ridership has decreased in Canada over the last several decades. However, the thriving curbside bus industry in the US and in Southern Ontario demonstrates that there is significant growth potential for a liberalized inter-city bus industry. While urban service would increase under liberalization, rural service would likely continue to decrease. To maintain rural ridership, provinces should create a system of least-cost subsidies to ensure that companies are willing to serve otherwise unprofitable, but socially desirable routes.
Year: 2012
U.S. Greens Shut Down Canadian Oil
Heads up, Canada! Our one and only big energy customer, the United States, isn’t going to need Canadian oil any more. That’s the implication of the International Energy Agency’s latest predictions. The U.S. will be the world’s largest oil producer by 2020 and the largest oil exporter by 2030. Some say this could happen a lot sooner.
Calling Out Honour-Based Violence
Today (Sunday, Nov. 25), is United Nations International Day to Eliminate Violence against Women. Creating awareness of the global epidemic of violence against women is crucial. But by taking an international perspective on the problem, as the UN has done, we risk...
Media Release – A New Model For Inter-City Busing Could Restore Services and Lower Prices: Liberalizing the market could ensure rural service while lowering the price of inter-urban travel.
Inter-city bus service is vital to rural Canada, yet has diminished throughout the country over the last few decades. The old model of cross-subsidizing unprofitable rural routes with profitable urban routes has broken down. The study recommends full liberalization of provincial inter-city bus markets, and the introduction of a least-cost subsidy system for unprofitable, socially desirable routes.
Featured News
Leon Fontaine – A Passionate Canadian Thought Leader – RIP
This past weekend, we learned of the tragic and unexpected passing of Pastor Leon Fontaine at 59 years of age. Leon was a gifted leader playing many roles both nationally and internationally. He was, with his wife Sally, the senior Pastors at Springs Church with...
Public Inquiries and Public Trust
Testimony before the Public Order Emergency Commission reveals the case for government invoking the Emergencies Act is either weak or very weak. The Prime Minister was, in fact, opposed to members of his cabinet or senior public health officials meeting with protest...
Canada, U.S. Struggling to Reach Agreement to Agree on Product Rules
An ambitious plan to harmonize product regulations between Canada and the United States has become all process, few results. But there is hope.
Another Case of Municipal Corruption Highlights Need for Separation Between Council and City Administration
Today I had an article in the Huffington Post on how the City of Phoenix bars municipal politicians from getting directly involved in city operations to reduce the prospects for shading dealings with developers. I mentioned recent cases in Winnipeg and Toronto that may or may not have involved wrong doing. Sure enough, today’s National Post has an article about a Montreal corruption inquiry, in which a powerful Montreal politician has been accused of taking $300,000 in bribes.
Understanding Equalization
Last week, the Globe and Mail ran an article authored by John Ibbitson which profiled David MacKinnon, a Frontier Centre senior fellow and one of the country's leading critics of Canada's equalization program. David's work over the past several years has helped show...
First Nation conflicts highlight need for dispute resolution bodies
A Manitoba First Nation chief is threatening to divide a reserve to resolve an impasse with community members. Some members are staging a sit-in at the band office. Buffalo Point First Nation is located near the Ontario-Manitoba border. Band administration has already...
Italian judge’s anti-scientific verdict should not surprise us
Calling on people to stop asking questions leads to ignorance. Dissuading people from asking questions about scientific issues leads directly to scientific ignorance.
The purpose of scientific knowledge never has been to reach certainty and to stop questioning. While science and technology mitigate some of the uncertainty in which we live, they do not get rid of it.
No science is possible without doubts. Questions are to science what oxygen is to fire: without doubt, science is extinguished.
This is a basic lesson that an Italian court could use, having recently convicted seven earthquake scientists for their failure to predict and warn the population about the 2009 earthquake that sadly injured thousands and killed more than 300 people in the Italian town of L’Aquila.
The sentences handed out by judge Marco Billi were higher than those demanded by the prosecution, which had asked for the accused to be given four years each. The judge also imposed lifetime bans from holding public office and ordered the defendants to pay compensation of €7.8m (£6.4m).
The verdict has been called chilling and shocking. It may be easy to blame the judge for his supposed ignorance, but such blatant scientific ignorance does not exist in isolation. It has a context.
CRTC to Implement Wireless Industry Code of Conduct
The CRTC is holding a proceeding to establish a Code of Conduct for the Wireless Industry (meaning cell phones). This is unusual for the telecom industry although it has been used by the CRTC on the broadcasting side. The Broadcasting Code for Advertising to Children is one example. It isn’t traditional tariff regulation, it isn’t relying more on market forces, it is a kind of guided self-regulation, likely with penalties for violations.
Consumer anger has led three provinces to legislate provincial codes on mobile phone contracts. The big cell phone companies through the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) proposed the Code of Conduct to avoid more legislation at the provincial level and having to deal with different rules in every province. It took years to get the provinces out of telecommunications regulation and have a national market with the same rules and yet now, they are coming back into it through this path.
How did we get ourselves to this point? Terrence Corcoran takes the consumers groups to task as leftist anti-market economic illiterates here.
He claims that the figures show that the market is competitive, consumers have no right to complain if they don’t read their contracts and that the CRTC and the provincial governments should get out of the way of business and let them compete. Up to a point, I agree with this view, generally favouring free market competition as the best result for consumers.
Hydro Revenue Review Off the Table
A July presentation to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty suggesting the government is committed to a full-scale review of how it addresses hydroelectricity revenues in the equalization formula is not under active consideration, the Finance Department said Thursday.
Evaluating the McGuinty Legacy: The Good and the Bad
Dalton McGuinty has had as much of an impact on public policy in Ontario as virtually any of his predecessors. This article summarizes the best and the worst decisions he made as premier.
New Regina Mayor
As the polls predicted, last night Michael Fougere was elected Regina's new mayor. Largely seen as the "status quo" candidate, and endorsed by the outgoing and long-serving mayor Pat Fiacco, Fougere had described the election as a referendum on the previous councils...