Political leaders around the world have now spent more than two decades setting targets for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide that no one has any realistic hope of achieving. In the United Kingdom, emissions are being reduced at a rate of 1 percent per year. To...
Year: 2014
Teacher Tenure Rules Can Harm Children
An important and historical court case recently concluded in California that has implications for Canadian public schools. In Vergara v. California [2014], the Superior Court for Los Angeles ruled that some of the state’s teacher tenure, dismissal, and layoff laws are...
Urbanization and the Good News About World Poverty
Originally printed in the Huffington Post. The history of humanity is a history of poverty. This is illustrated in the work of University of California, Davis economist Gregory Clark. According to Clark (Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World):...
Knowledge is More Important Than Ever in Schools
Imagine that you are a fly on the wall in a faculty of education classroom or in a teachers’ professional development session. What would you hear? Chances are that you would hear about the need for teachers to establish a student-centred classroom environment in...
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There’s Nothing Fair About Canadian Health Care
For the past 14 years, Vancouver surgeon Dr. Brian Day has led the charge for health-care reform, pushing for the right of patients to pay for private care if their health and well-being are threatened as a result of waiting in a stagnant and overburdened public...
Transformers: More than Meets the Eye
The path to net zero, based on the much disputed belief that carbon dioxide is a pollution, is more steep and impractical than most people realize. Replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity will require much more power generation and a greatly upgraded grid to...
Now is the Time to Harmonize Manitoba’s Provincial Sales Tax
Premier Sellinger’s decision to increase the provincial sales tax to 8 percent has hovered over provincial politics like a dark cloud for more than a year. The issue won’t go away. Sellinger himself admitted that the lingering unpopularity of the tax increase...
Frontier Centre releases Housing Affordability and the Standard of Living in Toronto
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has today released Housing Affordability and the Standard of Living in Toronto, a new report authored by Wendell Cox, a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre. Mr Cox is an expert in land use and transportation policy and the...
Housing Affordability and the Standard of Living in Toronto
Over the past two centuries, the world has become more urban, as people have moved to the cities to better their lives. Cities exist because, as large labour markets, they facilitate a higher standard of living for residents and reduce poverty. Governments place a...
When Emissions Disappear, So Do Jobs
Following Barack Obama's recent visit to China, the White House issued a joint US-China climate announcement that says "China intends to achieve the peaking of C02 emissions around 2030." But that isn't news. A report published three-and-a-half-years ago and funded by...
Labour Laws Aren’t Always Helping Young People
Labour laws in Canada are supposed to protect workers from exploitation and ensure their safety, but they are not always helping teenagers who are entering the workforce for the first time. Most provinces require that anyone younger than 16 or 14 obtain a permit to...
First Nations Water Systems are Actually Improving
Deplorable water and sewage systems on many First Nations reserves are a real concern. This situation is exceptionally tragic when one considers that more than 90 percent of First Nations communities are located near or directly beside bodies of water. But what is...
Labour Laws Are Hampering Young People
Labour laws are meant to protect workers from exploitation and to ensure their safety, but closer examination shows that when it comes to teenagers, the laws are not always doing people a favour. Age restrictions for workers vary from province to province. In 2008,...
Councillors Shouldn’t Be Too Stingy
Winnipeg has a new mayor for the first time in a decade, and Brian Bowman wants to cut the salaries of councillors. There have also been moves to cut support staff for councillors, but more thought is needed on this one. Councillors in any municipality need to respond...
Another Climate Change Ransom Note
On November 2, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sent humanity a ransom note. In the words of the UK-based cartoonist known as Josh, its message was: "Give us trillions or you will fry!! There will be storms floods droughts winds and...