Peter Holle is the founding President of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, an award-winning western Canadian-based public policy think tank. Since its founding in 1997, Frontier has brought a distinctive and influential Prairie voice to regional and national debates over public policy in areas such as core public sector reform, housing, poverty, aboriginals, consumer-focused health care performance, equalization, rural policy and much more. Of the nearly 100 recognized think tanks in Canada, Frontier is one of only 5 to make the 2008 global “Go-To Think Tanks” list published by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.
Mr. Holle has worked extensively with public sector reform and has provided advisory services to various governments across Canada and the United States. His publications have appeared in various newspapers and journals including dozens of newspapers, the National Post and the Wall Street Journal. He has a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is a member of various organizations including the Mont Pelerin Society, an international organization of classical liberals.
Canada has released early results of the 2021 Census, with a detailed analysis of growth in Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs). Among the 41 metropolitan areas, 77% of the population growth between the 2016 and 2021 censuses was in the suburbs, with 23% in the urban...
Finally, provincial governments are loosening public health restrictions. Based on what many health officials are saying, there’s a good chance that our country will be largely free of these restrictions by spring. This is happening not a moment too soon, particularly...
Everyone knows that Canada is in trouble. Like other countries, this country has been racked by various waves of COVID-19 for almost two years. But COVID-19 is not the most troubling issue. Let me explain. Remember at the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t expect...
A B.C. Indigenous leader who advised Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the contents of the landmark 2008 government residential schools apology has said that Canadians must not succumb to black and white thinking about the schools’ legacy. Despite his opposition to the...
A few weeks ago, Albertans voted to reduce the inequities in the federal equalization program. The deficit between the dollars that leave to and come back from Ottawa has recently been as high as $27 billion in one year. During times of crisis, it feels like salt in...
One of the most widespread economic myths is that inflation—the reduced purchasing power of a currency—is a win for a nation, a sign of a booming economy. For the privileged classes in government and with initial access to monetary expansion, it is a win. For everyone...
A few years ago Senior Fellow Tim Ball wrote a column for the Frontier Centre which observed that global warming would benefit Canada and particularly Manitoba. Winnipeg, of course, some pundits say is the coldest city in the world over 500,000 so the commentary hit a...
Introduction The Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC) is the main provider of bus passenger transportation services in Saskatchewan. Formed in 1946, the company is one of the province’s original government-owned enterprises. Until the early 1980s, STC managed to...
Yesterday, PBS Newshour's coverage of Margaret Thatcher's passing last night included a great interview with two former high level officials from the Reagan administration, George Schultz and James Baker. The one comment that stuck with me was Baker's comment that...
Winnipeg’s most colourful community activist was not a predictable big government left winger.
It's no secret that Canadian so-called supply management marketing board policies are a destructive relic from the 1970s. Frontier, along with several other Canadian think tanks has written extensively how they artificially raise prices for consumers while...
As student numbers decline in a country with an aging population, we continue to see a constant stream of policies designed to artificially increase the demand for teachers – including the push for more early childhood education, lengthening the number of years students must be in school, and now reducing class size even when the evidence shows that it does not benefit students.
This is your future. Huddled around wood stoves to keep warm because electricity is too expensive because of subsidies paid to rich people who own wind farms and solar panels
James Buchanan, known as one of the founders of public choice economics, has just passed away. Public choice economics is essentially the economics of politics and how organized special interests dominate policy-making.
I am generally positive about the Harper Government in Ottawa but the biggest area where they fall down on policy is the failure to heed Buchanan’s observations on transfers to governments.