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.
The failures of mainstream Canadian media and proof of public thirst for alternatives was never more apparent than in February. The best chance for people to use their own eyes and ears to take in the trucker protests in Ottawa came from the alternative press. Should...
Imagine if a city suddenly fined people hundreds of dollars for something they regularly did hundreds of times a year? That’s exactly what the City of Regina and many other municipalities have done by banning single use plastic bags. One article is barely room enough...
One clear takeaway from the convoy protest is the realization that pandemic restrictions and mandates are not affecting everyone equally. Liberal MP Joel Lightbound’s clever retort of, “Not everyone can still earn a living using their MacBook while at the cottage”...
In an earlier commentary, Madhav Khandekar pointed out that the year 2018 was one of the coldest and snowiest winters in Canada, especially in western Canada. For example, Calgary witnessed one of the largest snowfalls in recorded history, and Edmonton witnessed 127...
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy!
The war against the invisible enemy of COVID-19 has unfortunately made normal rights and freedoms invisible as well. Another example manifested on September 13 when Saskatchewan’s premier renewed emergency orders for his province. The list of powers he claimed were so...
So it was a bit of a surprise when the Winnipeg Free Press reported that the Conference Board, one of Canada’s most respected think tanks, was endorsing the Province’s plan of hugely rolling the dice and building huge new power capacity for export.
Continuing to spend billions on dams for which the market has effectively disappeared will eventually erode the one undisputed area where Manitoba has some natural strengths – efficient and economical hydro power.
The beauty of this system is that it puts cost cutting pressure on the vast layers of middle managers and supervisors that are a fixture of the traditionally rule bound, bureaucratic and process-oriented government systems we still see mostly everywhere in the public sector, cities no exception.
Anyone of integrity in the world would be insulted that their government has a department that is strictly to oversee an ethnic group. That is Hitlerlism, that is apartheid, that’s everything this country and any country should be against.
Frontier was delighted to co-sponsor the annual Calgary luncheon of the Friends of
The IPCC has been co-opted by Eco-activist groups
Science which was held yesterday. It featured a presentation by Canadian author Donna LaFramboise who wrote an important book last year that exposes how the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been completely co-opted by eco-activist organizations with very defined agendas. We will post the audio and related powerpoints slides shortly. Here are my introductory remarks to give you a flavour:
To start off, I would like to thank the Friends of Science Society for hosting yet another crucially important climate change event. We at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy are proud of our long standing relationship with the Friends. For those of you who don’t already know, Friends of Science is a non-profit organization run by volunteers dedicated to educating the public about what science really tells us about climate change.
Even though world temperatures have not risen for the past 16 years the global warming lobby continues to bombard us with breathless reports of imminent doom due to mankind’s use of conventional hydrocarbon fuels. They tell us that that our emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas are causing a dangerous increase in our planet’s greenhouse effect. This then is causing the dreaded global warming that, so we are told by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC, is leading to a host of frightening phenomena; such things as:
– increasing extreme weather like droughts, heat waves and hurricanes.
– Unprecedented Arctic sea ice melt
– Antarctic icecap growth – that too is a result of human induced global warming, climate alarmists announced last week (go figure . . .).
– the threat of extinction of polar bears due to Arctic warming. Apparently no one has told the bears about this since they stubbornly continue to thrive, with rising numbers threatening native communities.
– The Maldives in the Indian Ocean will also soon vanish from the face of the Earth due to rising sea level, alarmists tell us. The fact that sea levels in the Maldives are lower now than they were in the 1970s doesn’t seem to matter at all.
While these proposed reforms will be seen as very scary by our cautious ruling political class, they must still be seen for what they are. We need to look at the tweaks purportedly being considered as more patches on a very patched up and dysfunctional transfer payment system.
Frontier has been fortunate to provide some recognition of the highest scoring First Nations in each of the three Prairie Provinces in the form of a plague and a cheque for $5,000.
Listen to Jon Gerrard’s talk. You will hear the intellectual leadership that is sorely missing in Manitoba politics.
The taxpayer should be free to withhold financial assistance to a welfare recipient who says he doesn’t want to work even if he is able to . . .