Ross McKitrick, Abdulrahman Khogali and Elmira Aliakbari “Brownfields,” or building sites contaminated by past users, need to undergo some level of remediation prior to their redevelopment. Ontario’s brownfield remediation rules underwent a major revision in 2011....
Ross McKitrick
Saskatchewan Megaprojects in the 1980s: the Ugly, the Bad, and the Good
Ross McKitrick , September 2016 Canada has had a troubled history of governments pursuing megaprojects that entail large losses of taxpayer money, leading politicians later to bemoan the fact that the project should never have been undertaken. Would better advance...
Ontario electricity has never been cheaper, but bills have never been higher
Ross McKitrick August 8, 2016 The more the wind blows, the bigger the losses and the higher the hit to consumers. You may be surprised to learn that electricity is now cheaper to generate in Ontario than it has been for decades. The wholesale price, called the Hourly...
American Job Losses and NAFTA
Decades of steady trade liberalization have served Canada’s economic development. As the Montreal Economic Institute’s Mathieu Bédard noted recently in FP Comment (“Trump’s anti-NAFTA myths spread north,” July 14), the NAFTA years...
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Canadian Property Rights Index 2023
A Snapshot of Property Rights Protection in Canada After 10 years
Alberta Politics and Empty Promises of Health-care Solutions
The writ has been dropped and Albertans are off to the polls on May 29. That leaves just four weeks for political leaders and voters to sort out what is arguably the most divisive, yet significant, issue for this election - health care. On Day 2, NDP leader Rachel...
Will Saudi Ceasefire in Oil War Offer Price Relief
Canadian energy producers have been dealing with a triple whammy of low oil prices, unfavourable policy changes and the Fort McMurray wildfire. Two weeks ago, Saudi Arabia’s new oil minister declared a ceasefire in the two-year-old oil war with the shale industry....
It’s Time to End Supply Management
Conservative Party of Canada leadership candidate Maxime Bernier has come out against the long standing practice of agricultural supply management for dairy, poultry and eggs. It is rare for a Canadian politician to take on this issue, but the evidence is overwhelming...
What’s the right price for carbon? Take a guess, everyone else is.
This op ed was originally published by The Financial Post on Thursday, June 16, 2016: http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/junk-science-week-whats-the-right-price-for-carbon-take-a-guess-everyone-else-is
Contrary to Rumours, There is No License to Pollute Canadian Waterways
In 2012, the Harper government replaced the old Navigable Waters Protection Act (NWPA) with a new Navigation Protection Act (NPA), aimed at updating and simplifying regulations governing transportation on inland waterways, sparking considerable controversy. Many...
Climate Crazy Ontario
The latest news out of Queen’s Park is that Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals plan to deindustrialize Ontario. Of course they don’t call it that; they prefer the term “decarbonize.” But for an industrial economy, the government’s new...
Liberals and federal NDP policies restrict Alberta oil to U.S. market
During the 1988 Free Trade debate, the Liberals and NDP fought a provision that required Canada to maintain its oil export volumes to the U.S. at historical levels. So it is a remarkable irony that these two parties are now fighting against pipelines that would allow...
Let’s stop pretending ‘social licence’ is an actual thing
Alberta’s premier has, one hopes, learned the hard way. Margaret Thatcher famously said “There is no such thing as society.” Today she might have added the corollary that “There is no such thing as social licence.” There is such a thing...
The Gulf States refuse to step up and accept their share of refugees
The Syrian civil war is now five years old, spreading deep economic and humanitarian costs around the world. The arrival of more than one million refugees and migrants in Europe is leading to tensions that could bring an end to internal mobility in the European Union....
How politicians wrecked the case for carbon taxes
In his March 2 article, “The cheapest way to cut carbon,” economist Trevor Tombe presents the basic logic of emission taxes as applied to CO2. In theory, a uniform carbon price would minimize the cost of emission reductions because it would prompt emitters...