The Prairie provinces’ debts have grown colossally during the COVID-19 pandemic, just as they have in the rest of Canada and the world. Indeed, at the end of 2020, Alberta’s debt was estimated to be $98 billion, Manitoba’s $28.6 billion and Saskatchewan’s $15...
Canada needs to finally have a conversation about Senate reform before politicians and interest groups transform the institution without the participation of average citizens. The federal government has introduced a bill in the Senate that would formally recognize...
Brexit allows the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to have an independent trade policy which was before the competence of the European Union. But on the other side, the UK has to remake and resign the different treaty; the European law and the...
In early April, the federal government of Canada announced that it would support Air Canada through the rest of the pandemic lockdown-induced drastic decline in air travel with a combination of loans, and, in a return to its previous status as a stratospheric ward of...
The decision by the Supreme Court of Canada to dismiss the latest challenge by Indigenous groups over the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project should not come as a surprise. It was a predictable outcome in a line of successive rulings that Trans Mountain had met...
Earlier this year, after years of resisting the recording of race-based statistics by police, there has been a sudden change of heart.1 Now, advocates and those seeking police reform want race-based data collected by police. In Ontario, the authorities hope that by...
The results of Manitoba students on the latest Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) tests are, to say the least, very disappointing. Over the last fifteen years, the reading, math, and science scores have declined from near the Canadian average to the bottom...
This Halloween, children younger than 16 will not be allowed outside without an adult after 7:00pm in Bonnyville, Alberta. The Halloween curfew has been around for decades, but some parents requested that the curfew time be extended an hour, or maybe two. But the...
Well that didn’t take long! Ontario’s school boards, teachers’ unions and Ministry of Education recently began bargaining in an effort to reach agreements across the education sector. The previous agreements, imposed on the sector in 2012 by the McGuinty government’s...
“Privatization is not inherently good or bad – the performance or effectiveness depends on implementation.” That isn’t the type of rhetoric one might expect to hear when describing something as polarizing as privatization, but it is one of the conclusions from the...
With the recent implementation of the First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA), this may be an excellent opportunity to raise another issue of contention—that of First Nations taxation. If First Nations governments were to tax their reserve base and...
Power Point presentation from Manitoba Hydro's Financial Quagmire. A Breakfast on the Frontier event held in Winnipeg on October 1, 2014 with Will Tishinski, retired VP, Manitoba Hydro. Listen to his Speech...
Public transit is often assumed to come at the expense of good roads, and vice versa. There are certainly cases where roadway spending and public transit are at odds. For instance, when light rail or streetcar projects remove lanes of traffic, or when road design...
The Alberta Teachers’ Association has correctly identified a problem but in doing so it has missed the bigger picture. The ATA is worried about administering the province’s new Student Learning Assessments (SLA) for Grade 3 students. They say that teachers do not have...
Public debate continues over unpaid internships for students. Unpaid internships can provide new work experiences and help students meet university or college requirements. However, reasonable people often consider them to be exploitation of young people....