Media Appearances

Speaker Argues Against Compact Cities

Participants at a housing innovation and infrastructure forum heard a defence of detached housing and against compact cities. Wendell Cox, an international public policy consultant specializing in urban policy, transport and demographics, told the audience at the forum cities that have urban containment policies push up housing prices and make them less affordable.

Borough Takes Over Sidewalk Repairs

This year, the borough decided to take the crumbling sidewalks into its own hands. On Wednesday, it declared it would be the first in the city to hand over all responsibility for sidewalk repairs to its blue-collar workers as part of a pilot project that could spread to other services. At an estimated $300,000, the expenditure is a drop in the bucket of the borough’s overall $66-million budget.

Alberta Workers Taste Reality

Wages once virtually on par with the rest of the country became higher across all public-sector categories, in some cases substantially so, according to the study by Ben Eisen and Ken Boessenkool. (The province’s 36,000 teachers are paid 20 per cent higher than their typical counterparts elsewhere in the country, according to a recent Statistics Canada study.) Alberta’s public- sector salaries consumed nearly 95 per cent of the increase in provincial revenues over the decade analyzed.

Featured News

Freedom Shouldn’t Come with Caveats, but it Does

In Saturday’s National Post, my esteemed colleague, George Jonas, made the compelling case for why university attendees should not be compelled to join student unions. He would, of course, dispute the use of the word case, because the idea that people should not be forced to join involuntary organizations would seem to be self-evident in a free society.

How Do We Assess Kids Without Tests?

Alberta has the most comprehensive standardized testing in Canada. Our students also consistently outperform pupils in other provinces on international achievement tests. Yet Alberta Premier Alison Redford wants to ditch provincial achievement tests (PATs) for Grade 3 and 6 students.

Think-Tanks Wielding More Clout in Politics: Organizations such as the right-leaning Manning Centre, nascent Broadbent Institute increasingly part of the ‘political infrastructure’

When Canadians think of political parties, they focus on the teams of politicians fronting them. But behind the scenes, Canadian political parties are increasingly getting support from a “political infrastructure” that plays a crucial role in selling their ideology to the public.