Media Appearances

Featured News

Traditional Teaching is not Obsolete

Artificial intelligence has come a long way. Unlike the rudimentary software of the past, modern-day programs such as ChatGPT are truly impressive. Whether you need a 1,000-word essay summarizing the history of Manitoba, a 500-word article extolling the virtues of...

Taxis’ Fare Road to Profit: Restricted supply has inflated value of vancouver licence to $800,000

Gary Tarantino owns arguably the most valuable taxi in Vancouver, in an industry already known for its breathtakingly high licence values. Tarantino’s Licence 70384 could easily command more than $1 million in a business where the average Vancouver taxi costs $800,000. That’s because he is the last holdout of independent taxi owners in an industry where all of the other 687 licences are held by the city’s four taxi companies.

Hydro Must Serve Citizens, Not Government

I find Lane to be credible and not conflicted. He has had a distinguished career serving the people of Manitoba at the Workers Compensation Board, Manitoba Public Insurance, the University of Winnipeg, St. Amant Centre, and, lately, the Public Utilities Board. Lane criticized Hydro and the government for the high degree of risk Hydro’s ratepayers will incur with the implementation of the utility’s capital expenditure plans, some $33 billion to be spent over the next 20 years.

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.

Rating Property Rights

The Frontier Centre has released the first Canadian Property Rights Index. The March 14th report, written by Joseph Quesnel, was fashioned along the same basis as a U.S. property rights index, rating how each of the 13 jurisdictions in Canada handled property rights.