Today, as federal politicians fan out across the country to wage an election campaign, there is little appetite to reignite a debate on water exports, as was suggested by former prime minister Jean Chrétien last week. Mr. White, though, maintains it’s only a matter of time before Canada begins trading water.
Worth A Look
The Price Is Always Right: The key decision for a government is selling state-owned enterprises, not how to price them..
Everyone knew last month’s privatization of Indonesian airline Garuda had gone badly, but exactly how badly is only now coming into focus.
Toronto’s Backward on Public Housing: Get ’em Out, Not In
Toronto Community Housing Corp. is one of the world’s biggest landlords. As the second-largest provider of social housing in North America, it owns more than 350 apartment buildings and another 800 houses and duplexes. Yet, the demand for subsidized housing is always greater than the supply, and wait times are always long.
Redact All You Want, We’ve Gone Overboard on Equalization
What exactly does the government have to fear from a study of equalization payments? We don’t know. But according to a February report published by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce (“Dollars & Sense: A Case for Modernizing Canada’s Transfer Agreements”), the government has much to fear – most importantly the revelation that Canada’s equalization program now distributes billions of dollars a year to provinces that least need the help.
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No Evidence of Climate Crisis
In his annual State of the Climate report published on April 14, 2022, Dr. Ole Humlum, Emeritus Professor at the University of Oslo, examined detailed patterns in temperature changes in the atmosphere and oceans together with trends in climate impacts. Many of these...
It Is Time to Move On
I wrote an opinion column immediately following the May 27, 2021 announcement of the “shocking discovery of 215 bodies found in a mass grave at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.” In that column, I correctly stressed the need to wait for real...
Copenhagen Will Fail – And Quite Right Too: Even if the science was reliable (which it isn’t), we should not force the world’s poorest countries to cut carbon emissions
Mr Brown’s Copenhagen objective will, happily, not be achieved. But the meeting will still be declared a great success. Politicians do not like being associated with failure, so they will make sure that whatever emerges from Copenhagen is declared a success, and promise to meet again next year. This will at least give our political leaders the time to get themselves off the hook.
The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery: In India, a Factory Model for Hospitals Is Cutting Costs and Yielding Profits
Dr. Shetty, who entered the limelight in the early 1990s as Mother Teresa’s cardiac surgeon, offers cutting-edge medical care in India at a fraction of what it costs elsewhere in the world. The approach has transformed health care in India through a simple premise that works in other industries: economies of scale.
President Vows To Kill State Corporations
In what amounts to a complete repudiation of the economic policies of Vladamir Putin, Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian President, pledged yesterday to disband Russia’s inefficient state corporations and called for a probe into their use of state money.
Comparing Apples to Oranges in Education
Take the challenge of the 8th grade exam circa 1895. Think you can pass?
America’s Fast Track To Wealth
“The real revolution in personal mobility had to wait for the automobile and the jet airliner,” he writes. “These technologies were affordable to every economic class. The wealthiest 20 per cent of Americans drive only a few more miles a year than the poorest 20 per cent. The automobile is the most egalitarian form of mechanized travel ever developed.”
Remove Web Barriers: Tech Guru
O’Reilly said Internet service providers should not be allowed to “traffic shape” web service, and cellphone companies should not be able to ban applications or services on their devices, because that hinders the ability of other firms to innovate.
The BBC’s Amazing U-Turn On Climate Change
Hudson’s piece is a U-turn – not because he has joined the ranks of sceptics who reject the theory of man-made global warming, but because at last he has written a story about the well-established fact that the earth’s temperature has not risen since 1998, and reports seriously the theories of climatologists (themselves not sceptics) who believe that we are in for 30 years of cooling caused by the falling temperatures of the oceans.
Whatever Happened to the Idea of Progress?
The idea of progress is not utopian; it is about improvement. In a public policy context, for example, the relevant issue is not whether a policy change achieves a perfect solution but whether it is a move in the right direction.
Spitting In The Eye Of Mainstream Education
The Academic Performance Index, the central measuring tool for California schools, rates schools on a scale from zero to 1,000, based on standardized test scores. The state target is an API of 800. The statewide average for middle and high schools is below 750. For schools with mostly low-income students, it is around 650. The oldest of the American Indian schools, the middle school known simply as American Indian Public Charter School, has an API of 967. Its two siblings — American Indian Public Charter School II (also a middle school) and American Indian Public High School — are not far behind.