Scott McGregor warns that foreign bids for iconic Canadian institutions—like a Chinese-Canadian billionaire’s move to buy Hudson’s Bay—may be more than business. They could be part of Beijing’s broader soft-power push, using culture and commerce to shift influence. In a world of rising tensions and shifting alliances, Canada must stay sharp. Protecting our heritage now means knowing who’s buying—and why.
Dissatisfaction with the current state of Canada's airports is palpable among the public, airlines, and the federal government. Landing fees, shop and restaurant rental fees, and ‘airport improvement fees’ seem high and uncompetitive versus U.S. airports. This...
What a difference the remote work revolution has made. The University of Minnesota Accessibility Observation auto and transit access data for 2021 (the latest) indicates a huge improvement in 30-minute job access for the average resident of 50 metropolitan areas that...
The RTD ship is sinking and Colorado legislators want to fix it by rearranging the deck chairs. According to U.S. Department of Transportation data, RTD carried less than 64 percent as many riders in May 2024 as in May 2019, well below the 77 percent average for...
A Snapshot of Property Rights Protection in Canada After 10 years
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...
In all the fuss about the Canadian rail disruption, one thing jumped out at me. Here’s how the National Post reported it: “Despite the economic impacts, the Canadian Industrial Relations Board ruled earlier this month that the railway workers are not an essential...
The Canadian government is considering spending $6 billion to $12 billion to introduce what it calls “high-frequency trains” between Toronto and Quebec City. Though some media reports have described these as high-speed trains (which generally means trains capable of...
Big Topics & Big Ideas
Calgary Transit is mired in the past, building an obsolete transit system designed for an archaic view of a city. Before the pandemic, transit carried 45 percent of downtown Calgary employees to work, but less than 10 percent of workers in the rest of the Calgary...
The jury is still out in Winnipeg: should governments be spending money on roads or more public transit? Well, a new policy brief from the Frontier Centre show that the sooner governments abandon their bias against cars the better. A recent University of Toronto paper...
• A recent University of Toronto paper by Jeff Allen and Steven Farber examines work access as measured in travel time to get to work. The “30-minute job access” is a rounded-up average in all heavily populated regions in Canada. • The 2021 census revealed that...
The latest urban planning fad to sweep across Canada is the 15-minute city, which proposes to redesign cities so that all urban residents live within an easy, 15-minute walk of schools, retailers, restaurants, entertainment, and other essentials of modern life. This...
Big Topics & Big Ideas
Canada’s first subway line, which opened in Toronto in 1954, was 7.4 kilometers long and cost $6.8 million per kilometer—$76 million per kilometer in today’s money. That seems a bargain compared to a subway line Toronto is now constructing at a projected cost of well...