There is a new entry to Canada’s list of bad ideas promoted during the COVID-19 outbreak: a literal nanny state. Aspirant recipients and allies are seizing on panic to invoke a policy monstrosity that would be a blow to children and families. In September’s throne...
The complexity and perverse incentives of Canada’s Employment Insurance (EI) program are an eyesore on the nation’s economy. Rather than open the economy up to modernity, however, reforms approved by the Senate on March 17 (Bill C-24) increase EI generosity and...
For many years, there has been debate about equalization and other transfer programs and their impact on Atlantic Canada and other regions. Much of this discussion has been technical and difficult to follow. The debate has also been misleading because it focused on...
The “Great Reset” is often labelled a conspiracy theory, but it is real. This is a difficult statement to make because it is precisely what every conspiracy theorist says. In this scenario, however, all it takes is a cursory Google search to see that the World...
The heartbreaking death of Nathanael Spitzer, the cancer-stricken boy from Ponoka, exposed a most callous streak in Alberta’s medical bureaucracy. There is no forgiving how Alberta Health Services appallingly used a child’s death to promote yet more COVID-19 fear. ...
In October, Apple Inc. warned that draft rules from the European Union that would require the technology company to open up its mobile operating system to third-party apps would pose a security risk to its users. Expanding on comments already made by CEO Tim Cook, a...
John Kerry's first act as the new US Secretary of State was to recognise today as Waitangi Day, a holiday back in my home in New Zealand....
Smallish countries are often in the vanguard when it comes to reforming government. In the 1980s Britain was out in the lead, thanks to Thatcherism and privatisation. Tiny Singapore has long been a role model for many reformers. Now the Nordic countries are likely to assume a similar role.
Facing the “fiscal cliff,” perhaps the president and Congress should start thinking in terms of the “foreclosure crisis.” All lenders, whether a local home-loan bank or the Chinese government, expect to be repaid either from the borrower’s income or, if that is insufficient, from the sale of assets. Where does that leave the U.S. government?
Winnipeg’s private garbage contractor is facing $400,000 in fines for not meeting service targets in the month of November alone. While some will point to this as a failure of contracting out, it actually demonstrates the fact that contracting out hedges against poor performance.
Imagine you and your business partners tried to corner the Canadian market for light bulbs. You conspired to control production and divvy up the market to inflate prices. Cartels like this are illegal in Canada. And there are tough criminal penalties if you’re caught – fines of up to $25-million and 14 years in jail under the Competition Act.
Back in May I wrote about the first ever docking of the private Dragon capsule with the International Space Station.
A particularly talented lunch lady at a Swedish school has been ordered to stop doing such an excellent job because it is “unfair” to students at other schools who do not get to eat such good food.
Richard Stursberg’s new book – The Tower of Babble – details the severe challenges involved in modernizing a large, moribund government organization in an enlightening discussion of internal politics and intrigue.
Did Mitt Romney and Bain Capital help office-supply retailer Staples create 88,000 jobs? 43,000? 252? Actually, Staples probably destroyed 100,000 jobs while creating millions of new ones. Since 1986, Staples has opened 2,000 stores, eliminating the jobs of distributors and brokers who charged nasty markups for paper and office supplies. But it enabled hundreds of thousands of small (and not so small) businesses to stock themselves cheaply and conveniently and expand their operations.