Day 14 - Advent is the season of preparing for Christmas. Here at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy we want to tell you about some of the things we would like to see under our tree. On Day 14 we wish Ottawa and all provincial capitals would dramatically...
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in a report released with its latest World Financial Stability study, critiqued Italy, chiding the perennial underperformer for its famously large, unaffordable and growth-stifling public sector. Why this matters to anyone...
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has just released Balancing Elephants: Saskatchewan’s Return on Investment - SASKFERCO. The 1980’s brought in some of the worst economic times Saskatchewan had ever had. It was a time of many systemic changes, political...
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy and The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) today jointly released The Size and Cost of the Public Sector in Western Canada, authored by Rodney A. Clifton, Jackson Doughart, and Marco Navarro-Génie. This study examines...
Those of you who are tired of my rants about the demise of our once great health system will be pleased to know that this is my last editorial. I am retiring from the BCMJ Editorial Board; currently, I am the longest-serving member (more than 20 years). I have been a...
Back in the lofty, pre-Justin Trudeau government days of 2014, back when oil was booming, pipelines were planned to east and west coasts, and Alberta and Saskatchewan were swimming in money, around $81 billion was spent in capital expenditures (CAPEX) in the Canadian...
The Conservatives talk constantly about ensuring taxpayers get value for money. But the reality is the politicians don’t control the spending process as tightly as they like to think they do. The bureaucracy is the real power in the land – and its interests are often best served by growing the size of government.
But the real story is missing from the popular narrative. Since the federal Tories came to power in 2006 the body count in the federal civil service til recently had expanded by 32,000.
The federal government employs 400,000 people, more or less – and will probably still employ 400,000 people, more or less, when it completes its modest downsizing in 2015. With a maximum hit of 12,000 people, it is a modest downsizing, indeed: one worker a year, for three years, for every 100 workers who keep their jobs.
Vic Fedeli is at his desk at the Ontario legislature by 7:30 every morning. Fedeli, 55, figures he works 80-90 hours a week, not including travel time. He’s paid $116,550 a year. That’s less than the chief librarian in Ajax, Ont., or a fire training officer in Brampton. And unlike his cohorts, there’s no fat pension waiting for the burnt-out politician when he retires.
A year ago a series of major earthquakes reduced the heart of Christchurch to rubble and tore at the foundations of New Zealand's precarious fiscal position. In common with much of the developed world, the tectonic plates of an entrenched sense of entitlement and...
Four out of five British Columbians say government employees should be paid the same amount as people doing the same jobs in the private sector, according to an Angus Reid survey commissioned by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Stephen Harper is diminishing the federal government for a generation, not simply to eliminate the deficit, but to reshape Canadian politics.
It seems Albertans are poised to dump the Progressive Conservative Party after 41 long years in power. If so, the Tories will have been punished for being too progressive and too little conservative. They’ll be replaced by a party that’s surely dearer to the Prime Minister’s ideological heart – Wildrose.
For those not familiar with the column, Lett argues tax hikes should be considered to address the province’s deficit. If one scrutinizes the Manitoba government’s spending track record in greater detail, however, Lett’s proposition becomes much harder to stomach.