It’s customary in the run up to an election for voters to ask, “Do I feel better off today than when this Government first took office?” Since Labour is a second term government, let’s turn our mind back to 2017. After nine years of National, economists were...
When one thousand Liquor Mart workers walked off their job Tuesday, Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union president Kyle Ross called it a “last resort.” “We hope it ends sooner rather than later,” Ross said at a press conference. That’s funny. Many...
A Basic Understanding
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith delivers her victory speech in Calgary on May 29, 2023, after winning the provincial election. (The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh) It’s time to move on. The Alberta election is over: Danielle Smith is the premier and that means it...
The cost of actually building a house does not vary that much across Canada The Ford government’s plan to expand the land supply available for housing has evoked the usual dog whistles about “urban sprawl” by interests apparently unaware of the strong...
Reading is the most important skill taught in school. If students don’t learn how to read, not much else that happens there is going to matter. That’s because being able to read is important in virtually every job. Without the ability to read, life itself will be a...
It is inappropriate for a politician to single out citizens or groups of citizens, whoever they are, for public scorn.
President Obama on Tuesday night stressed U.S. economic competitiveness as a new policy theme, accentuating the point he made last week by naming General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to lead his new jobs council. This is welcome, though not solely because it may signal less Administration hostility to business. The pairing is also instructive because both Mr. Obama and GE symbolize a major reason the U.S. has become less competitive—the misallocation of resources.
The Star has an editorial today opposing the use of public funds to construct sports arenas. I've seen liberal, conservative and centrist commentators all opposing this absurd waste of money but I've seen very few (if any) efforts to defend the planned wave of...
The Sask. Party can talk about tax cuts, only if it’s prepared to talk spending first.
“Canada is poised to cut its corporate-tax rate to 16.5% on Jan. 1, part of a decade-long campaign that some experts say is making the country one of the most cost-effective places to do business in the developed world.”
“There is a fashionable new science—behavioral economics, they call it—which applies the insights of psychology to how people make economic decisions. It tries to explain, for instance, the herd instinct that led people during the recent bubble to override common sense and believe things about asset values because others did: the ‘bandwagon effect.'”
Canada’s strong economic performance has given it a long-sought place in the global spotlight. Now the question it faces: what to do with its new power.
Lunch on the Frontier
“If you’re a renter who reads the newspapers, you have spent the last few years in a constant state of low-level anger at this “bizarre spectacle”—the unexamined assumption that perpetually escalating housing prices are the natural state of human affairs, and certainly a good enough proxy for economic health that the two quantities are freely interchangeable. How much more bizarre must it look in England?”