From Globe and Mail In a book published last year, Swedish economists Andreas Bergh and Magnus Henrekson affirmed that, as a general rule, every 10-percentage-point increase in the size of government in wealthy countries reduces economic growth - by as little as 0.5...
Taxation
BC Residents Could Save With 10% HST: And they stimulate the economy in the process
The new Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) rate in British Columbia would bring tax savings to BC residents for years to come, and have a positive influence on economic development through export stimulus.
Afraid of 2012? Remember the Budget of 1995: While the federal spending deficit today is almost identical to what the Liberals faced in 1995, the civil service should relax. The situations are fundamentally different.
The 1995 Liberals had no choice. That’s the real difference between the desperate budget of former Liberal finance minister Paul Martin and the less draconian edition due to be handed down next year by his Conservative counterpart, Jim Flaherty.
Can Canada Increase Entrepreneurship?: How tax administration may be biased against self-employment
In doggedly downgrading self-employed individuals to employees, the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) is exhibiting a strong bias against entrepreneurship, creating a series of negative consequences for the Canadian economy.
Featured News
Celebrating Manitoba’s Fisher River First Nation
Indigenous communities in Manitoba face some of the greatest obstacles. Over the years, when the UN Human Development Index was applied to First Nation communities across Canada, Manitoba First Nations often ranked lowest. So, it’s important to highlight some of the...
UK-Canada Nuclear Fusion Project Could Generate Jobs, Unite Climate Alarmists and Skeptics
For a long time, nuclear fusion has been a sci-fi fantasy; the holy grail of energy production that involves the combination of multiple atomic nuclei to generate energy. It’s the same process used by the sun to create energy, and the opposite of nuclear fission,...
David Pankratz
Frontier interviews David Pankratz, Director of the Institute for Community Peacebuilding at Canadian Mennonite University, about smarter ways to assist low income Canadians.
Taxes or User Charges?
Like all governments, municipalities have the option of using a number of revenue-raising tools that have different characteristics. We examine, in this Charticle, the use of property taxes versus user charges for the funding of municipal services in 30 Canadian cities. FC038
Municipal Tax and Municipal Tax Reliance
Frontier’s Local Government Frontiers Project collected various financial data from Canada’s 30th largest cities in 2007. This Charticle presents the levels of taxation imposed collected divided by the number of households counted in each jurisdiction. FC037
Equalization Hurts Ontario, Expert Warns
Ontario taxpayers still funnel billions of dollars to supposedly needy provinces like Quebec, Manitoba and those in Atlantic Canada.
Americans Vote on Taxes with Their Feet
In a fascinating new book, Rich States, Poor States, U.S. supply-side economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore document a remarkable hypothesis – that high tax rates redistribute people, not incomes.
Tax Cuts Favoured Over Minimum Wage Hikes
In the war on poverty, tax cuts rather than a higher minimum wage give the working poor a hand up, concludes a new report for a Prairie-based think tank. Lifting Manitobans who are stuck at the bottom of the income ladder can best be done by raising the provincial tax...
How Toronto Has Fared as One Big City
“[Amalgamation] hasn’t worked the way I thought it would or should have worked,” he said. “The province is partly to blame because they didn’t put enough controls in place to make sure it would run right. And certainly, the councillors elected, they had no concept of fiscal responsibility, in my opinion.”
1st Annual Local Government Performance Index
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy releases its inaugural Local Government Performance Index (LGPI). It contains some 3000 data points concerning the 2005 financial performance of municipalities in Canada’s 30 most populous jurisdictions.
Individual Municipality Analyses – 2007 Local Government Performance Index
Individual one page city financial performance summaries from the 2007 Local Government Performance Index, released November 27th, 2007.