The “Just Transition” legislation currently before the House of Commons Natural Resources Committee mentions unions a fair bit. It also mentions what are effectively five-year plans, which was a common practice for moulding the economies of the Soviet Union and China,...
National Citizens Inquiry
The flight of office workers to the hinterlands will have profound effects on society.
After more than two weeks of shutting down virtually all federal government services, 120,000 of the picketing workers returned to work just recently. The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) walkout had been brewing since last fall, when PSAC president Chris...
For the past 14 years, Vancouver surgeon Dr. Brian Day has led the charge for health-care reform, pushing for the right of patients to pay for private care if their health and well-being are threatened as a result of waiting in a stagnant and overburdened public...
The path to net zero, based on the much disputed belief that carbon dioxide is a pollution, is more steep and impractical than most people realize. Replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity will require much more power generation and a greatly upgraded grid to...
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has just released The Creative Destruction of the Sharing Economy by Lee Harding, a research associate with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. This paper examines the creative destruction that the sharing economy is having on...
The World Bank just issued its annual ‘Ease of Doing Business’ report for 190 countries and territories. Again, Canada was not near the top. It was 18th. Small New Zealand was first, Singapore was 2nd, and Denmark was 3rd. Even our main trading partner, the US, was...
Labour laws in Canada are supposed to protect workers from exploitation and ensure their safety, but they are not always helping teenagers who are entering the workforce for the first time. Most provinces require that anyone younger than 16 or 14 obtain a permit to...
Labour laws are meant to protect workers from exploitation and to ensure their safety, but closer examination shows that when it comes to teenagers, the laws are not always doing people a favour. Age restrictions for workers vary from province to province. In 2008,...
In five of Canada's provinces, including all three prairie provinces, barbers and hairstylists must be certified by a provincial regulatory body in order to do business. It's what's known as a compulsory trade. When a trade is voluntary, on the other hand, a person...
Source: Gregory Thomas, National Post, 20 November 2013 If Stephen Harper really wants to help working Canadians and their families, he needs to scrap the pork-barrelling Employment Insurance (EI) system designed by Pierre Trudeau, and give Canadians back their own...
The federal government has decided to withdraw funding for provincial job programs. While downloading funding responsibility to the provinces makes sense, since they are better able to administer such local initiatives, the federal government needs to free up tax revenue for the provinces to fund these programs.
The United States labor market has been undergoing a substantial shift toward small-scale entrepreneurship. The number of proprietors – owners of businesses who are not wage and salary employees, has skyrocketed, especially in the last decade. Proprietors are self employed business owners who use Internal Revenue Service Schedule C to file their federal income tax. Wage and salary workers are all employees of any establishment (private or government), from executives to non-supervisory workers.
Listening to Alberta Minister of Education Jeff Johnson, one would think that he was a modern visionary in education. His vision, however, as he has himself acknowledged, is half-baked: “There is a vision developing,” he's been quoted to say in the context of...