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,...
Workplace
Canadians Should Question The Designation Of Compulsory Trades
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...
The Employment Insurance ripoff
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...
Job Training is Best Left to the Provinces
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.
Featured News
How to Turn Free Citizens Into Compliant Serfs
Free citizens have minds of their own and want to pursue their lives as they see fit. This is inconvenient for the elites, who wish to be in charge of everyone’s lives so that they can show their superiority and gain benefit for themselves and their friends. So the...
Demographia International Housing Affordability – 2023 Edition Released
Demographia International Housing Affordability rates middle-income housing affordability in 94 major housing markets in eight nations: Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. This edition covers the third...
The Fall of the Midwest Economic Model: In 1970, the future seemed to belong to Michigan’s example of big companies and big unions. Not anymore.
President Obama has kicked off a three-day bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois, where the corn is high and at least some factories are spewing smoke. He’s holding town-hall meetings on the economy, putting the unemployed back to work and “growing wages for everyone.” He won these Midwestern states handily in 2008, but he’s not taking anything for granted these days. The Midwest is the region with the largest number of target states.
Canada’s Contract Killer
In Canada, 15 per cent of the workforce is self-employed. Australia's rate is 18.5 per cent. Recently I proposed the idea that there's a distinct link between self-employment and entrepreneurial innovation. Self-employed people are, by behaviour and motivation,...
Good Bye Forced Funding of Union Advertising: Expect to see ‘paycheque protection’
Paycheque protection legislation which requires that union dues be spent solely on collective bargaining, not partisan politics and advertising is looming on Canada’s policy landscape.
Canadian Human Rights Commission Goes After Free Speech
In Canada, for instance, freedom of speech is not constitutionally guaranteed to the same degree it is in America. And those wishing for a glimpse into how forces sympathetic to Islamism will try to influence (read: stifle) public debate about the Muslim faith should be aware of recent Canadian experiences.
Free the Post
Attempts to reconcile tensions between the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and Canada Post are taking place in Ottawa today. Negotiations are ongoing and a compromise seems long overdue. According to a recent Toronto Star article, back-to-work legislation is in the...
A Welfare State or a Start-Up Nation?: After one generation, a one percentage point difference in growth rate becomes a 25% difference in per capita income.
Who you vote for in the next election will largely be determined by how you answer the following question: Should we encourage more productive use of resources or more social welfare?
Virtual Assistants – Location No Barrier!
When Greg Cole decided he needed an extra assistant, he resolved to look for a Virtual Assistant. But this VA needed to be different from the two assistants he already had – specifically, they needed to be located in Australia to take advantage of the time difference.
What Canadians Want: The Conservatives are rewarded for their economic success.
Canadian Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper’s landslide victory in Monday’s election, capturing the first center-right majority since 1988, is a tutorial in economics as much as politics. Aspiring Presidential candidates south of the 49th parallel, please take note.
Beware of Politicians Bearing “Green” Gifts: Governments can’t plan and spend their way to green prosperity
Many activists and politicians promise to improve economic performance through government spending on “green job” creation. Economic theory and empirical evidence from Europe both suggest that such efforts are unlikely to strengthen the economy.