Monthly Archives: November 2005
Breaking news: Canada’s current account balance hits near-record levels!
What with the fall of the federal govt last night and the upcoming election, I’m pretty sure that few paid much attention to today’s StatsCan Daily. That’s too bad, because there was some interesting stuff there – and of far more importance than the tsunami of polls and election speculation that dominated today’s media headlines. […]
An elegant summary of what ails GM
Courtesy of William Watson, in today’s National Post: Here’s the problem with General Motors. Would you buy a car, used or new, from a company that wrote the following sentence: "The Buick LaCrosse is conquesting sales at impressive rates … "? "Conquesting"?
Who pays corporate taxes?
Not corporations. Oh sure, maybe someone employed by a corporation has to write out a cheque to the order of the Receiver-General, and the cheque may even have a corporate logo on it. But corporations do not pay taxes – people do. The question is which people. Or, in the language of public economics, what […]
A sea change in Canadian federal politics?
Today’s National Post has two, apparently unrelated columns that suggest we might – just might – be witnessing an important turning point in federal politics. The first is that the Conservative Party of Canada is peering into the Void of Complete Irrelevance, and is getting out the springboard: Andrew Coyne – Will the Tories jump […]
Convergence in Canada
In a previous post, I was sceptical of a claim made by the Globe’s Murray Campbell to the effect that the policy of redistributing from ‘have’ to ‘have-not’ provinces hasn’t worked. I’ve spent some time looking at the data, and one mystery has been cleared up: Ontario’s nominal GDP per capita was indeed 103% of […]
Maybe equalization is working after all
In today’s Globe and Mail, Murray Campbell says that the federal govt’s policy of redistributing tax revenues to the ‘have-not’ provinces is not working (subscription req’d). That may be, but the evidence he provides isn’t particularly convincing. For example, …Ontario’s gross domestic product per capita has dropped to 103 per cent of the national average, […]
The Canadian Macroeconomic Study Group meeting is this weekend
I’d like to go, but it’s a long way from Quebec City to Vancouver for a weekend conference. The programme looks interesting. Here are some papers that I wish I could see in person:
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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