Monthly Archives: October 2016
A Grave Problem
Ontario has no eerie, overgrown church graveyards. There are no dangerously angled tombstones, no grave markers obscured by rambling vines, nor ancient trees with branches sweeping the ground. In Ontario, cemetery operators are required to maintain graveyards properly. There must be an accessible entrance. Grave markers must be stabilized. Section 29 of the Funeral, Burial and Cremation […]
Synchronisation and the Gross Money Supply
You decide to make a new monetary system from scratch. You give everyone a chequing account on your computer, with an initial balance of 0 units. If Andy buys bananas from Betty and pays her 100 units, Betty now has a positive balance and Andy now has a negative balance. The Net money supply remains […]
Why is it so hard to know the relationship between immigration and economic performance?
Here is the number of new permanent residents to Canada, as a percentage of the existing population, over time: "New permanent residents" is not a perfect measure of immigration – it excludes temporary foreign workers, who have become much more important in recent years, and also ignores emigration, that is, the non-trivial number of newcomers […]
The carbon costs of immigration
Canada is, as far as countries go, relatively cold and sparsely populated. Our houses are large by global standards, and we drive a fair amount. We are rich enough to consume a lot of stuff. These factors, together with the oil sands, mean that we have one of the world's highest levels of CO2 emissions on […]
A Supreme Folly
Last August, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that, in future, only candidates who are "functionally bilingual" in French and English will be recommended for positions on the Supreme Court of Canada. With the information released subsequent to the nomination of Malcolm Rowe to the Court, we now have some sense of what this means. At a minimum, […]
Monetary Science Fiction
Chris Dillow says that economics is like literature. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. But if it is literature, economics needs more science fiction. Paradoxically, imagining radically different worlds can help us understand better how the actual world works, as well as helping us consider policy alternatives. Imagine a world where all borrowing and […]
Another Foray into Data: New Macro-Financial Data
I think Stephen Gordon's Project Link and its piecing together of fragments of Statistics Canada data is a solid step in the right direction. If our national statistical agency is not going to provide long-term consistent data series, then I suppose its up to the researchers to lead the way. Another case in point is […]
Project Link: Piecing together recent Canadian economic history
I've already ranted a couple of times – here and here – about Statistics Canada's 'Attention Deficit Disorder': its habit of starting new time series using new methodologies without updating the historical data. As I put it in my first rant, Statistics Canada must be the only statistical agency in the world where the average […]
Equity and diversity plans won’t solve the Canada Research Chair program’s gender problem.
The Canada Research Chair program has a long-standing gender problem. Way back in 2002, the CRC Secretariat commissioned a gender-based analysis of the program which concluded: There are several sub-disciplines/fields where women are under represented among the Canada Research Chair nominees. In part, this may be due to the lesser "research maturity" of some disciplines […]
Canada’s residential schools and the dangers of educational hubris
In 1953 the Canadian Geographical Society published a glossy black-and-white volume called "Image of Canada." It has the usual inspiring pictures of Saskatchewan wheat fields and Toronto city lights; of majestic glaciers and mighty log booms. The book also contains images that open a window to the past, and let us see the world through 1950s eyes. […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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