Category Canada – Politics
Presidents: do you get what you pay for?
In 1915, Woodrow Wilson earned $75,000 per year, or $1.9 million in 2018 dollars, for serving as President of the United States. The current incumbent of that office receives only a fraction of that amount: $400,000 annually. Congress has increased the presidential salary three times in the past 100 years: raising it to $100,000 in […]
Postmodern Economic Measurement: There is no number, only numbers
National income accounting distills a nation's economy into a single number: gross domestic product. GDP has been critiqued many times for its neglect of household production, environmental degradation, income distribution, and so on. Many alternatives have been proposed, such as genuine progress indicators, happiness measures, the Human Development Index, the Better Life Index, well-being indexes, […]
Natural Resources, Living Standards and Inequality
Kevin Milligan had an op-ed in the Globe and Mail a few days ago drawing the link between natural resource development, middle class incomes and inequality. The point essentially was: “Without income derived from the resource boom, Canadian inequality and the well-being of the Canadian middle class would be much worse than we’ve experienced.” The […]
Is the war over higher education spreading north?
In the US, higher education has become a partisan issue. While Democrats view colleges and universities as having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country, a majority of Republicans now view colleges and universities as a negative influence (see this Pew survey). There is also a partisan divide in the US […]
The Balance of the Federation: Canada 1870 to 2016
My contribution to Maclean’s 2018 Chartapalooza was a plot of the federal government’s share of total government expenditure in Canada since 1870. The chart showed that until World War I, with the exception of period marked by the building of the federally subsidized CPR, the federal share of total government spending in Canada was approximately […]
How much more can governments spend by switching to a debt ratio target?
In my recent National Post column, I make reference to some back-of-envelope calculations to the effect that replacing the fiscal anchor of balanced budgets to one of a fixed debt-GDP ratio allows the federal government to increase spending by 1.2 percentage points of GDP, or by about $25 billion. I'm going to work through the […]
A Very Brief History of Federal Cash Transfers: Canada 1867 to 2017
This is a post in celebration of Canada’s 150th and similar in time span to my previous one on housing supply and dwelling starts. Canada is a federation and a key feature of its operation is a system of intergovernmental transfers between its fiscal tiers. Indeed, transfers and regional equity are enshrined in Section 36 […]
Infrastructure Overbuilds: Past and Present
Thomas Gunton of Simon Fraser University’s Resource and Environmental Planning Program had a piece in yesterday’s Globe and Mail raising the question if the statement of support for the Keystone XL pipeline and the approval of two other pipelines was moving Canada to a situation of surplus capacity when it comes to pipelines? Gunton’s answer […]
No Health Deal. Now What?
Well, I just finished watching the federal health and finance ministers discuss the failed federal transfer health deal on the news. I suppose coming just a few days before Christmas, a dispute over federal health transfers can become a new sort of Canadian holiday tradition given it has happened before with the December 2011 unilateral […]
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, […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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