Category Canada – Politics
The perils of pricing publicly-provided products
One of the more resilient errors in policy analysis – in Canada, anyway – takes the following form: a) Public goods should be provided at zero price by the government. b) Therefore, goods provided by the government should have zero price. The former assertion is correct, but b) is a non sequitur: not all publicly-provided […]
Why Canadians should be grateful that Joe Clark lost the 1980 election
Ed Glaeser lists five problems with the US policy of letting homeowners deduct mortgage interest payments. Megan McArdle (among others) agrees, but isn't very optimistic about the chances of getting rid of it: Current homeowners bought their homes on the expectation not only that they would enjoy tax deductibility, but that they would be able […]
Cheer up, Andrew Coyne
It may well be that "there is no longer anything resembling a conservative party in this country". OTOH, there is no longer anything resembling a progressive party in this country, either.
Only idiots start wars they can’t win.
So Jack Layton is idiot du jour: Canada should pursue 'Buy Canadian' strategy: Layton: Canada should adopt a "Buy Canadian" strategy in response to the "Buy American" clause included in the proposed U.S. stimulus package, NDP Leader Jack Layton urged Tuesday. During question period in the House of Commons, Layton said that there's a "golden […]
The changing game between monetary and fiscal authorities
Who's in charge of aggregate demand? Monetary policy affects aggregate demand; fiscal policy affects aggregate demand. How the monetary authority acts may depend on how it expects the fiscal authority to act, and vice versa. What happens depends on the rules of the game they are playing. The rules of the game have changed in […]
What do do with the $1.95/vote subsidy: Give it to the Parliamentary Budget Office
We all know that the Harper government's proposal to kill the the $1.95/vote subsidy for the federal political parties blew up in its face. But would it have been good policy? Andrew Coyne thinks so, and it's hard to see just what public policy goal is being served by giving public money to political parties. […]
A fiscal stimulus proposal that should be implemented, but won’t be
A recession is here, the Bank of Canada is running out of bullets, and it's time for a fiscal stimulus. The problem is that the worst possible signal has been sent out to the usual gang of well-connected, media-savvy interest groups: "We're giving money away, and we really don't care who gets it!". This has […]
On the economics of the MSM print media
Paul Wells, Andrew Potter and Dan Gardner have posted recently on the plight of the economic model of MSM journalism. What will happen to popular discourse if people stop buying newspapers and magazines because pretty much everything that's in them is available for free on the internet? Well, let's consider what's at stake. From page […]
What if increased government spending is contractionary?
Suppose that Canada does go into recession, either this month or in the months to come. What policy instruments are in the arsenal? The automatic stabilisers: Taxes will fall with revenues, and expenditures will rise as unemployed workers start drawing on employment insurance benefits. (There are of course other mechanisms at work here.) Monetary policy: […]
“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”… you’ll lose the election
Consider two recent media feeding frenzies: Stéphane Dion admits that there might be circumstances in which an eventual Liberal government might run a deficit. Stephen Harper notes that "Canada is not the United States": there is no crisis of solvency in the Canadian financial system, and there's no evidence that one will occur anytime soon. […]
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