Category Canada – Politics
An open letter to the leaders of Canada’s federal political parties from economists teaching in Canadian colleges and universities
The press release and the list of signatories (more than 230 and counting) are over here. Here's the letter: One of the few issues on which most economists agree is the need for public policy to protect the environment. Why so much agreement? Because in the absence of policy, individuals generally don’t take the environmental […]
What are we, chopped liver?
From Stéphane Dion's 5-point Action Plan for dealing with the economy: 2. Convene a meeting of leading independent private sector economists to report on the state of the economy and assess both domestic and international trends for the coming year. Emphasis added. Memo to the Liberal Party of Canada: there are quite a few talented […]
Stephen Harper’s project to reduce the size of the federal government
Paul Wells often makes the point – in his book, and more recently here – that one of Stephen Harper's long-term goals is to reduce the size of the federal government. I don't think that there's much doubt that this is a goal of the Conservative government. What's much less clear is whether or not […]
Tracking the tracking polls
This is cross-posted on democraticSPACE. There are a lot of published opinion polls out there: I count 41 since September 8. The trouble is that many of them contradict each other – just what are we supposed to make from all this? Let's haul out our introductory statistics textbooks and take a closer look. Firstly, […]
Taxing my patience
Dumb tax proposals o' the day: The Liberals will go back to giving tax breaks to income trusts. I have to wonder what Ralph Goodale must be thinking about all this. It was a good idea to remove those tax breaks, and it's still a bad idea to put them back in place. The NDP […]
Why Canada’s MSM is doing an incredibly bad job of covering the election
Andrew Coyne makes the unassailable point that the MSM is making a horrible hash of covering the election campaign. And he also provides some insight as to why. As ever, it comes down to the incentives that journalists face: Read the coverage in any major daily on any given day. Watch the television. It's not […]
Deficit hysteresis
So it has come to this: Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, who this morning refused to say categorically he would never run a deficit if the economy slides, backtracked this afternoon to commit unequivocally that a Liberal government would never cause a deficit. Quizzed three times by reporters in London, Ont., on Wednesday morning, Mr. Dion […]
The Liberal-NDP childcare policy: The state as malevolent troll
The Liberals and the NDP have recycled their promises of a national daycare program: Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said if elected, his party would scale up spending on child care spaces to reach $1.25 billion in four years time, money that he said would fund 165,000 new spaces… NDP Leader Jack Layton made a similar […]
The GST cut: stupid economics, smart politics?
Paul Wells offers some very persuasive insight into why Stephen Harper cut the GST: It's not always true, after all, that long-term change and electoral expediency are necessarily antagonistic. The GST cut is a case in point. Economists, or at least economists who aren't named Stephen Harper, hate it. As a mechanism for encouraging growth […]
Campaign memes I don’t understand
1. The "Green Shift" is complicated and difficult to understand. It's not. Seriously. How hard can it be to figure out? Carbon taxes up. Other taxes down. End of story. It's much easier to understand than the cap-and-trade models of the other two parties. 2. Stephen Harper is the most credible leader on economic issues. […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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