Category Canada – Politics
When universal programs are regressive
Alain Dubuc’s column in today’s Le Soleil makes the not-made-often-enough point that many universal programs are in fact regressive, and wonders why self-described progressives defend them so ferociously: Mais pourquoi a-t-on privilégié l’universalité ? Parce qu’elle rend les programmes sociaux acceptables, puisque tous les citoyens, et donc tous les électeurs, en sont bénéficiaires. Et par […]
We can’t get to Kyoto from here, and there’s no point in pretending that we can
All of the opposition parties in Ottawa say that they support the Kyoto accord, and they insist that any climate change policy must be aimed at achieving the Kyoto targets for greenhouse gas emissions. But this is simply not going to happen. There is no feasible way we can achieve the Kyoto targets.
The politics of climate change policy in Canada
Convincing Canadians of the need to make significant sacrifices in order to slow global warming was never going to be easy.
The Canadian Wheat Board: Won’t anybody think of the consumers?
The Canadian Wheat Board – a cartel for Canadian wheat producers – is experiencing the sort of troubles that all cartels have to deal with at some point or another: some of its members believe that they could do better on their own. We’ve all seen this story before, but a distinguishing feature of this […]
How a not-completely-stupid idea became a multi-billion-dollar policy mistake
Another step in the long, slow, agonising death of a white elephant: the federal government is selling land it had expropriated for the Mirabel airport back to its original owners. If you have the benefit of thirty years’ worth of hindsight, the Mirabel airport is a pretty easy project to mock: it made many of […]
How much should politicians be paid? And who should pay them?
The proposal to increase Ontario MPP’s pay has elicited the usual flurry of indignation: "It’s remarkable that they would have the chutzpah, the nerve, I mean gonads the size of a canal horse, to introduce legislation like this…" Whenever politicians try to vote themselves a pay increase, a certain amount of scepticism is warranted. But […]
“But the pension fund was just sitting there”
The federal government’s economic update was released the other day, complete with the eye-catching proposal to be "debt-free" by 2021. I don’t know what’s worse: that the Conservatives expected it to be swallowed, or the fact that some journalists did. It turns out that the measure of debt they’re talking about is "net debt", which […]
Income-splitting: An expensive way to solve a small problem, and to make a bigger problem worse
The Conservatives are floating the idea of income-splitting, and Andrew Coyne – who has apparently read Jean-Yves Duclos’ Innis Lecture that I referred to here – approves on the basis of fairness: For once, the crass appeal to the base is also the perfect means of broadening the base; the cynical vote-buying thing is also […]
“To you from falling hands we throw / The torch”
I’m generally cynical about petitions, and doubly so for internet-based ones, but this one deserves all the support we can muster: "We the undersigned feel enormous gratitude for the sacrifice made by all the Canadian Armed Forces through the ages in defence of this country and its values; acknowledge the very special nature of the […]
The NDP and the minimum wage
The Ontario NDP has introduced a private member’s bill to increase the Ontario minimum wage from $7.75/hr to $10.00/hr, and its cousins in Ottawa have proposed a $10/hr minimum wage for workers under federal jurisdiction. The question is: why? We know that the link between those who earn the minimum wage and those who are […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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