Category Canada – Politics
Information and Empire
The case of the Parliamentary Budget Officer again locking horns with the federal government because of a request for information is symptomatic of a broader problem. The PBO is giving the government until the fall to release additional details of planned budget cuts or will take them to court. Naturally, in Ottawa’s current budgetary siege […]
Competition between unions
Suppose you were a believer in the benefits of canoes. You want as many Canadians as possible to own a canoe. You would presumably want to encourage competition between different canoe manufacturers, so they would compete on price and quality, so that price would be lower and/or quality would be higher, so that more Canadians […]
The Big Secret: Banks are banks
I have a confession to make. During the financial crisis I secretly bailed out the Bank of Montreal. I was part of a vast conspiracy of millions of other Canadians doing the same thing. It's worse. My personal bailout program for the Bank of Montreal started long before the financial crisis. It started when I […]
Fiscal policy, ideology, and framing
TiC Take a standard New Keynesian macro model. Assume it sometimes gets stuck in a ZLB liquidity trap, where monetary policy can't work. There is a very simple solution: use fiscal policy. Government spending should be cut whenever the economy is not in a liquidity trap. That is the clear policy implication of New Keynesian […]
Is a Constitutional Challenge Public Health Care’s Next Arena?
Many Canadians believe that the Canada Health Act is the bulwark that is supposed to be protecting public health care and that it should ensure comparable levels of coverage across the country. Yet, if one examines per capita provincial government health spending, the evidence shows that there are major differences.
Anke Kessler on the effects of robocalls on voter turnout
One of the (many!) important questions raised by the robocall scandal is whether or not the deceptive calls did in fact achieve their presumed goal of inducing supporters of opposition parties to stay home and not vote. If you look at riding-level data, there's not much to see. But Simon Fraser University's Anke Kessler has […]
If I had a policy tardis…
Imagine it was possible to travel back in time, and tell the policy makers of the past everything that we now know about pay as you go pension (PAYG) plans. Life expectancies will increase, birth rates will fall, and the contributions required to sustain the schemes will grow. PAYG pensions will be blamed for discouraging savings, […]
Raising the pension age: not if, but when.
It is not a question of if: Canada will, eventually, raise the age at which people are entitled to claim Guaranteed Income Supplement and Old Age Security. The US is raising its full retirement age, the UK is raising its state pension age. We'll raise our pension age for the same reason that they raised […]
The politics of NGDPLP targeting, redux
Back in November 2011, there was a part of the world that I didn't understand. The politics of monetary policy didn't make sense to me. Now the world is starting to make more sense. It's not that my understanding has changed. It's the world that has begun to change. Specifically, John Quiggin has come out […]
No, we really don’t want to reduce inequality
A few weeks ago, Mike Moffatt wrote an op-ed that ran in the Ottawa Citizen and several other PostMedia papers to the effect that there simply isn't the will on the part of 99% of the population to do much about inequality: if there were, there'd be more popular support for the sort of tax-and-redistribution […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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