Category Canadian economy
Minding the Gap
The Mowat Centre has issued a new report on Ontario’s fiscal balance within the Federation called "Filling the Gap: Measuring Ontario's Balance within the Federation." The report finds that: “based on the latest available figures, Ontarians transfer approximately $11B on net to the rest of Canada. This transfer is equivalent to 1.9% of the province’s […]
Good Luck Balancing the Federal Budget by 2015-16
Budgets are political and aspirational documents as they lay out a future course for the economy and government revenues and expenditures much as the government of the day would like them to be. Well, the 2013 federal budget is no exception as a bit of additional study of the budget numbers suggests that balancing the […]
Crime and Police
Statistics Canada has released its most recent report on police personnel and expenditures and notes that police strength measured as officers per capita declined in 2012 by 1 percent. Moreover, there has been a slight decline in police expenditures overall with spending in 2011 totaling 12.9 billion – a decline of 0.7 percent from the […]
Federal Budget Forecasting
What a difference just a few months can make in the world of federal government finance. Apparently, weak commodity prices and a slowing economy are playing such havoc with government finances that Thursday’s federal budget will show a downward revision of economic growth forecasts as well as a shortfall in revenue that will be addressed […]
Was Canada ever the best place in the world?
A revised and updated version of this post is on the Globe and Mail website here. Thanks to all of the WCI commentators who helped me get my head around the HDI calculations. For much of the 1990s, Canada topped the United Nations' Human Development Index (HDI). Newspaper headlines and politicians declared we were the […]
Why don’t we have disinflation (until now)?
Just a quickie, between meetings. Paul Krugman asks "Why don't we have deflation?" His answer is: downward nominal wage rigidity. And he shows that graph of frequency distribution of nominal wage changes with a big spike at zero. I don't think that's quite the right question. So I don't think that's quite the right answer. […]
Inheritance
Well, Ontario has a new finance minister – Charles Sousa – and according to the Toronto Star: “Charles Sousa, the two-term Mississauga South MPP who finished fifth in last month’s leadership race, will succeed the retiring Finance Minister Dwight Duncan at the treasury. An affable former Royal Bank executive, Sousa inherits a $11.9-billion deficit that […]
University retention and males
Carleton University admits more male students than females. But it graduates more female students than males. Why? What, if anything, can and should we do about it? (I don't know.) The public access data is here. (Datacubes is a lovely tool, but it takes a little time learning how to use it.) You can see […]
(Why) Is inflation finally falling?
This post is premature. It's too early to say for sure. And I don't have any real answers to explain this (possibly non-) event. I'm trying to fit together a number of things that have been puzzling me.
Toilets, Governments and Incentives
In my morning newspaper, I came across a hardware store flyer advertising a great new innovation – toilet with pump! Essentially, along with your regular toilet, an additional water storage tank and pump is installed that allows you to store recycled water used from your sink, tub, or shower and then use it when you […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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