Category Energy
How to make mine operators pay for the mess they make
When an Ontario cemetery operator sells a burial plot, they must side aside 40 percent of the money they receive into a "care and maintenance account". This is a way of solving a grave moral hazard problem: operators might sell plots, and then walk away from their maintenance obligations. The same kind of moral hazard […]
Doug Saunders has written a dreadful column about the “resource curse”, and I’m going to explain why it’s dreadful
This column by Doug Saunders on the "resource curse" in last Saturday's Globe and Mail is quite dreadful: When the price of oil is the foundation of your country’s economy, a sudden plunge to half its value focuses the mind wonderfully, doesn’t it? One's heart sinks at the very first sentence: the premise is wildy at odds […]
The New Mercantilists
In its search for new revenues, Ontario commissioned a government panel to examine how to wring more money out of government assets. In recent days, the panel led by TD Bank CEO Ed Clark has revealed several ideas including selling off Hydro One’s distribution business, restructuring Ontario Power Generation so it provides more revenues and […]
Flogging a Dead Horse: Research the Progressive Conservatives misinterpreted was flawed
This post was written by Mike Veall of the Department of Economics at McMaster University. David Reevely and Jim Stanford, followed up by Paul Boothe, Mike Moffat, the Globe and Mail and others have shown that the Ontario Progressive Conservative millions job plan does not follow from the research it is based on. For example, […]
Alberta Juggernaut Continues…For Now
Friday’s Labor Force Survey release showed total employment and the unemployment rate were little changed and that there has been little overall employment growth in Canada since August. Indeed, total employment shrank slightly in Canada with Quebec and British Columbia faring the worst in terms of the total number of jobs lost. Of course, Alberta […]
Resource Revenue Retention: New Twists on an Old Idea?
In a post on iPolitics, author and journalist Madelaine Drohan discusses the move by the PQ government in Quebec to embrace the Generations Fund – a sovereign wealth fund created by the Liberal government of Jean Charest in 2006. The original plan was to invest water power and mining royalties into a fund whose income […]
My trip to see the oil sands
Last month, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers organised a field trip for a group of economics professors to see a couple of the oil sands installations. I once wrote somewhere that the oil sands are the most important Canadian economic fact of our time, and I jumped at the offer to join the tour. […]
The New Gold Rush
This post was written by HEC-Montréal professor Simon van Norden With changes to environmental review processes, I get the feeling that the Harper government is keen to speed up development of the Oilsands. That’s not particularly odd. Oil prices tripled and Canada is sitting on the second largest reserves in the world; the Canadian dollar […]
Who benefits from the oil sands? Who benefits from saying that only Alberta does?
This didn't pass my sniff test: The economic benefits of oil sands development, while considerable, are unevenly distributed across the country, making interprovincial tensions understandable. While provinces other than Alberta are projected to benefit, modelling by the Canadian Energy Research Institute projects that 94 per cent of the GDP impact of oil sands development will […]
When men and women are miles apart….
The Globe and Mail website doesn't cope with data and graphics easily, so I'm reproducing my most recent Economy Lab post, along with data tables that couldn't be included in the G&M piece, here:
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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