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There is a trade-off in cancer screening. On the one hand, older people are more likely to get cancer – as the chart shows, colorectal cancer incidence rates rise with age. On the other hand, the number of years one can expect to live decreases as one gets older. If a cancer is slow growing […]

1. Canada is a big country …but not as big as one might think. Some maps show Canada as an enormous country, about twice the size of China or the US, similar in size to the entire continent of Africa: However maps like the one shown above distort the size of northern countries, making them […]

The following is a guest post by Mikal Skuterud of University of Waterloo On February 14, the Federal Government issued 27,332 invitations for permanent residency to Canadian Experience Class (CEC) applicants in the Express Entry pool. To issue this unprecedented level of invitations, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) reached deep into the pool, providing […]

One way to measure students' satisfaction with their educational experience is to ask graduates, if they could choose again, would they select the same program. Canada's National Graduates Survey (NGS) has been asking some variation on that question since 1982. The data has many limitations, as I explain in this post. But the little we can […]

In the US, liberal bias in academia has long been a subject of concern, especially to those on the right of the political spectrum. Now here in Canada, pundits and politicians are increasingly bothered by a perceived lack of openness to conservative views on campus (see, for example, here, here or here). Yet Canada is not the […]

In Ontario, public sector employees earn more than private sector employees. Many workers in the private sector earn the minimum wage, or only slightly above minimum wage. The peak of the public sector earnings distribution is much higher, at twenty-something dollars per hour, and there are a good number of public sector workers earning $40 […]

The Ontario government publishes an annual "Sunshine List". This is a dataset containing detailed salary information on every Ontario government employee earning over $100,000 per year. The list includes the salaries of public servants, also salaries of people who work in Ontario universities, hospitals, and other government agencies.  A couple of conversations I had earlier […]

First I need to tell you why I am writing this post. I got two emails from Canadian economists saying they agreed with my post against "normalising" interest rates. The first email was from an academic macroeconomist. He asked me if I thought that calls for normalisation from bank economists were motivated by bank profitability. […]

Aboriginal programming is one of Canada's most worthwhile initiatives, from the classic radio program Dead Dog Cafe to Nick Rowe's favourite show, Moosemeat and Marmalade. But what is it worth? If you were asked to do an economic impact assessment of Aboriginal media – especially Aboriginal language programming – how would you do it?  A lot of […]