Tag Archives: canada
Tax Competition
The Tax Foundation released its 2014 International Tax Competitiveness Index (ITCI) of 34 OECD countries and Canada’s overall rank was 24 out of 34 countries. Despite our recent snagging of Burger King, we are apparently in the bottom third of OECD countries when it comes to tax competitiveness. Interestingly enough, the United States did even […]
Physician Numbers Rising-Costs Stable For Now
CIHI has just released its latest report on physicians – Physicians in Canada 2013 – and the key findings can be summarized as follows: (1) For the 7th year in a row, the number of physicians in Canada increased, reaching 220 per 100,000 population in 2013. (2) In 2012–2013, total payments to physicians in Canada […]
Balancing the Premiers
Apparently, ten out of ten premiers (13 out of 13 if we count the territories) can agree that Canada is suffering from a “fiscal imbalance” between Ottawa and the provinces. At their annual meetings, which are wrapping up in Charlottetown today, the provincial premiers are arguing that since the Federal budget is moving into surplus […]
Physicians and Workload: A Very Simple International Comparison
The Canadian Medical Association has been having its annual meetings this week in Ottawa and in honor of the event, let me put out another international comparison on physicians using data from the OECD Health Statistics 2013. The first chart (Figure 1) is a basic resource availability measure showing the number of physicians per 1000 […]
We Are Not Slower, Just More Erratic: Comparing Growth in Canada and the United States
The existence of a productivity gap between Canada and the United States should ultimately manifest itself in terms of the growth rate of real per capita GDP. If productivity growth in Canada is consistently below that of the United States, then our real per capita GDP should also not grow as quickly as the United […]
Ontario Employment: Yours to Discover
Well, the latest Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey numbers paint a rather bleak picture for Ontario with employment dropping by 34,000 jobs and the unemployment rate rising from 7.3 to 7.5 percent. However, Ontario’s employment picture is much more complicated than that and regional numbers suggest that some parts of Ontario – well the GTA […]
Canada: One Hundred and Forty-Seven Years of Economic Growth
Well Canada Day is once again upon us – we now have 147 years of Confederation to celebrate– and what better way to celebrate than with a brief retrospective of economic performance as measured by per capita GDP. For your viewing pleasure, I present real per capita GDP in $2002 for each of the main […]
Canadian Manufacturing Employment: Growth and Decline (But more decline than growth)
Ontario’s budget will be presented today in the wake of new GDP numbers from Statistics Canada showing that Ontario’s real GDP growth was amongst the poorer performers in the country in 2013 (Quebec, NS, & NB were lower). Manufacturing was again singled out as one of the sectors in which Ontario is doing rather badly […]
Cross Border Shopping Isn’t What it Used to Be
Canadian retailers have recently been concerned that the Canada Border Services Agency has been too lenient with cross-border shoppers in the wake of the increase in duty free limits in 2012. While it is true that cross-border trips have grown substantially over the last decade, I’m not sure they should be that concerned.
Exchange Rates and Gasoline Prices?
Well the price of gasoline just spiked upwards across Canada and the usual media analysis has begun. Five key reasons were summarized as follows by Shawn McCarthy in the Globe and Mail: 1) Approach of the summer driving season leading to a switch to summer gas formulations which leads to a reduction in supply. 2) […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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