Tag Archives: canada
Police, Crime and the Great Canadian Crime Drop
It would appear fiscal restraint has finally caught up with police services across the country. The recent release of Police Resources in Canada, 2013 by Statistics Canada documents a decline in police strength after nearly a decade of increases as well as a slowdown in per capita spending. The crime rate, however continues to fall.
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 […]
Should Municipalities in Canada Get More Money?
In the tradition of the fur traders of the Northwest Company, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities is holding their board meeting “Rendezvous” at the head of the Great Lakes in Thunder Bay from March 5th to 8th. It was difficult task trying to find an agenda on their website but no doubt they will be […]
Missing the Target in Canada
Target’s retail invasion of Canada seems to have developed parallels to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia – it is fighting a losing battle in a cold winter. Target’s northern front lost 941 million dollars in 2013. A CBC news story reports that: “That expansion has been hammered by supply issues, as there are frequent reports of […]
Taxation and Growth: A North American Cross-Border Comparison
My last comparison of U.S. states and Canadian provinces with respect to their federal transfer revenue shares got me thinking about the other revenue sources and whether any relationship could be found between economic growth and revenue composition. Income taxation is supposed to have incentive and distortion effects on saving, risk taking and labor supply […]
Fiscal Federalism: A Cross-Border Comparison
As a federal country, one of Canada’s hallmarks is a well-developed system of intergovernmental transfers. Indeed, we often remark that Canadian provinces are dependent on federal transfers for large chunks of their spending and there is some debate over whether Canada’s provinces should engage in more own-source revenue effort rather than plead for more transfers. […]
International Employment Update: U.S. Resilience and Australian Exceptionalism
I thought it was time for an updated look at employment creation in the advanced economies given that we are now at just over five years since the 2008-09 Great Recession that walloped world economies. I’ve taken the IMF World Economic Outlook Database employment numbers for the period 2007 to 2013 to get employment levels […]
Visioning the Surplus
The Federal government is poised to move into a period of fiscal surplus. According to the 2014 Federal Budget, the 2014-15 fiscal year will see a 2.9 billion dollar deficit (which could actually be a small surplus due to the 3 billion dollar contingency fund). After that, 2015-16 will see a 6.4 billion dollar surplus […]
When Will Low Interest Rates End?
A recent piece in the Financial Post titled “How many times can economists cry wolf about interest rates” caught my interest because I – like many economists in Canada – have been expecting interest rates to eventually start to rise and yet they do not. So when will Canadian interest rates start to go up? […]
Canadian Housing Prices: Some More Data to Ponder
Well, given the continuing pronouncements that Canada’s housing market is overvalued, I thought I would follow up my November post with another take on the data. Among the many suggestions received on that post was to extend the data back further and to look at price/rent ratios. This time, I decided to gather CMHC data […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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