Tag: Economy and Taxation

Such appointments would signal the priority the two leaders attach to the achievement of this deal. To represent Canada, we can think of no one possessing a better appreciation and the experience of successfully working both systems, as well as the gravitas, guile and good humour to get it done,

At least, that’s my reading of what’s going on here, and I’m open to being corrected. Several years ago, U.S. Steel acquired the Stelco plants in Ontario on the strength of an agreement with the government that it would keep them open and keep the workers employed as normal. Instead,

On November 18, intending it to be a sarcastic and over-the-top remark, I suggested that pretty soon the Conservatives would be accusing people of wrecking — a form of sedition used by the Soviet Union as a catch-all category for the vaguely defined crime of harming the economy, decreasing efficiency,

It’s hardly surprising, but I thought it was worth mentioning.  November 23, 2011, is the day that Fraser Institute director Michael Walker officially and publicly announced that he opposes democracy. In Greece, only. Not here, so far. I was pleasantly surprised to hear both Bank of Canada chair Mark Carney

One of the long-running themes of this blog are the unstated corporate conflicts of interest which the major newspapers cheerfully allow to proliferate on their editorial pages. Monday’s strange promotional piece about RIM by former Conservative minister Jim Prentice provides an unusually explicit case in point. RIM, you will recall,

… and I can’t say I’m sorry to see it. Yesterday I suggested that at least Mitt Romney would be a sort of Obama-esque President, who could at least push off the final confrontation with the revolutionary nutcases for a few more years. Today I feel more confident that he has a good shot at […]

Occasionally I like to draw attention to a Government of Canada press release which pops up in my RSS feed and which strikes me as particularly stupid or pointless. This week’s champion is a national press release circulated Monday morning, in which Kelowna Conservative MP Ronald Cannan announces that Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, […]

I regard the Conference Board of Canada with deep suspicion. It plagiarizes reports and opposes universal healthcare. Which is why I was so impressed to see an op-ed by its economist, Glen Hodgson, arguing that it is high time we started treating tax breaks like the government expenditures they really are: not spending per se, […]

Greenhouse effect: We can always deal with it later, right? No surprise there, I suppose. Still, it was depressing to read ATB economist Todd Hirsch’s attempt at an obituary for climate change in the Globe & Mail: “debt is the new carbon.” Hirsch’s argument is that climate change doesn’t matter anymore because we’re interested in […]

Unemployment rates, like political opinion polls, are in my opinion so useless that an intelligent media would simply ignore them. In this case the reason is because the statistics in question have been quietly manipulated beyond the point of meaningfulness by government statisticians operating with the full blessing of cowardly politicians less interested in releasing […]

This was the seeming incongruous thought which came to mind as I skimmed this dubious excuse for a think-piece by Kenneth Rogoff in the Globe & Mail, and this even more dubious arm-waving about a Ponzi scheme by a columnist in the National Post. Rogoff is a former IMF chief economist, but despite that, I […]

Continuing my regular series of hopelessly bad government press releases, let me just say that if this is what human resources minister Diane Finley thinks is strong affirmative action in the face of blatantly illegal mass layoffs by American call centre company IQT falling the closure of their Canadian operations, then that is a strong […]

Sometimes the right-wing columnists which populate our supposedly left-wing mainstream media get truly bizarre. Witness, for instance, today’s asinine free-marketeering in the Ottawa Citizen by William Watson, who offer the absurd and even pathetic market that even though EI programs successfully helped laid-off workers during the recession, we should get rid of them anyways to […]

Apparently what the Conservatives meant by “small government” during this spring’s election was “government so small it can dictate terms of employment to people even when they are not government employees.”
It’s wor…