Walking With Giants: How Economic Thought and Policy Evolves
Armine Yalnizyan, Atkinson Fellow on the Future for Workers – Recipient of the 2023 Galbraith Prize in Economics This lecture was delivered on May 31, 2024, at the Canadian Economics…
Angella MacEwen
Jason Kenney’s tax plan full of holes
Jason Kenney has proposed that he will revive the Alberta economy and create jobs by cutting corporate taxes from 12% to 8%. The thinking goes that profitable businesses already located…
Parental Leave and Pay Equity
Budget 2018 is being advertised as a truly comprehensive gender budget, with two key pieces of that being use-it-or-lose-it paternity leave, and action on pay equity. Last year’s gender budget…
Self-insurance for workers doesn’t work
This is a guest post from Rod Hill, a Professor of Economics at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John campus. A previous version of this post first appeared in…
Ease up on shareholder payouts, pay your workers more instead
With Alberta and Ontario raising their minimum wage to $15 per hour, and BC possibly following suit soon, the usual suspects have begun their predictable howling about how this is…
Income transfers, means testing, and universality, oh, my!
Overall, the NDP leadership race has provided a lot for progressive economists to be excited about. From progressive tax reform to fair wages and worker’s rights, poverty fighting income transfers…
Precarious work, Federal government edition
There was a recent article in the Hill Times about temporary workers in the federal public service, noting that this number is growing even under Trudeau’s sunny ways (that’s not…
NAFTA and Labour Rights
I recently spoke at the Standing Committee on International Trade on their study “Priorities of Canadian Stakeholders having an interest in Bilateral and Trilateral trade in North America, between Canada,…
Transit costs are too darn high
Public transit is a key piece of urban infrastructure, important for getting people where they want to go while limiting congestion and pollution. A central part of the federal government’s…
Alberta Alternative Budget 2017
Media Release Foundations for an Alberta Alternative Budget released today (March 14, 2017-Edmonton) Today, a coalition of researchers, economists, and members of civil society released a plan to boost Alberta’s…
Alternatives to Corporate Globalization: Cooperatives
In this guest post Tom Webb gives a summary of the pitch in his new book, that co-operatives are the answer to the problems of the global capitalist agenda. At…
Harper’s EI Appeals Process Not Working
This weekend, Quebec unions and activists issued a joint statement on the appeals process in Employment Insurance, calling on Trudeau to review the appeals process. The 2012 budget removed part-time…
Stop Trump copy-cats: Listen to workers
I presented at the Standing Committee on International Trade’s incredibly brief review of the implementing legislation for CETA. With me were representatives from the Business Council of Canada, the Chamber…
Parental and Caregiving Leaves
The very narrow and brief on-line consultations around parental and caregiving leaves finishes today. As we’ve done in the past, a coalition of community and labour organizations worked together to…
How do you solve a problem like precarious work?
Finance Minister Bill Morneau has taken quite a bit of heat for his tone deaf comments about the reality of precarious work, specifically saying that we should just “get used…
How to Solve a Problem like Internal Trade Barriers?
The updated agreement on internal trade, which had been moving along nicely, has hit a snag. Negotiators had wanted to open up all government procurement (meaning, not allowing any preferential…
Minimum wages as economic stimulus?
The Alberta Federation of Labour has an excellent minimum wage campaign, called “15 is fair”. I provided some research support for a paper they produced on the positive economic impact…
Who Earns Minimum Wage?
Photo by OFL Communications Department Minimum wages have been getting a lot of attention lately. And for good reason. Workers earning minimum wage often struggle to get enough hours, don’t…
The TPP is a Bad Idea, part 27
On June 16th the House Committee on International Trade held its 27th meeting about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Canadian Labour Congress, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, Scott Sinclair, and…
Who earns minimum wage?
Minimum wages have been getting a lot of attention lately. And for good reason. Workers earning minimum wage often struggle to get enough hours, don’t have predictable schedules or advance…