Labour Force Exodus
Statistics Canada reported this morning that 38,000 people gave up looking for work in February. The official unemployment rate fell because these Canadians were no longer counted as being unemployed.…
Erin Weir
The Loonie’s Stagnant Purchasing Power
The following note also appears on Business Insider. I owe Paul Tulloch a hat tip for reminding me of these issues in a good comment on my last post. When…
What To Do About Dutch Disease?
In response to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s complaint about oil and the exchange rate, several (conservative) commentators argued that this “Dutch disease” is not what ails Ontario manufacturing. Andrew Coyne…
Santa Claus Delivers a Positive Quarter Despite Corporate Scrooges
The Month: Christmas Gift Canada’s economy was buoyed by Christmas cheer as a December bounce more than offset slight declines in October and November to turn the fourth quarter positive.…
2012 Essay Contest
The information for this year’s student essay contest is now available. Please note the submission deadline of May 7.
Provincial and State Corporate Taxes
The following commentary also appears on The Globe and Mail’s Global Exchange blog: What Obama’s Corporate Tax Proposal Means for Canada Last week, there was much consternation in Canada’s business…
Debunking Drummond
The Drummond report claims that Ontario is headed for a $30-billion deficit. This figure has been widely and uncritically reported. For example, The Globe and Mail, printed four articles featuring…
Drummond Misdiagnoses Ontario’s Economy
The Harvard International Review has posted an interview with Don Drummond. I have posted the following response: It is good Drummond confesses that his free-market policy prescriptions failed to improve…
McGuinty’s Business Tax Breaks
An interesting nugget in last week’s Drummond report is Table 11.1, an updated version of Table 2 from “Ontario’s Tax Plan for Jobs and Growth” (2009). It provides a sectoral…
Trans-Pacific Partnership
The United Steelworkers’ union made the following submission to the Government of Canada earlier this week: The United Steelworkers union welcomes the opportunity to comment on Canada’s proposed entry into…
EI Shrank by 100,000 in 2011
Statistics Canada reported today that the number of Canadians receiving Employment Insurance rose by 4,230 in December, a month in which unemployment rose by 6,100. The proportion of unemployed workers…
Inflation and Drummond
Statistics Canada reported today that consumer prices jumped in January (by 0.4% or 0.5% seasonally-adjusted), offsetting the drop in December. As a result, the annual inflation rate is now 2.5%…
Drummond: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
The Drummond Commission reported today. The Good While the McGuinty government prevented the Commission from considering tax rates, it proposes some sensible measures to raise revenue. Chapter 18, “Revenue Integrity,”…
Evidence vs. Ivison
If the National Post’s John Ivison wanted to agitate this blog’s authors, he could not have done much better than last week’s commentary on the census numbers. It was printed…
Ontario’s Not Digging Deep Enough
PricewaterhouseCoopers’ biennial guide to Canadian mining taxation, Digging Deeper, features a comparative summary of royalties, mining taxes and corporate taxes for a hypothetical gold mine. This approach differs from the…
Ontario’s Pitiful Mining Tax
This table displays the mining taxes and royalties paid for minerals – including coal, but excluding oil and gas – to Canada’s major mining jurisdictions in 2010. (The excluded jurisdictions…
Old Age (In)Security
Here is an overview of today’s timely Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives paper on Old Age Security: Old Age Security (OAS) is the basic building block of Canada’s retirement income…
Diane Finley’s Demographics
On CTV yesterday, human resources minister Diane Finley said (45 seconds into this interview): “As we go forward, we’re going to have three times the expense in Old Age Security…
Budget Cuts Could Worsen Rising Unemployment
It was not a happy new year for Canadian job seekers. Statistics Canada reported today that unemployment rose for a fourth consecutive month in January. Overall employment remained flat as…
GDP Turns Negative
Statistics Canada reported today that the economy shrank in November for the first time in six months. This decline was driven by reduced energy production, which partly reflected maintenance shutdowns…