A Cure for Deficit and Tax Phobia
It started as a FB post, morphed into this blog, and who knows what’s next: the case for an approach to public finance that enables the level of ambition these…
himelfarb
Don’t Panic: Debt Can Build a Better World
This is an updated version of an article that first appeared in Alberta Views (December issue). COVID-19, this microscopic bug, seems to have upended just about everything. History provides no…
Review of Hugh Segal’s Bootstraps Need Boots
Hugh Segal has written an engaging personal and political memoir and plea for basic income. Here’s my review in Alberta Views.
How to Pay for a Just and Green Recovery
Some colleagues and I published this piece on how to pay for “building back better”. The Broadbent Institute published this longer version here.
After the Pandemic
First Policy Response has brought together diverse views (including my own) on how the pandemic recession differs from previous recessions and what we need to do to get through this…
Austerity and the Decline of the Collective
(Notes for Second Annual Arnold Amber Memorial Lecture, Toronto, May 29, 2019) I am honoured to be celebrating the life and values of Arnold Amber. Celebrating social justice and human…
We Need an Antidote to Complacency and Resentmento
When life becomes a zero sum game, when competition is seen as the sole basis for organizing society, when targeting social benefits that should be universal shows folk that some…
We Can’t Make Things Better Without More Tax Revenue
Here’s my latest, in CCPA’s Monitor on reconnecting taxes and the common good. https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/reconnecting-taxes-and-common-good
EXPANDING THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION
The other day, CNN ran a focus group on what some American voters were now thinking about their president. The comments were almost universally critical including among Trump voters. But…
The outrage must not dull
What’s going on – the ban on transsexuals, the removal of civil rights protections, the equivocation on nazis and white supremacists, the assault on immigrants, the pardon, and so much…
The Beginning of the End of Homelessness
Roy Romanow and I just published this piece making the case that ending homelessness should be a top priority in the government’s promised National Housing Strategy. Shortly after we put…
Why Proportional Representation Is Likely To Produce Better Public Policy
Here is a piece I wrote for CCPA on the policy benefits of a more proportional electoral system.
Basic Income
The Ontario government has committed to test the idea of a basic income. Over the next week or so Hugh Segal will release a discussion paper intended to guide the…
Proportional Representation: Fairness, Representativeness and Accountability
Here are the notes for my introductory comments to the Special Committee on Electoral Reform July 27, 2016 I thank the committee for the opportunity to appear on this…
GREAT NEWS ON THE HOMELESSNESS FILE
June 01, 2016 09:00 ET Former Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow Elected Co-Chair of Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness Board of Directors CALGARY, ALBERTA–(Marketwired – June 1, 2016) – The Canadian…
Alex’s Blog 2016-05-12 18:36:30
A couple of days back, Ed Broadbent, Hugh Segal and I published an op-ed making the case for some form of proportional representation. Yesterday the government announced its process for…
What Bernie Sanders Has Accomplished
Here is an op ed in the Star on what we might learn from the Bernie Sanders camPaign
The Decline of the Collective
Keynote Speech at the Parkland Institute November 20 2015.
Austerity’s Vicious Circle
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2015/10/02/austeritys-vicious-circle.html. Here is my latest written for The Toronto Star as part of their series on how Canada has changed over the last ten years.