Big Business Joins The Battle Against Climate Change
Whatever you do, don't tell Canada's grubby gang of Con climate change deniers anything. For I doubt they could survive the shock.They want us to believe that fighting global warming…
big business
An Analysis of Financial Flows in the Canadian Economy
An essential but perhaps overlooked way of looking at the economy is a sector financial balance approach. Pioneered by the late UK economist Wynne Godley, this approach starts with National…
Ontario Electricity Sector V – What they knew, and when they knew it…
Last month I published a full-length article in the “The Monitor” magazine providing a “how we got here” analysis of the Ontario electricity sector and some options for the next…
Con Millionaire: The Selling of Stephen Harper
As you may have heard, Stephen Harper is finally gainfully employed again, after getting paid to do nothing for so long.And although he hasn't yet asked Big Oil for a…
Some missing elements from the Canadian TPP debate
With an agreement reached on the Trans Pacific Partnership, the 12-member trade and investment treaty, opinions began swirling about what the deal means for the future of Canada. Plenty of…
Canada After Harper
Here is the link to buy a new book, Canada After Harper, edited by Ed Finn and with an introduction by Ralph Nader, just published by Lorimer. Most Canadians know…
The CBC – the Corporate Broadcasting Corp.
A new scandal blew up at the CBC this week when the website Canadaland published an exposé charging that Amanda Lang, the broadcaster’s senior business reporter and host of The…
Andrea Horwath’s Debacle
I can’t remember the last time I laughed out loud when I saw election results. I almost spat a mouthful of my breakfast across the room. Almost nobody expected Ontario’s…
NDP Sectarianism Returns with a Vengeance
You have to wonder what Andrea Horwath was thinking. By bringing down the Ontario government a week ago and launching an election as a result, the NDP risks opening the…
Corporate Cash Stash Surpasses National Debt
Today’s National Balance Sheet Accounts indicate that the amount of cash held by private non-financial corporations in Canada soared from $591 billion in the third quarter of 2013 to $626…
PotashCorp Projects Low Royalties
Today’s fourth-quarter report indicates that PotashCorp paid “provincial mining and other taxes” of $194 million on potash sales of $3 billion in 2013. In other words, Saskatchewan’s resource surcharge and…
StatCan Debunks Small-Business Mythology
Canadian economic commentators often worship small business as the supposed source of economic dynamism and growth. This cult of small business has greatly influenced public policy, with federal and provincial…
Weir vs. Wall on Potash Profits, Dividends and Royalties
Earlier this week, PotashCorp laid off 440 workers in Saskatchewan. Here are the closing paragraphs from today’s front-page story reporting a letter from Premier Brad Wall asking the company to…
PEF Session at the House of Commons Finance Committee
The Progressive Economics Forum (PEF) normally hosts sessions at the Canadian Economics Association’s annual conference. But the House of Commons finance committee threw most of the union economists testifying in…
A Nuclear Error: Uranium Royalty Cuts
On Thursday’s Lang & O’Leary Exchange (at 24:45 in this CBC video), I noted that while the Government of Canada just signed a deal with Kazakhstan allowing Cameco to invest…
The NSA Scandal is all about Economics
Back in 1998, I wrote a lengthy investigative feature for The Financial Post about Canada’s signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and its post-Cold War role. You can…
The Blackberry mess and what Canada needs
Another year, another dead Canadian tech giant. Blackberry was sold yesterday for scrap to the Toronto private equity firm Fairfax. The purchase price of $4.7 billion is essentially valued at…
The rise and fall (and rise?) of Blackberry – the story that just won’t quit
This is an experiment. I’m writing an essay based on my latest Metro Morning column. Each of these columns take hours of prep, so I thought I’d convert it into…
How Offshore Tax Havens Destroy Governments
Last fall, Greek magazine editor Kostas Vaxevanis published in his magazine Hot Doc a list of 2,000 wealthy Greeks who were hiding taxable savings in the Geneva branch of HSBC.…
Statistics Canada Resuscitates Dead Money
Interestingly, the day after the new Bank of Canada Governor gave a speech distancing himself from his predecessor’s “dead money” comments, Statistics Canada released a significant downward revision to the…