Surrendering to the provinces doesn’t bring peace to the federation. It only emboldens them
Wednesday, January 10th, 2024
The thesis… that peace with the provinces is the highest aim of federal policy, and that the way to achieve it is to give them everything they want – or at least to never give them any offence – is a recipe for national paralysis. There are issues on which federal leadership is essential… how we got here [is] not because the federal government has been too hard on the provinces, but because it has been altogether too indulgent of them.
Tags: economy, ideology, jurisdiction, rights
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
How Ottawa can help fix health care: first, send less money
Friday, January 27th, 2023
When one level of government is raising the money, while another spends it, it makes it hard for the public to know who to hold to account for any of the system’s ills. That, too, dulls any lingering incentive for reform… without Ottawa to share the blame for underperformance, provincial governments would have a stronger incentive to organize the delivery of health care so as to achieve greater quality and public satisfaction per dollar spent.”
Tags: budget, Health, jurisdiction, mental Health, tax
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
Canada’s rapidly approaching fiscal crisis isn’t driven by the pandemic
Sunday, December 6th, 2020
… thanks to the remorseless arithmetic of population aging, with its crushing combination of higher costs (mostly for health care) and lower revenues (with fewer people of working age to earn income or pay taxes on it)… the provinces’ collective debt-to-GDP ratio is likely to hit 120 per cent by mid-century.
Tags: economy, jurisdiction, standard of living, tax
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The feds can’t make the provinces ‘do the right thing’ on the pandemic, but they can make it worth their while
Wednesday, November 18th, 2020
… it can still structure its assistance in ways that offer provinces incentives to take a tougher line… That was the idea, you’ll recall, behind the Safe Reopening Agreement: in return for $19-billion in federal dough, the provinces made certain undertakings with regard to things like testing – they were supposed to be testing 200,000 people a day by now (actual figure: roughly 50,000). Any further assistance should be contingent on provinces meeting broader standards of policy stringency – and should be withheld without it.
Tags: budget, Health, jurisdiction, standard of living
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
An ambitious plan for an alternate reality
Friday, September 25th, 2020
This is the prospect that has so entranced the Prime Minister’s Office: bundling all the policies they’d ever dreamed of together and passing them all in a rush – in the name of “the pandemic” – and doing it all with borrowed funds. The government that failed at so basic a state responsibility as safeguarding public health is eager to take on new challenges.
Tags: budget, economy, Health, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
The landmark Charter challenge over private health-care wasn’t about what you thought it was
Sunday, September 13th, 2020
the heart of the plaintiffs’ argument… If governments are to impose a monopoly over the funding of health care, they have an obligation to see that it is provided in a timely fashion… User fees and private insurance may not be the answer to wait times, but it is not impossible that the system could be reformed in such a way as to make more efficient use of resources, without harm to the principle of universal public funding.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, rights
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
The Liberals seem to think they have abolished scarcity. Let’s hope they’re right
Saturday, September 5th, 2020
There was widespread public consent earlier this year to the proposal that the economy should be put into a coma, to prevent the spread of a deadly disease… Spending hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed money to keep the lights on in the midst of a once-a-century pandemic made sense. Borrowing billions more to fulfill every Liberal dream, political or ideological, does not.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, tax
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
It won’t be popular, but we should scrap the homeowner tax break
Friday, July 31st, 2020
Sell your principal residence for more than you paid for it, and in most cases you will pay no tax on the gain at all. Indeed, until 2016 you didn’t even have to report the transaction on your tax return. Neither is there any limit on the exemption – as there is, for example, in the United States. The bigger the gain, the bigger the tax benefit. You can guess which income groups benefit the most.
Tags: economy, housing, ideology, tax
Posted in Equality Policy Context | No Comments »
The CERB is nothing like a basic income, but it might be the platform we use to build one
Friday, May 22nd, 2020
the possibility that today’s pandemic-induced mass unemployment may continue for longer than anticipated makes reform of income support both more likely and more urgent. And the general idea of a basic income – a single, unconditional transfer, without the intrusive and bewildering eligibility requirements that demean its recipients and leave many others without – remains as valid as ever… The CERB, for all its limitations, has created the precedent for a federal benefit of this kind. Maybe there’s an opening here, after all.
Tags: economy, featured, ideology, participation, poverty, standard of living, tax
Posted in Social Security Debates | No Comments »
We can see the way out of the coronavirus pandemic, but the steps to get there will be slow
Monday, April 20th, 2020
There is no easy option… We can tough it out at home, or we can tough it out at work. We can live a little less free, or a lot. We can lose thousands of lives, or tens of thousands; endure slow growth, or a depression. Those are the real choices before us. Either way, it will take months, at least, before we can declare victory.
Tags: economy, Health, jurisdiction, participation, standard of living
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
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