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Premiers call dibs on federal money before it’s all spent
Friday, December 11th, 2020
Health care is provincial jurisdiction. They can levy taxes like Ottawa. If they need more money, they could raise taxes… A lot of what Ottawa does is sending money to people or provinces. But health care? … Mr. Trudeau doesn’t want to just send cheques. He wants to say he paid for something new and specific that Canadians want. He told the premiers that Ottawa might fund better long-term care, or pharmacare.
Tags: budget, featured, Health, jurisdiction, pharmaceutical, tax
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
Federal NDP chooses wealth taxes as the wedge issue party needs right now
Wednesday, October 14th, 2020
The biggest knocks against wealth taxes is that they encourage the flight of capital and tax avoidance, and they shrink incentives for investment. The Parliamentary Budget Officer costed the 1-per-cent tax proposal and estimated it would raise $5.6-billion in the current fiscal year, but also that each family’s net worth would shrink by 35 per cent in a vast expansion of avoidance behaviour.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, tax
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
CERB is dead, but a new EI will live, as the pandemic leads to more lasting policy changes
Wednesday, July 15th, 2020
the Liberals are looking to morph the CERB into a new EI… But melding CERB into EI won’t be simple… in a normal year, employment insurance pays benefits to less than 40 per cent of the unemployed. Some don’t work enough hours to qualify, but a lot more are ineligible because they never paid in, probably because they were self-employed or considered contractors. CERB covers far more people.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, participation, standard of living
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
They’re World War deficit levels, but not the biggest or the baddest yet
Wednesday, April 1st, 2020
The deficits being projected now look to be roughly 5 to 8 per cent of GDP… The 1984 deficit was 8.1 per cent of GDP, when the economy was recovering from the 1982 recession and interest rates paid on the national debt were high. But in those terms, the deficits are not on the scale of the Second World War, when military production and defence spending pushed the annual deficit to 23 per cent of GDP in 1943. A comparable deficit in 2020 would be nearly $500-billion… Canada has seen worse.
Tags: budget, economy, featured, ideology
Posted in History | No Comments »
Where is Andrew Scheer going to find $15-billion to pay for all his promises?
Thursday, October 10th, 2019
Lopping $15-billion from program expenses takes far more than curbing spending growth. It means cutting the equivalent of about two-thirds of the defence budget, or eliminating two or three mid-size government departments… Mr. Scheer is the candidate who campaigned on fiscal probity, so the last big policy announcement of this campaign will be his explanation of how he would get to a balanced budget.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, jurisdiction, standard of living
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
Countering political disinformation campaigns requires transparency
Thursday, January 31st, 2019
… if the purpose is to catch foreign efforts to sway the campaign with disinformation and divisive message, the definition of political ads is too narrow. Those Russian-paid ads didn’t always mention a candidate or a party. A real effort to try to counter disinformation campaigns would require some broadly open-source transparency for a larger class of paid messages. The big social-media companies seem to believe that clashes with their business model.
Tags: featured, ideology, participation, privatization, rights
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
Scrapped mandatory census cuts even deeper for disability advocacy group
Saturday, July 24th, 2010
Jul. 24, 2010
The Participation and Activity Limitation Survey, Statscan’s major data collection on individuals with disabilities, was cut by the government department that paid for it, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada. The Harper government has told advocacy groups a census-related survey that gathers statistics about disabilities will eventually be replaced by a database culled from tax information, welfare rolls and similar databanks – but there’s skepticism about whether that information will be as reliable.
Tags: disabilities, ideology, participation, rights
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
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