Inept regulation fingered in Great Recession
Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
Jan 26 2011
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, we have learned for the umpteenth time that it’s wrong to trust the private sector to do the right thing without rigorous government oversight… The bottom line is that epic disasters – like an unsupervised greed on Wall Street that cost eight million Americans and 400,000 Canadians their jobs in the Great Recession – usually have inadequate or corrupted regulation as a root cause.
Tags: economy, ideology, privatization, standard of living
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
Short-term pain for long-term pain
Friday, July 9th, 2010
Jul 09 2010
With unemployment still at intolerably high levels, Canada has begun to engage in “fiscal consolidation.” This is the new euphemism for austerity. For cutbacks in jobless benefits and pensions, for tax increases on the working class, and reductions in social-service spending… Governments understandably are concerned about mounting deficits… But the way to eradicate those deficits is by creating jobs, and the tax revenues they generate, until the private sector feels confident enough to take back the 400,000 jobs it eliminated in Canada since the recession began…
Tags: budget, economy
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
World leaders embracing austerity are playing with fire
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Jun 24 2010
Canada will urge fellow G20 members to slash their deficits in half in just three years. Britain’s new Conservative-led government just tabled a budget with the most severe cutbacks since the Second World War… In Europe, the eurozone debt crisis earlier this year has nations differing only in the speed and severity of their austerity measures… Myopic deficit-eradication nostrums, while not defunct, have been thoroughly debunked.
Tags: economy, ideology
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
More than meets the eye in pharmacy fight
Sunday, April 18th, 2010
Apr 18 2010
It’s not the purpose of the taxpayer-financed Ontario Drug Benefit Plan to act as a come-on to customers who boost Shoppers’ sales volume of Doritos, eyeliner, tobacco (yes, tobacco!) and other “front of store” items. These high-margin goods account for more than 51 per cent of sales at Shoppers, accurately described in a recent Toronto Life profile as “Canada’s new general store.”
Tags: pharmaceutical
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
Five bright ideas to save the Liberal party
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
Apr 02 2010
Human capital is our only significant resource… Common sense dictates that under-investment in our people is a drag on our economy, diverting public funds to welfare payouts and the criminal-justice system. It impedes our progress in nurturing the creativity by which wealth is created, with our inability to tap the latent strengths of so many Canadians in distress whom we casually neglect… It’s time to define ourselves by what we do, becoming home to the world’s most prosperous aboriginal population, the world’s best-run health-care system, the go-to nation for learning how to use social justice as a test for all we do.
Tags: standard of living
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
Innovation out of our hands in a branch-plant economy
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
Mar 23 2010
If it feels at times that we’re living in someone else’s country, in some degree we are. With one of the least domestically owned economies among our industrial peers, it’s long past time we confronted the implications of foreign ownership on our lack of control over productivity, on which our prosperity very much depends.
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
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