Archive for the ‘Debates’ Category

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Economic analysis of child benefit bolsters case for national basic income

Thursday, September 19th, 2019

The Canada Child Benefit has not only lifted kids out of poverty, but it has boosted the country’s economy by $139 billion since 2016, according to a new economic analysis of the initiative… Every dollar Ottawa spends in child benefits generates almost $2 in economic activity, says the report by the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis

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Austerity and the Economy: Spending Cuts Versus Tax Increases

Friday, September 13th, 2019

Talking about “austerity” without distinction of how austerity is implemented does not make any sense. The composition of austerity plans is crucial to understand their effects on growth and fiscal sustainability.

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Reconciliation is nothing to fear, it will benefit all Canadians

Thursday, September 12th, 2019

By empowering First Nation communities and their members to run their own businesses and hire their own Indigenous professionals, this will create a partnership between First Nations and nearby non-Indigenous communities. This partnership is past due and will be beneficial to all Canadians. This is the kind of reconciliation we can all be proud of.

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Impressive GDP numbers don’t tell the real story of the economy and inequality

Sunday, September 8th, 2019

From 1982 to 2015, the share of total income going to those in the top 1 per cent grew from 8 per cent to 14.2 per cent — a jump of 78 per cent. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the bottom 50 per cent — half the country — fell by 29 per cent. So while our economy has grown, the bulk of those gains are flowing to the richest 1 per cent of people.

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Many companies are choosing to underfund pensions even though they have the cash, study finds

Thursday, August 29th, 2019

The study found that in 2017, the 90 defined pensions were collectively underfunded by roughly $12 billion. The companies responsible for those pensions, meanwhile, paid out $66 billion in dividends to shareholders — more than five times the amount it would have cost to fund the pensions… “Shareholders are supposed to take on the firm’s risk. Instead, that risk is being shouldered by workers whose retirement security is compromised by outstanding pension deficits.”

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Canada should have a federal minimum wage

Tuesday, August 13th, 2019

Last year the federal government passed legislation that… will improve job security for federally regulated workers through scheduling rights, equal pay for temporary employment agency workers and protections against contract flipping that lower wages. Now it’s time for the next step: a decent minimum wage.

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Premier Ford cries poor but subsidizes $700 million for fossil fuel consumption

Monday, August 5th, 2019

In the last year alone, Ontario provided nearly $700 million in subsidies for fossil fuel consumption… No one wants to see public dollars wasted, least of all the Government of Ontario. If it takes the opportunity to buckle down on fossil fuel subsidies and reinvest those millions wisely, not only will it set the province on a path to a more sustainable future, it will also prove itself to be Canada’s vanguard for smart, fiscal efficiency.

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Money has never been cheaper. Should Ottawa be borrowing more?

Wednesday, July 31st, 2019

Ultralow interest rates are a problem, but also an opportunity. Borrowing has never been cheaper. If the federal government were to increase borrowing, only for a short period and only to fund one-off items such as new education facilities or transit infrastructure, it could finance that at very low costs, locked in for decades.

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Jim Stanford on Uber and the future of precarious work: ‘It isn’t inevitable’

Monday, July 8th, 2019

… we should be continuing to invest in skills and the knowledge infrastructure… But we also need to be actively nurturing the jobs that people with those skills can most productively do… They only came to Canada because smart policy interventions brought them to Canada. We hustled for them, and we put in place rules. We said to a company like Boeing, for example, ‘you want to sell a bunch of extremely expensive aircraft to Air Canada? Well, you’re going to have to produce something in Canada.’

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Beware gurus with plans to reinvent conservatism

Thursday, July 4th, 2019

Protectionism, then, does not protect our workers against other countries’, nor even workers against consumers, though that is nearer the truth. In reality, it protects some Canadian workers against other Canadian workers. Which workers fall into which group is decided not by how hard either works or the quality or price of what they produce, but by which can most successfully lobby politicians… The conflict… between the interests of consumers and producers, is ultimately illusory.

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