Archive for the ‘Debates’ Category
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Play the Trump cards right, and Canada’s auto sector will benefit
By stopping the migration of industrial capital toward Mexico, Mr. Trump will actually help Canada’s auto industry – and other manufacturing sectors equally damaged by NAFTA… instead of trying to defend a flawed deal that has hurt working people in all three countries, Canada should enthusiastically endorse the principle that trade must go both ways – and take advantage of this opportunity to imagine a different way of managing globalization.
Tags: economy, featured, globalization, ideology, standard of living
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How Canada could actually become a world leader in pension innovation
Bill C-27, legislation to facilitate the offering of target-benefit (TB) pension plans… [which] integrates the best elements of the traditional DB and DC plans: an explicit target pension benefit; a recognition that long-term compounding of investment returns makes the target benefit affordable; and it offers fair and sustainable risk-pooling and clearly spelled-out property rights and obligations among the employer, employees, pensioners and the pension-management organization.
Tags: economy, pensions, standard of living
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With automation (not trade or immigrants, as Trump claims) taking jobs, it’s time to consider a universal basic income
… 47 per cent of existing jobs in the United States are vulnerable to automation in the next 20 years… This is what is really driving the populist revolution… It is only jobs that are being destroyed, not wealth… Or rather, it’s not a disaster unless having no work means no money or self-respect… The UBI would provide everybody with enough to live on. Since everybody got it, there would be no stigma involved in living on it.
Tags: economy, featured, globalization, ideology, participation, standard of living
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‘All for ourselves and nothing for other people’: The takeover of economics by neoliberalism
Inequality, flat incomes, work-life imbalance and unsustainable debt can all to a large extent be traced to this deliberate government policy. Just reversing it would start a recovery. That means returning EI to an actual insurance program, reinstating the federal Canada Assistance Plan which provided strings-attached (read: humane rates) money to the provinces for social welfare, increase the minimum wage to living-wage levels, enforce and enhance labour standards and their enforcement, and make it easier, not harder, for unions to organize.
Tags: budget, economy, featured, globalization, ideology, participation, poverty, standard of living
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Do Canadian policy-makers understand how alarming it is that their ‘stimulus’ has proven an utter failure?
Households and provinces are using federal stimulus to bail themselves out of the debt they gorged on for years, not to stimulate… exports of manufactured goods have failed to respond to a lower exchange rate… The Bank of Canada had expected a quick transition from energy to non-energy export growth. Instead, exports of all manufacturing goods have essentially stagnated over the past year… more of the same ineffective medicine isn’t what will get us to better economic health.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, jurisdiction, standard of living
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Don’t blame Keynes for Canada’s low-growth economy
There’s a widespread view that the Canadian economy is struggling and that it needs a fiscal jolt to get it going. That view gets at some fundamental issues about the nature of the current stagnation and… the nature of Keynesian economics… What’s struggling is not the level of economic activity, it’s the rate of economic growth. Contrary to the impression you’d get from the media, those are two different things…
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, participation, standard of living
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Precarious Jobs Need Stronger Safety Net
Canada should strengthen the safety net under workers in precarious jobs, according to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute… “But it would be a mistake for policymakers to emphasize rigid labour legislation over other social policies in search for solutions.” … . Interventions to shape employment arrangements with legislation pose significant risks of stymying job creation.
Tags: economy, featured, globalization, ideology, poverty, standard of living
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Trudeau Should Forget Infrastructure P3s and Support a People’s Bank
Only a few have called this what it is: a long-term plan to funnel billions from the public purse into giant investment firms. Privatization plans have proven deeply unpopular once they are widely understood, as the Ontario Liberals discovered after announcing plans to sell off Hydro One… postal banks could be similar to credit unions, but they would reach hundreds of small rural communities that don’t have access to banking at all.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, privatization, standard of living
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Manufacturing hasn’t vanished – it’s just smarter — The Globe and Mail Published Sunday,
Manufacturers now produce roughly a third more than they did in early 2009, after recovering all the ground lost in the global recession, and then some… manufacturers… are doing more with a lot fewer workers. Robots, sensors and sophisticated software are transforming factory floors. The number of U.S. factory jobs is up a mere 3 per cent since 2008, to 12.3 million. And since the late 1990s, nearly 6 million manufacturing jobs have vanished. The trend shows no sign of abating… Bringing jobs back to the United States will increasingly hinge on building smarter factories, not ones dependent on protectionist walls.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, participation
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New Canadian study explains why working class should be angry
… in Canada, the productivity of labour — the amount workers produce per unit of effort — went up by over one per cent per year over the 38 years between 1976 and 2014. The average worker’s earnings, however, barely budged over that same period. The rise in wages was less than one-tenth of one per cent per year. Put differently, the rise in productivity was more than 10 times that of earnings.
Tags: economy, featured, globalization, ideology, participation, standard of living
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