Archive for the ‘Debates’ Category
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Arbitrator nixes Ontario’s plans for wage freezes
Friday, September 17th, 2010
Sep. 17, 2010
Finance Minister Dwight Duncan has urged Ontario’s one million public sector workers to take a two-year wage freeze to help restore the province’s financial health and protect its vital social services. But an arbitration case has called those restraint measures into question. In a binding ruling released Thursday, arbitrator Norm Jesin awarded 17,000 workers in long-term care homes a 2-per-cent wage increase for this year. Labour leaders say the award could affect the outcome of talks for hundreds of thousands of workers in other sectors, including hospitals, public schools and universities.
Tags: budget, standard of living
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Economic warning signs are flashing
Friday, September 17th, 2010
Sep 17 2010
The once-robust housing market has sagged. The trade surplus has vanished. And economists across the spectrum have slashed their growth forecasts… Thanks in part to Harper’s willingness to set aside his low-tax, small-government philosophy, Canada came out of the 2008-09 the recession faster, with more impetus, than any of its western peers. But now the pace is slowing and caution signs are flashing. The last thing this nation needs is an abrupt dose of federal restraint
Tags: economy, ideology
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It’s too soon for more payroll tax
Saturday, September 11th, 2010
Sep. 10, 2010
Longer-term fixes to the system are needed on the benefits side, too. A new Mowat Institute finding that fewer unemployed Canadians are receiving benefits than they used to, and that unemployed people in the richest provinces were underserved by the system in the recession… The EI fund should be balanced, yes, but it should also be counter-cyclical – paying out more and collecting less when the economy is weak. Deficit reduction ought to remain a leading priority for the federal government, but EI premium increases get in the way of recovery, and hamper the consumer spending that will also help bring the budget back to balance.
Tags: economy, standard of living, tax
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Why Harper’s government is so divorced from reality
Saturday, September 11th, 2010
Sep 11 2010
… for many who support right-wing parties, moderately high unemployment is useful. It keeps wages down and encourages employees to work more for less. It keeps unions in check. Insofar as it reduces tax revenues and leads to deficits, it provides an excuse to stomp on public sector wages and eliminate government programs. Best of all it keeps the population in line. Most are too busy worrying about their jobs to pay attention to matters like climate change or the Alberta oilsands. Economic collapse would be disastrous. But — for some — economic hard times can be convenient.
Tags: economy, ideology
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Canadian economy saunters when it could lope
Friday, September 10th, 2010
Sep. 09 2010
Although Canada doesn’t need an extension of the short-term infrastructure stimulus announced in 2009, it does need to provide unemployed and underemployed workers with continued access to the training they need to earn a decent income. For Ontario, that means extending the Second Career program for as long as necessary to accommodate the backlog of unemployed workers who have applied for the financial help — a task made more onerous and more urgent by the federal government’s impending cut-off of the additional five weeks of jobless benefits it offered long-tenured workers last year.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology
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The steadfast strangling of U.S. economic freedom – and its citizens’ wealth
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
September 8, 2010
The Fraser Institute thinks that economic freedom is a good thing and that more of it is better than less. (The freest economies, it says, “operate with minimal government interference” and rely for economic decisions on “personal choice and markets.”… Economic freedom has a more powerful impact in the United States than in Canada because Canada’s “fiscal federalism”
Tags: economy, ideology
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Moving up — way up — the value chain
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
September 7, 2010
In the bad old days when people were sent to poorhouses for falling on hard times, there was a job called “picking oakum.” … Picking oakum is an extreme example, but it highlights the need for economic strategies that go beyond simply promoting more value-added activity… we need to fully understand that “making things” will not keep Canada prosperous… The good jobs of tomorrow and the industries where we have a chance to develop a comparative advantage are largely at the upper end of the value chain.
Tags: economy, globalization, participation, standard of living
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Tough times for unions
Monday, September 6th, 2010
Sep 06 2010
… public sector unionization rates are very high — about three in every four workers. But union membership is dwindling in the private sector with the decline in manufacturing jobs, which are traditionally unionized, and the rise of the service sector, which is much harder to organize, as unions have discovered over the years… On the private sector front, the unions have to work harder to convince service sector employees of the merits of union membership.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, standard of living
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Another new world order [economic productivity]
Sunday, September 5th, 2010
Sep. 04, 2010
The broader challenge is about how well and how quickly Canada will adjust to the global drivers of change affecting all countries: tackling demographics and their wide-ranging impacts from health care to education to pensions; tackling the rise of Asia and its implications for our foreign policy; tackling climate change in all its immense ramifications. But a risk to early and effective action is a political environment in Canada that has shifted to a short-term focus, leaving few forums to discuss and achieve consensus on the broad structural trends that are reshaping our world.
Tags: economy, globalization, standard of living
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Living with ‘quasi-recession’
Friday, September 3rd, 2010
Sep 03 2010
When John Maynard Keynes talked of persistent underemployment, he did not mean that, following a big shock, economies stay frozen at one unchanging level of depressed activity. But he did think that, without external stimulus, recovery from the lowest point would be slow, uncertain, weak and liable to relapse… described as a “quasi-recession,” a better term than “double-dip recession.” It denotes an anemic recovery, with bursts of excitement punctuated by collapses. It is the situation we confront today.
Tags: economy, ideology, standard of living
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