Archive for the ‘Governance Policy Context’ Category
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With government spending, virtue hath its own rewards
Monday, July 25th, 2011
Jul. 25, 2011
…the Lausanne-based IMD Business School’s World Competitiveness Report… puts average government spending in the world’s 58 most developed countries at 47 per cent of GDP and says the 23 biggest state spenders are all European countries. From this perspective, the very concept of limited government – from which many of our blessings flow – looks quaintly anachronistic… Canadian governments spend less than 40 per cent of GDP. By WCR assessment, Canada is the seventh most competitive nation on Earth.
Tags: budget, economy, globalization, standard of living, tax
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Canadians need more clarity on how government spends
Friday, July 22nd, 2011
Jul. 18, 2011
Kevin Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, is right to have drawn attention this month to a recent OECD survey, which found Canada’s interim reporting of government spending to be slower and less detailed than most of the 24 other countries considered… the PBO will be supplying quarterly reports from its new database, with a time lag of about 60 days… The true purpose of prompt interim reporting is to allow parliamentarians to compare the estimates that MPs had previously voted on with the government’s actual spending – or lack of it – comfortably inside one annual budgetary cycle.
Tags: budget, participation, rights
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Growing equalization payments to Ontario threaten country
Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
Jul 20, 2011
The resource boom… has had a double effect on Ontario, having sent the Canadian dollar soaring by roughly 40% since 2004. The higher dollar has in turn clobbered Ontario’s struggling manufacturing sector, which has hemorrhaged 290,000 full-time jobs over the past decade… Meanwhile, Ontario continues to struggle even after its equalization top up, with lower levels of public services than many other provinces… fewer public servants, nurses, doctors, teachers, day-care spots and long-term care beds than in most other provinces. That runs counter to the objectives of equalization…
Tags: budget, economy, standard of living
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It’s Conservatives who changed to fit Canada
Sunday, July 17th, 2011
Jul. 16, 2011
True, roughly three-fifths of Canadians did not vote Conservative in the last election. True, too, would be that Mr. Harper ran the opposite of a conservative fiscal policy, having been a big spender from his first day in office… The Conservatives spent money before and during the recession as if governing from the centre-left… In this, they read their electorate correctly, since, for all the talk about Canadians moving in a conservative direction, most of them opposed any reduction in the ambit of government.
Tags: budget, ideology
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Meech Lake foes won the battle, lost the war
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011
Jun 29 2011
Over the second half of Jean Chrétien’s tenure, billions of federal surplus revenues were transferred to the provinces and/or spent on tax cuts. With that money went the federal capacity of initiate a top-down expansion of Canada’s social infrastructure. In Chrétien’s wake, Paul Martin negotiated separate child-care funding agreements with each province. In the name of asymmetrical federalism, he offered Quebec different modalities in the 2004 Health Accord… Today, Stephen Harper is poised to rush through the door that Martin pried open in 2004.
Tags: ideology, rights
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Without Canada, French Quebec would be lost in a generation
Friday, June 24th, 2011
Jun 23, 2011
The survival of language is directly tied to economics. No money, no clout, no French… In Louisiana, Acadian French-speakers had no state-ordered linguistic protection, whether in the form of subsidies or legal guarantees. They had to speak English to survive, and were assimilated by economic necessity. The same would happen to an independent Quebec. If Quebecers want to continue living and working in French, their best option is to remain part of Canada
Tags: economy, multiculturalism, rights
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The strange, and very political, death of hope
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
Jun 02 2011
Any rise in deficits came mainly from bailouts to banks, or needless warmaking. The point is: The catastrophe had/has no connection to government social or economic spending. Yet the only solutions proposed everywhere are public spending cuts. Ordinary people know, or sense, that this is stupid… But — and here’s where hope comes in, or flies out the door — governments slash anyway… This is how hope in public participation dies, or is killed off.
Tags: budget, ideology, rights, standard of living
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Solution to economic crisis? More of same
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
May 31 2011
Reading Michael Boskin’s article is like reading a road map back to the 1890s and the era of the Robber Barons. Trying to paint the dire economic circumstances of the world as a result of mankind trying to create a more just and balanced democratic society for everyone is not only ludicrous but purposely deceptive. Nowhere is the real culprit identified — the 40-plus years of artificially low interest rates caused by the deregulation and lack of monitoring of the world’s major banks brought to us by the very same neoconservative politicians he champions.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, standard of living
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Restraining the welfare state
Monday, May 30th, 2011
May 29 2011
… governments provide services, from defence and law enforcement to a humane safety net, that are essential to a successful economy and society. But the size of the welfare state — and the erosion of incentives to work, save and invest, owing to high taxes and bloated transfer payments — is a major impediment to faster income growth. This simple analysis should raise a red flag about how we think about the trade-offs between dynamism and security, or growth and redistribution… to control, reform and reduce government spending… is a prerequisite for substantial economic advance.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, standard of living
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Tax policies may aggravate gap between rich and poor
Monday, May 30th, 2011
May 27 2011
Canada is witnessing a phenomenon in which the most wealthy are enjoying stunning increases in their income while the rest of society stagnates… In a 2008 study of 30 OECD countries, Canada was singled out as one of the member nations that has witnessed the worst widening of the wealth gap. Inequality and poverty declined in Canada for 20 years before the late 1990s, the OECD study said, but since have gotten much worse. Among OECD nations, only Germany saw as sharp an increase in inequality of household earnings, the report found.
Tags: budget, ideology, poverty, standard of living, tax
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