Today we released a new Climate Justice Project report, Fighting Energy Poverty in the Transition to Zero-Emission Housing: A Framework for BC, by yours truly, Eugene Kung (a lawyer with the BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre and a steering committee member of the CJP) and Jason Owen (who worked on this project as a student…
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In every leaders’ debate, everyone watching is looking for the zinger – the moment when an important question is asked and one of the participants stands there with his or her mouth open, with nothing to say. It doesn’t always happen. But it happened to Tim Hudak in the Ontario…
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This essay was commissioned by the National Post. It was published in today’s edition under the headline “A Problem for Everyone“. In the print edition, the overline – a large font summary of what you are about to read written by the editors — reads: “Income inequality isn’t just unfair…
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Prime Minister Harper will be launching his tough-on-crime agenda today. Our criminal justice system is by no means perfect, but the omnibus crime bill will send us back to a 19th century punishment model. Here are some reasons why Canadians need to speak out against this legislation. The former U.S….
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As I write, the Europe’s sovereign debt crisis is a ticking bomb. Unprecedented events are happening at a mind-spinning pace. In the middle of last week the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) offered to help bail out the struggling European countries. By the end of the week,…
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In August Canadian Business magazine published my article on why inequality is bad for business. It is produced in full below. Last week the International Monetary Fund, not known for left-leaning views, released a series of articles entitled “Why Inequality Throws Us Off Balance”. One of the papers is by…
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No one should be surprised that a Buy American provision has been included in the American Jobs Act, President Obama’s new job creation bill. Such provisions have been standard features of U.S. infrastructure spending and procurement legislation for decades. Despite the economic importance of this bill, there is a lot…
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The C. D. Howe Institute is out this morning with a press release entitled, “Raising Oil and Gas Royalties Does Not Benefit Provincial Coffers.” A complete analysis of the accompanying 30-page paper – featuring many graphs, tables and regressions – will take time. But here is my initial take. Background…
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Further to Jim Stanford’s excellent critique of the Ontario Conservative platform’s graphs, I am similarly struck by the Liberal platform’s lone graph. “Cutting Ontario’s Taxes on New Business Investment in Half” (page 25) purports to show that corporate tax cuts are required to get the province’s “Marginal Effective Tax Rate”…
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With the results of the Canadian Wheat Board’s 2011 producer plebiscite now in, farmers have given the single-desk for wheat a rousing endorsement with 62% of the votes cast. Despite the vote being held at the end of summer and through a mail-in ballot (which have notoriously low response rates),…
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