Few understand the dangers of the security state run amok better than Canadian author and human rights advocate Dr. Monia Mazigh. Dr. Mazigh’s husband, Ottawa-based engineer Maher Arar, was deported by the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured and held without charge for over a year. A commission of…
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This week’s GDP numbers confirmed that Canada experienced a recession in the first six months of 2015 and today’s latest job numbers show Canadians looking for steady, good jobs have been feeling the pinch. During the month of August, Canada created 12,000 new jobs – switching out 42,000 part-time jobs…
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What we don’t know about Canada might hurt us. That’s the title of a great article (with a cool gif!) from American economist and blogger Ben Casselman about what happened when the Harper Conservatives cancelled the mandatory long-form Census in June 2010 and replaced it with a voluntary National Household…
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The writ has been dropped, and we are now four days into the longest election campaign in recent history. Canadians now have a critical decision to make about the direction of our country—and lots of time to make it. The first opportunity (of several, we hope) to have some of our…
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The best measure of the political saliency of expanding public pensions might be the progression of conservative think tank studies purporting to show that there is no need for an expanded CPP or for the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan. In the past few months, we have heard: CPP expansion is…
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Late yesterday afternoon, by a vote of 44 to 28, the Senate approved the government’s overkill anti-terrorism legislation, Bill C-51, without amendment. (You can see who voted which way at this link.) By doing so, Senators ignored an almost airtight consensus in Canada’s legal community that the security and information-sharing reforms…
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The Harper government gives five reasons why Canadians ought to be happy with its proposal to double the maximum contribution to the Tax-Free Savings Account. Examine each of its points more closely, however, and it’s clear that the TFSA carries far higher risks than rewards — for individual Canadians as…
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In the prelude to the 2015 federal election, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair is talking job creation in Southwestern Ontario. He’s promising more small business tax cuts and credits as his entry point. It’s the political norm these days to promote low business taxes, but the reality is small business tax…
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