Alternative Federal Budget

As part of the consultations undertaken in preparation of our forthcoming Alternative Federal Budget, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives hosted an economist roundtable, The Global Economic Crisis: Can Canada Escape a Lost Decade? on January 26, 2012. The event brought together several leading Canadian economists to address the appropriate fiscal policy response to Canada’s anemic economic recovery, as well as three internationally recognized authorities who shared their perspectives on the nature of the global economic crisis, how it’s likely to unfold, and obstacles to reform.

Click on the sessions below to watch online (via CPAC):

Keynote I: Perspectives on the global crisis and what to do 

Speakers: 

• Yanis Varoufakis (PhD Essex) is the director of Political Economy division, department of Economic Sciences, University of Athens. He is the author of The Global Minotaur: America, the true origins of the financial crisis, and the future of the world economy (2011).
• Stephany Griffith-Jones (PhD Cambridge) is Financial Markets Program Director at the Institute for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University; professorial fellow Institute of Development Studies University of Sussex. She is co-editor with José Antonio Ocampo and Joseph Stiglitz of Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis (2010). 

Panel I: Canadian dimension of crisis and assessment of the policy response 

Panelists: Patti Croft, Alice Nakamura, Mario Seccareccia, and Jim Stanford

Moderator: Althia Raj

Keynote II: Perspective on the U.S. and the global crisis, and the way forward

Speaker:

• Thomas Palley (PhD Yale) is Schwartz Economic Growth Fellow at the New America Foundation, Washington DC. He is a frequent contributor to the Financial Times of London Economists’ Forum, and his most recent project is Economics for Democratic & Open Societies.

Panel II: External environment, domestic structural weaknesses, and the path to sustained economic recovery

Panelists: Roy Culpepper, Andrew Jackson, Brenda Spotton Visano, and Eric Pineault

Moderator: Norma Greenaway

Old Age Security (OAS) is the basic building block of Canada’s retirement income system. Canadians build on that foundation, saving for their retirement with benefits from the Canada or Quebec Pension Plan, a workplace pension if they’re lucky enough to have one, and private savings.

But now Prime Minster Harper says OAS is unsustainable and will not be able to accommodate the retirement of the baby boom generation over the next 20 years. Subsequently, the government is now considering controversial reforms to pension programs—including raising the age of eligibility for OAS from 65 to 67.

Pension experts don’t agree. Old Age Security: Can We Afford It?, a new CCPA technical paper by Monica Townson, sheds some light on the negative impact of cuts to Canada's pension programs and also addresses its sustainability, given government claims that OAS costs will be soon be “unaffordable.”

Click here to read the full report.

We've all heard political leaders boast that the Canadian economy has fully recovered from the recession and that the recession was not as severe in Canada as in other countries. It turns out that both of those claims are false because they don't take population growth into consideration.

Canada's Incomplete, Mediocre Recovery, a new CCPA study by Jim Stanford finds that, after adjusting for population growth, neither GDP nor employment growth have yet to recoup the ground lost during the 2008-09 downturn. Real per capita GDP remains 1.4% lower as of the third quarter of 2011 than it was at the beginning of 2008. And the labour market is still much weaker than it was before the recession—measured by the employment rate, less than one-fifth of the damage has been repaired.

As for international comparisons, once population growth is factored in, Canada's GDP performance ranks 17th out of 34 OECD countries. Canada also ranks 17th (out of 33 reporting countries) in terms of employment growth.

Click here to read the full report.

The Toronto Star today published an interesting story on the ongoing austerity measures happening in Europe. Canada has yet to fully experience our own austerity measures although big cutbacks are already included in previous budgets and will start to hit in the coming year. The European extremes on this topic should provide Canadians with food for thoughts before we embark on that same path.