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Search results for: “site/economics of childcare”
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In our politics, telling the truth gets you in trouble
What’s that they say about the first casualty of war? You can obviously say the same for Canadian elections. Linda McQuaig, the prominent Toronto NDP candidate and long-time economics journalist, is the latest to be caught in this political vortex. She found herself in a heap of trouble last week…
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In our politics, telling the truth gets you in trouble
What’s that they say about the first casualty of war? You can obviously say the same for Canadian elections. Linda McQuaig, the prominent Toronto NDP candidate and long-time economics journalist, is the latest to be caught in this political vortex. She found herself in a heap of trouble last week…
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A clever new slogan, but where are the jobs?
Premier Clark’s much anticipated BC Jobs Plan comes up short where it matters most: the jobs. For all the fuss of a four-day media launch, the “Canada Starts Here” plan contains very few measures that will lead to new employment, and the ones that are there come many years into…
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Election 2011 UNSPUN: Winnipeg’s Inner City and North End Neighbourhoods
Lessons from Ten Years of Research The inner city suddenly becomes important to politicians during elections. Some political parties choose to focus solely on crime and fear. The approach they take is punitive, shaped, we believe, from a lack of understanding of how complex challenges really are. Others have a…
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Just how bad is BC’s LNG deal with Petronas?
Last week, the BC government released the text of its Project Development Agreement with Pacific Northwest LNG (led by Malaysian state enterprise, Petronas), considered the front-runner in getting BC an LNG export industry. The agreement goes to the BC legislature this week in order to convince Petronas to make a “final investment decision.” There…
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Canada’s Shredded Social Saftey Net
Our employment insurance system far below OECD average Between October 2008 and May 2009, 363,000 Canadians were thrown out of work – and the OECD projects unemployment in this country to rise to 9.8% in 2010. In this global recession, the weakness of Canada’s Employment Insurance (EI) system has become…
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The Union Card
A Ticket Into Middle Class Stability Download 1.09 MB40 pages This report examines 30 years of unionization and income data to examine the impact of union decline on the mobility of Canada’s middle class. The resulting findings contribute a new addition to our understanding of middle class economics, and reveal…
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$15 minimum wage will help families, reduce inequality; no evidence that sky will fall
READ THE FULL REPORT HERE. Vancouver – In the wake of the B.C. government’s shockingly low 20-cent increase to the minimum wage, a new report suggests that such small changes fail to adequately reduce poverty and inequality, and are unnecessarily timid. David Green, a professor and former chair of the…
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The Case for Increasing the Minimum Wage
What does the academic literature tell us? Download 774.62 KB 12 pages Economist David A Green, a professor and former chair of the Vancouver School of Economics at UBC and an International Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, conducted a thorough review of academic research on the…
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Balanced Budget Legislation – another zombie policy returns from the dead
Ah, here we go again – when seeking to assert credibility as sound fiscal managers, governments reach for the tired gimmick of “balanced budget legislation” (BBL). It’s not about good economics. Nor about good public policy. Just crass politics. And now the federal government is once again dangling this useless…
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Fast Facts: And now for some un-conventional wisdom…
All the responses to the 2011/12 provincial budget in the April 13 Winnipeg Free Press speak with one voice that is critical of this year’s budget and the NDP government that tabled it. That so many well-known political pundits (Messrs. Craig, Martin, Brown and Kelcey) would speak with such commonality…
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Debt By 1,000 Tax Cuts
Stephen Harper knows he can’t come right out and reveal his radical agenda to downsize government. But if he gets his majority, expect Harper to slash and burn on the pretext that the federal debt and deficit requires massive an evisceration of government. Since he welcomes a future fiscal squeeze…