| By: Dean Stansel, José Torra, Matthew D. Mitchell and Ángel Carrión-Tavárez
The annual Economic Freedom of North America Report once again finds that Alberta is the province with the highest level of economic freedom, while the next freest province, British Columbia, ranks 43rd out of 93, followed by Ontario (47th), Saskatchewan (50th), Manitoba (53rd) and Quebec (54th), as most of the country continues to rank in the bottom half across the continent.
Growing Government Workforce Puts Pressure on Federal Finances is a new essay, as part of a series on federal reform, that finds the federal workforce has grown more rapidly than the Canadian population starting in 2015/16, imposing significant costs on taxpayers.
Comparing Recent Crime Trends in Canada and the United States: An Introduction is a new study, and first chapter of a larger study examining crime rates between the two countries and focuses on national comparisons, that finds from 2014 (a year when crimes rates reached their lowest) to 2022 (the most recent comparable year of data), the violent crime rate in Canada increased by 43.8 percent to 434.1 violent crimes per 100,000 people. That’s now higher than the violent crime rate in the U.S., which only increased 5.3 percent over the same period.
Comparing Performance of Universal Health Care Countries, 2024 finds that despite high levels of spending, Canada has among the lowest availability of doctors, hospital beds, and most medical technologies—and some of the longest wait times—when compared to a group of 31 high-income countries that also have universally accessible health care.