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1. Less Ottawa, More Province, 2021: How Decentralized Federalism is Key to Health Care Reform

   A significant body of research suggests that Canada’s health care system consistently underperforms relative to most peer jurisdictions with universal health care systems. This underperformance continues despite the fact that Canada is one of the world’s ...

2. Housing Codes, Homelessness, and Affordable Housing

   Homelessness is a growing problem in Canada; 235,000 people have been homeless at one time or another during any given recent year. Furthermore, at any one time perhaps as many as 5,000 or more are homeless. While there are many causes of ...

3. Repairing Alberta's Heritage Fund for the Long Term

   In 1976/77, Alberta’s Heritage Savings Trust Fund was created to save a share of the province’s resource wealth so as to provide benefits to Albertans in the future. Unfortunately, the Heritage Fund has been limited in its ability to do so as consistent ...

4. Fiscal Lessons for Atlantic Canada from Saskatchewan

   COVID-19 and the related economic recession have thrown governments across Canada into varying degrees of fiscal peril. In Newfoundland & Labrador, the challenges of rapidly increasing debt and large deficits have created perhaps the largest fiscal ...

5. Lessons for the Ford Government from the 1995 Federal Budget

   Chronic deficits since the 2008/09 recession have weakened Ontario’s public finances. The province’s debt-to-GDP ratio—a key measure of fiscal sustainability—increased from 27.8 percent to an estimated 47.0 percent of GDP by the end of 2020/21. ...

6. Federal and Provincial Debt-Interest Costs for Canadians

   In recent years, deficit spending and growing government debt have become a trend for many Canadian governments. Like households, governments are required to pay interest on their debt. In aggregate, the provinces and federal government are ...

7. The Growing Debt Burden for Canadians: 2021 Edition

   Budget deficits and increasing debt have become serious fiscal challenges facing the federal and many provincial governments recently. Since 2007/08, combined federal and provincial net debt (inflation-adjusted) has doubled from $1.0 trillion to a ...

8. Job Creation and Housing Starts in Canada’s Largest Metropolitan Areas

   Canada’s economy has generated millions of new jobs over the last two decades, with the total number of employed people nationwide growing by 4.1 million between 2001 and 2019 (a 27.6% increase). Though growth in employment is unambiguously positive, it ...

9. Equalization and Stabilization Post-Recession: Is Canada Ready?

   Is Canada’s existing system of federal transfers designed to respond adequately to economic volatility across the country and more precisely to rapid changes in relative income levels across provinces? The purpose of this paper is to investigate this ...

10. A Friend in Need: How Albertans Continue to Keep Federal Finances Afloat, 2020

    In studies published in 2017 and 2019, we measured Alberta’s net contribution to Canada’s economy during the most recent economic boom in the province. The first of these studies showed that when it comes to overall economic growth, job creation, ...