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1. All our trade doors look unattractive now

   I’ve been reading a new paper by Oxford economic historian Kevin O’Rourke called Two Great Trade Collapses: The Interwar Period & Great Recession Compared, a title that, unlike many academic titles, pretty much catches what the paper ...

2. William Watson: Trying to digest 159 ways to improve a country

   I spent seven hours Wednesday confined with several hundred other columnists, reporters, financial analysts, policy wonks, cameramen, video editors, sound engineers and so on at the federal government’s annual budget lock-up. You line up ...

3. Taxes are way up since 1961—are public services?

   Media reports about the Canadian Consumer Tax Index that the Fraser Institute published this week focused, quite rightly, on the fact that the average Canadian family now spends more of its income on taxes than on food, clothing and ...

4. William Watson: Land-locking Alberta’s resources will reduce the wealth of our nation

   It’s early February so in my McGill University course in the history of economic doctrines we’ve finally reached Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. (What have we been waiting for? Aristotle, Aquinas, Mun, Cantillon, Quesnay, and Hume, to be ...

5. William Watson: A thousand points of tax

   Whatever your politics, this was quite a week for Canadian economists. Our president-elect, that is the president-elect of the Canadian Economics Association (CEA), was named to the federal cabinet. On Oct. 19, Jean-Yves Duclos (pictured ...