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1. The finance minister said what? Part 3

   This third installment in what has unfortunately become an ongoing series of blog posts examining statements by Canada’s federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau (pictured above) focuses on recent comments made during testimony before the ...

2. The finance minister said what? Part 2

   Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau (pictured above) recently appeared on BNN Bloomberg and made a number of incredibly worrying statements indicating that he (and the federal government) are either wholly misunderstanding the ...

3. The finance minister said what?

   Coming out of an emergency cabinet meeting earlier this week, ostensibly called to deal with the watershed announcement that Kinder Morgan was halting all “non-essential” spending on its Trans Mountain pipeline despite regulatory and ...

4. Ottawa using bounty of robust growth to simply boost spending

   The recently-released 2018 federal budget calls for growth in both spending and revenues. Between 2017-18 and 2022-23, total revenues are forecast to grow from $309.6 billion to $373.9 billion—an increase of 21 per cent. After a three ...

5. Canada has a business investment problem—deal with it

   It’s not as if we needed more bad news about Canada’s economic prospects. But we got it last week with the latest data highlighting the country’s weak business investment. Statistics Canada released its latest survey results on ...

6. 2018 budget—another nail in the coffin of Trudeau’s balanced budget promise

   While campaigning for the 2015 election, then-candidate Justin Trudeau made a commitment to Canadians, pledging three years of modest budget deficits of no more than $10 billion, with a balanced budget by the end of his first mandate in ...

7. Trudeau government 0-for-3 for budgets that improve fundamentals for growing the economy

   With the Trudeau government tabling its third budget, the script has become familiar. Each budget the government loudly proclaims platitudes about growing the economy and helping the middle class. In reality, there’s no magic lever to ...

8. Trump reforms lay bare Canadian policy missteps

   Prime Minister Trudeau has stated unequivocally that he won’t reduce Canadian taxes to remain competitive. ...

9. Trudeau government tax policies puzzling in light of finance minister’s admission

   In a recent year-end press scrum, Finance Minister Bill Morneau (pictured above, right) said something unexpectedly telling. Although it did not receive widespread attention, Morneau all but admitted that raising tax rates changes the ...

10. Professor conflates taxes with transfers—just like the Trudeau government

    In a recent commentary in the Financial Post titled “Misleading the middle class,” Simon Fraser University professor Rhys Kesselman criticized our analysis of how federal tax policy changes have increased the amount of income tax paid by ...