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1. Ottawa’s going to fight poverty—good! (though they could fight better)

   In what amounts to a new federal white paper on poverty, Opportunity for All, the federal government has announced it will try to cut Canada’s poverty rate in half by 2030. We in the column-writing business spend so much of our time ...

2. The end of Trump-whispering

   I wrote in January about how economists, apart from warning about the consequences, don’t have an awful lot to say about how best to fight a trade war. Adam Smith himself wrote that such wars were a situation in which policy be left to ...

3. Is Canada’s latest NAFTA strategy too ‘insidious and crafty?’

   In Book IV, Chapter 2 of The Wealth of Nations, where he enumerates the benefits of free international trade, Adam Smith leaves only a tiny role for governments. He says the United Kingdom should support its merchant marine because ...

4. 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 ...

5. Boeing dispute shows the advantage of reviewable trade rules

   Aerospace has always been a little different as industrial politics go, but doesn’t the current Boeing-Bombardier dog fight seem more than usually strange, even for that industry? British Prime Minister Theresa May has now joined Prime ...

6. The market already rewards risk-taking—taxes don’t have to

   For most of my working life I’ve been a tenured university professor, which means I can’t be fired except for cause. In theory, the powers-that-be could shut down my department or, for that matter, my university. But both events are ...

7. Trade policy as social engineering—the downside of more NAFTA vetoes

   Trade policy always involves social engineering. If you change the rules under which goods and services can come into your country, that will change who does what for a living and for how much money. To a greater or lesser extent, ...

8. William Watson: The good news about aging—seeing the past more clearly

   My optometrist recently informed me my vision was getting better. A wearer of glasses since the age of 11, I now have close to 20/20 vision in my left eye. It seems improvement of this sort is common as people age. I asked him if ...

9. William Watson: My favourite finance minister of them all

   Last week the Fraser Institute published a short book about the income tax, then and now, edited by Fraser executive vice-president Jason Clemens and myself. It’s called The History and Development of Canada’s Personal Income Tax: Zero ...

10. 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 ...