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1. Canada’s Faltering Business Dynamism and Lagging Innovation

   Canada displays many of the same symptoms of business malaise evident in European nations. Real GDP growth over the past decade was the slowest since the 1930s, productivity has stalled, and reduced competitiveness has hampered our ability to capitalize ...

2. The Implications of Slowing Growth in Canada’s Labour Force

   Most projections show that the growth of Canada’s labour force will continue to slow for years, with growth dependent on immigration as our population ages. However, the pandemic has reinforced the fact that projections about the future are ...

3. The Minimum Wage, Lost Jobs, And Poverty in Canada

   Raising minimum wages is usually done in an attempt to help low-income households. However, extensive research shows higher minimum wages rarely provide a boost to the intended households, and often hurt the very people they intend to help. There is near ...

4. Does Canada Need a Wealth Tax?

   In its recent Speech from the Throne, the federal government said it was considering a tax on what it termed “extreme wealth inequality” in this country. This would be a mistake for several reasons. To start, wealth inequality is not increasing in Canada. ...

5. Ontario Government Perpetuates Poor Electricity Policy

   The sharply rising cost of electricity in Ontario for more than a decade has been a major drain on both the province’s economy and its public finances. Electricity prices for hydro consumers have risen by more than 50 percent since 2001, ...

6. Should Upper-Income Canadians Pay More Income Tax?

   The increasing focus on the distribution of income and taxes in recent elections is one consequence of a decade of chronic slow growth in much of the OECD region of industrialized nations. After all, when the overall size of the economic pie stops growing ...

7. Risk and Reward in Public Sector Pension Plans: A Taxpayer’s Perspective

   The most striking feature of Canada’s retirement system is arguably the large and growing gap between pensions in the public and private sectors. Eighty percent of public sector workers participate in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Only ten percent ...

8. Business Investment in Canada Falls Far Behind Other Industrialized Countries

   This bulletin provides an overview of business investment in Canada: why investment is important, its recent performance, and how it compares with other industrialized countries. Business investment is central to long-term economic growth and ...

9. Ontario's One Cylinder Economy: Housing in Toronto and Weak Business Investment

   Economic growth in Ontario has lagged Canada since 2003, reducing the province to ‘have-not’ status within Confederation. One theme that runs throughout the paper’s analysis is the persistent weakness of Ontario’s manufacturing sector, where output has ...

10. The Importance of International Trade to the Canadian Economy: An Overview

    In 2015, exports accounted for 31.5% of GDP, up from 25% before Canada signed a series of free trade agreements starting in 1988. Exports were 36% of GDP before the global recession began in 2008. Value-added exports, which subtract the imports embedded ...