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1. The Budget That Changed Canada: Essays on the 25th Anniversary of the 1995 Budget

   February 28th, 2020, is the 25th anniversary of one of the most important federal budgets in Canada’s history. It took decisive steps to finally solve a problem of runaway deficits and debt that had begun in the late 1960s and grown worse, almost without ...

2. Year of the Wealth Tax?

   Senator Elizabeth Warren remains a top contender in the Democratic presidential nomination race. ...

3. Be nice to the price—be very nice to the price

   In the Fraser Institute seminars I and some American friends do for Canadian journalists, introducing them to the basic concepts of economics in two-and-a-half days, we have a section called “Be nice to the price.” In it we show how ...

4. So how broke is the Canada Pension Plan?

   Earlier this week Statistics Canada issued “Public Sector Universe 2018,” which has a cosmic ring to it, but in fact is simply—though in a complicated way—“a comprehensive list of institutional units that” comprise Canada’s public sector, ...

5. If doctors can’t help their parents, what good are they?

   I’ve been teasing doctor-friends this week by sending them this abstract of a new working paper from the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research. It’s called “Do doctors improve the health care of their parents? Evidence from ...

6. Our national unity pipeline

   After this week’s federal election there has been a lot of talk about the suddenly gloomy prospects for national unity—or at least national getting-along, since we’ve seldom had true national unity, not even during two world wars. But ...

7. What’s the over/under on next year’s top marginal rate?

   Since its inception, the U.S. federal minimum wage has never been reduced. ...

8. If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time preference

   If anything ever were to drag me from my current free-market home over to the political Left, it would probably be the films of Ken Burns. The latest in his long line of historical documentaries about the real lives of real Americans is ...

9. A buck is a buck is a buck, except when it isn’t

   The words “tax-free” appear in the Liberal Party’s election platform five times (on pp. 8, 9, 15, 40 and 43). In a society where top marginal tax rates are over 50 per cent, “tax-free” catches a person’s eye. The first instance ...

10. Canadian tax rates—diversity worthy of Tolstoy

    Statistics Canada published income tax data for 2017 this week. The Daily picked out a number of interesting facts to highlight, many of which got picked up in news stories about the release. The average or “effective” rate of tax was ...