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1. Comparing Municipal Government Finances in Metro Vancouver, 2018 Edition

   Municipal governments play an important role in the lives of British Columbians by providing important services and collecting taxes. But municipal finances do not receive the same degree of public scrutiny as the finances of senior governments. This can ...

2. Ontario budget ignores past promises, offers no plan to enhance economic competitiveness

   Predictably, many of the headlines on Ontario’s 2018 budget, released today, focus on Premier Kathleen Wynne’s so-called “free” child care plan and other big-spending items. It is, after all, a big-spending budget. But crucially, the ...

3. 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 ...

4. Workers will ultimately pay part of B.C.’s new employer health tax

   Last week, British Columbia’s provincial government announced the elimination of Medical Services Premiums (MSP) premiums by 2020. And introduced a new payroll tax—the employer health tax (EHT), to be implemented a year earlier. Does ...

5. Canada’s Past Fiscal Leaders Are Now Fiscal Laggards: An Analysis of 2017 Provincial Budgets

   Around the turn of the 21st century, Alberta and Ontario could both boast of having comparatively sound public finances relative to most other provinces. In recent years, however, serious fiscal problems have emerged in both provinces. Alberta and Ontario ...

6. Provincial and local governments should make infrastructure decisions, not Ottawa

   Last week, and as part of Ottawa’s multi-billion infrastructure spending plan, Amarjeet Sohi, federal minister of infrastructure and communities, wrote letters to his ministerial counterparts in each province and territory laying out ...

7. Prime Minister Trudeau selling Canadians false bill of goods on infrastructure

   Appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, May 19, 2017 You’d think that a prime minister would be intimately familiar with one of his government’s signature policy initiatives. However, regarding Ottawa’s multi-billion dollar infrastructure plan, a recent ...

8. Wynne government reopens spending tap, exposes province to more risk

   Appeared in the Financial Post, May 10, 2017 The Wynne government recently tabled Ontario’s first balanced operating budget in a decade. While it’s good to see the province finally bring its annual operating expenditures in line with revenues, there are ...

9. Ottawa’s ‘innovation budget’ unlikely to spark innovation

   Government-sponsored venture capital initiatives tend to underperform compared to initiatives funded by the private sector. ...

10. Trudeau government stretches definition of ‘infrastructure’ too far

    Appeared in the Ottawa Sun, April 2, 2017 The 2017 federal budget revealed new details on the Trudeau government’s nearly $100 billion infrastructure spending plan. Canadians should know that, contrary to the government’s rhetoric, much of this spending ...