Search

Search results

1. Ontario’s decade of spending decadence

   Appeared in the Windsor Star The Ontario government has never made a secret of its desire to have the federal government help fund Ontario’s provincial budget. It even started its own think-tank with $5 million in 2009, which regularly publishes reports ...

2. Grasping Alberta's budget problems

   Appeared in the Calgary Herald The new Alberta government has delayed introducing a budget until the fall, so MLAs will have plenty of time to think about how they’ll collect and spend Albertans’ money. Thus, to properly manage the estimated $48.4 billion ...

3. The provinces are lousy at controlling spending

   Appeared in the Calgary Herald Provincial cries for more federal money are as old as Confederation, and rarely have any substance to them. After all, it’s easier to demand that Ottawa ante up federal cash—to cry about some mythical “fiscal imbalance” ...

4. Some Alberta economic facts of life

   Appeared in the Calgary Herald In a famous explanation of why voters choose the governments they do, a 1990s-era adviser to Bill Clinton remarked, “It’s the economy, stupid.” That’s not wholly accurate; voters toss parties out (and vote parties in) on ...

5. Don’t define compassion by government spending

   Appeared in the Calgary Herald In a recent column in the Edmonton Journal, a local historian mused that modern governments have become too enamoured with “the unfettered market of purely economic conservatism.” He then equated higher taxes and more ...

6. Government budgets are like volcanoes: It’s what underneath that counts

   Appeared in the Calgary Herald Imagine you’re near what you thought was a dormant volcano but it suddenly erupts. Assuming you escape, you might later reflect that there was nothing “sudden” about it. The eruption resulted from earlier events deep within ...

7. The federal government doesn’t owe Ontario—or Alberta—more money

   Appeared in the National Post In a year when two heavyweight provinces, Ontario and Alberta, which together constitute 55 per cent of Canada’s GDP, are running substantial deficits, there are three ways to reduce the red ink. Strategy one: cut (and reform ...

8. Money kept by Canadian taxpayers is not a “loss”

   Appeared in the Calgary Herald With tax season at hand, here’s a useful tip for any tax-weary Canadian. When some people refer to income or other money not taxed as a “loss” to government, remember that they may merely be using technical language. In ...

9. A Tale of Two Energy Booms

   Non-renewable resource prices, especially oil prices, and associated revenues to governments have fallen significantly over recent months. This is not the first time such gyrations in oil and gas prices and then government revenues have occurred. Recent ...

10. Cheer up, western prosperity will return

    Appeared in the Calgary Herald As everyone from the Manitoba-Ontario border to Tofino knows, the local and provincial economies, which depend on resource extraction, have slowed. So this is a critical time to get some perspective on the past. If ...