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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. 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 ...

3. Alberta’s missed Heritage Fund opportunity

   Appeared in the Calgary Herald Over the past decade, the province of Alberta treated boom-time resource revenues like a permanent state of affairs. That set the province up for fiscal failure, for multiple lost opportunities. One high-profile example is ...

4. Alberta tried tax hikes in the 1980s—they didn’t work

   Appeared in the Calgary Herald In the debate over whether the Alberta government should reduce and reform spending to cushion the blow from falling revenues, some claim higher taxes will balance the books. How soon we forget. Alberta tried that in the ...

5. Western weakness won’t help Ontario’s budget woes

   Appeared in the National Post With the plunge in oil prices over the last six months (and already soft natural gas prices), it’s not headline news to note that provinces heavily dependent on energy-related revenues are suffering. The decline in the ...

6. Fumbling the Alberta Advantage: How Alberta Squandered a Decade of High Energy Prices

   It is well-known that Alberta’s provincial budget is highly dependent on resource revenues. Over the last decade, as a proportion of total revenues, resource revenues have accounted for as much as 40% (2005/06) and as low as 19% (2009/10). In the most ...

7. Lax Heritage Fund rules allow governments to plunder Alberta's future

   Appeared in the Red Deer Advocate and Winnipeg Free Press In 1987, the value of Alberta’s Heritage Savings and Trust Fund stood at $12.7 billion. That year, the province faced a massive budget deficit and transfers to the fund from resource revenues were ...

8. Dry numbers paint a depressing picture of Alberta's budgetary woes

   Appeared in the Calgary Herald As many students enrolled in algebra class are likely discovering, numbers can be rather dry. But a proper understanding of them is indispensable to modern life. Without hard, reliable numbers regularly checked, much ...

9. Too much optimism explains Alberta's expanded deficit

   Appeared in the Calgary Herald Back in the mid-1990s, British Columbia’s New Democratic government published a pre-election budget that forecast a balanced ledger for the then-ending fiscal year. The Glen Clark government quickly dropped the writ and ...