No easy outs: leaders should wrestle with tensions for a great budget
Budgets represent a set of difficult choices where society’s greatest needs come head to head with the cold reality of what our public finances can afford.
Why we have a terribly imbalanced economy
Canadians now have the highest household debt relative to household income in the G7, and one of the poorest performances in innovation and productivity in its business sector. The two are linked.
Trudeau government not being honest about true costs of national pharmacare
The government will likely need to borrow to finance any new spending and add more debt, which will result in higher taxes in the future. And yet, pharmacare is being presented to Canadians as if there’s no direct cost to them.
Liberals ‘must stop moving so ponderously’ on tax credits to catch global rivals, say renewable-energy advocates
The Liberal government has proposed several investment tax credits intended to support the energy transition, but none have yet passed into law.
Canadians’ economic anxieties have ‘blown past’ pandemic concern benchmark, according to Proof Strategies CanTrust Index
Millennials scored highest in the economic anxiety category at 71 per cent, with boomers coming in at 64 per cent. Women are feeling stress and anxiety more acutely than men.
Police are sounding the alarm on the government’s interest rate cap
The government’s plan to reduce the criminal interest rate from 47 per cent to 35 per cent APR will force low-income Canadians to turn to illegal lenders for loans.
Canada needs its own productivity commission
We need to build a new economy where innovation and productivity make real increases in per capita well-being in income and wealth generation to address the demands of health care, achieving net-zero emissions, education, and more defence spending.
AI could lead to a future of better possibilities, if we play our cards right
Leading economist David Autor argues that AI, if managed properly, could rebuild the middle class by opening up more workers to all kinds of jobs that are currently the preserve of the professional elites, creating new kinds of jobs in the process. AI is just a tool, he says, and it is how we use it that matters.
MPs push for Canada’s chief auditor to investigate the firm behind the ArriveCan app
The auditor general’s office says it’s ‘evaluating the request’ made by the House Government Operations and Estimates Committee to poke deeper into the myriad contracts obtained by GC Strategies.
The federal government is failing Canadian health research
Canada risks losing out by inadequately investing in health researchers working to unlock new discoveries.
