Tag: Economy and Taxation

Recently evidence surfaced, quietly and unobtrusively, of the ways in which other inspection regimes suffer from the same sort of lackadaisical approach that the Harper government has applied to food plants — under which the XL foods E. coli outbreak and the Maple Leaf Foods listeriosis outbreak have occurred, with

I view the rise of so-called “fact-checking” in the mainstream corporate news with mixed emotions. First of all, it is nice to see them, you know, doing their jobs for a change. But second of all, why do they need a fact-checking column? Does this mean that they’re not, um,

Here’s a puzzle for my readers: try and guess which one of the following two editorials, each of them discussing a slight bump in the tax rate for the wealthiest individuals, comes from the Globe & Mail, and which one comes from the local leftist rag: An extra two per

In a way it’s a sign of how sick our democracy is, and how pliant our national media has grown, that the future of the Parliamentary Budget Office (and especially its soon-to-retire manager, Kevin Page) is more in doubt than the future of the government whose routine accounting mismanagement he

Well, at least they’ve come out and said it: income inequality is a growing problem in Canada. The Globe & Mail said it. The Toronto Star said it. CBC said it. Even the National Post managed to get it out, interspersed amongst gripes about how Canadian income inequality isn’t nearly

Even when it doesn’t matter. Recently an Ottawa botany professor has suggested that the Bank of Canada erred by using a Norwegian species of maple tree as the basis for the leaf on the new $20 bill. This gave us, first of all, a glimpse into the competence of the

It’s Christmas time, and even Margaret Wente was feeling unusually charitable in Saturday’s column (and pretty much plagiarism free, for the time being). So if you’re hoping to get your regular dose of venom and bile from the chattering classes, you’ll have to settle for me. I’d like to juxtapose

Well, try that on for size. Let me be clear, says Stephen Harper: “Canadians have not spent years reducing the ownership of sectors of the economy by our own governments, only to see them bought and controlled by foreign governments instead. It is not an outcome any responsible government of Canada

As I pointed out in my last post, the fact that the Conservatives have admitted they will miss their budget projections next year isn’t news. There hasn’t been a single annual budget yet that actually reached the projected balance it was supposed to, and, as a result, the date at which the Conservatives promise we’ll […]

Try this one on for size. The Canadian media, which for the most part hasn’t met a Canadian corporation they think shouldn’t be sold to foreign interests, has latched on to what they claim is evidence of Chinese “hard-ball” with respect to the purchase of our Nexen oil company by the government of China. The […]

Last time, in my new Hollowing Out series, I began taking a look at the Globe & Mail’s list of Canada’s largest 1000 companies back in 1996. (This list is not freely available online to my knowledge, so I cannot link to it.) I found that around 30% of the

In the wake of the recent Ted Opitz case, in which the Supreme Court of Canada issued a bizarrely partisan split ruling, written by two Harper appointees to the nation’s highest bench, accusing Liberals of trying to undermine democracy, I thought it would be useful to take a quick look

In honour of the recent controversy over the proposed takeover of Nexen by the government of China (since only foreign governments are allowed to make money off of Canada’s oil patch, not our own government), I thought it might be nice to start a major new project, devoted to studying

Being neither a lawyer nor an accountant, I have to stress I may be missing something here. I do invite correction. However, I don’t think I’m wrong here. Here’s a simple question: what percentage of their income are MPs paying into their pension fund this year, and what percentage of

A few years ago, when the Harper regime was young and idealistic, they had a grand plan for the future of regulatory inspections in Canada — inspections of meat processing plants, aircraft maintenance, etc., etc. No longer would the government field an army of inspectors, trotting around the country peering

… Although given how readily they swallowed it, it might be a bit of a stretch to call it bait in the first place. Apparently one of the items in the next Conservative omnibus bill will be reforms to MP pensions. The “reforms” are, in a word, horseshit. They’ll make