When the final accounting is done, federal debt is likely to be about $550 billion higher because of pandemic-related lockdowns in Canada and other countries. Most of the current discussion around the additional debt focusses on its sustainability – whether the debt can be rolled over...

The global financial crisis has had lasting impacts on the global economy and how we think about it. In its wake, the resulting surge in government debt in many countries has been accompanied by lower, rather than higher, interest rates and subdued inflation pressures. These events have sparked...

Canada’s municipalities deliver services that are critical to their citizens’ quality of life. Those services require revenue from taxes, fees and transfers from other governments. Yet municipal budgeting is opaque: in most of Canada’s major cities, non-experts cannot make the simplest...

The COVID-19 crisis and its impact on the revenues and expenses of all governments will make the fiscal capacity of Canada’s municipalities a pressing topic for years to come. All the more reason for municipalities to present budgets and other financial information that let Canadians...

This paper sets out to investigate two issues: first, it briefly provides a retrospective look at whether the stance of monetary policy was appropriate for hitting the Bank of Canada’s inflation target during 2018 and 2019, and second, it examines how to determine in real time whether monetary...

Technological change is a driving force behind economic growth. It can improve productivity for existing goods and services, meaning the same output can be achieved with fewer inputs, or more can be produced with the same amount of human labour. Technologies also enable the development of new...

When the British Columbia government announced in 2018 that it would implement a publicly accessible registry of beneficial ownership of land, hopes were high that the registry would effectivelycombat the province’s money laundering problem. However, in the ensuing months, the BC government...

To provide a comparative view of electricity costs across Canada, this Commentary presents cost estimates for each province’s electricity system in 2018 and monthly costs facing representative consumer profiles in each province for 2019. In 2018, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Alberta had the...

In theory, the management of public funds by Canada’s senior governments – federal, provincial and territorial – reflects the preferences of Canadians, expressed through their elected representatives. In practice, however, the revenues and expenses of senior governments – and the...

The power and knowledge imbalance between traditional professionals and consumers is often large enough to warrant standard setting by governments and self-regulatory organizations in order to protect the health, safety or financial integrity of consumers. In many cases, however, the need to...