The Bank of Canada should pay closer attention to the effects of money and credit growth on inflation and asset markets. The authors contend that maintaining price stability should remain the Bank’s only formal goal, but say greater attention should be paid to asset market stability. Once the...

Alberta government needs a revamped resource revenue stabilization fund to overcome the effects of wild swings in resource revenue and spending.Energy prices change substantially and unpredictably, causing revenue planning trouble for the Alberta government. Adjusting to these movements...

Canadian policymakers have the policy tools needed to ameliorate the regional economic harm that taxing GHG emissions can cause. A price on GHG emissions will affect Canadian provinces differently, possibly undermining support for a policy that incurs regional transfers of income. The authors...

The need for reform of the regulation and design of workplace pensions for Canadians sparked three major provincial reviews by Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, and Nova Scotia between November 2008 and January 2009. While Canadians with incomes below half the average wage are generally...

The thickening of the Canada-US border in response to post 9/11 security challenges has created new obstacles to cross-border trade and investment. However, preclearance of people and goods before they arrive at the physical border offers one of the best ways to address crossborder obstacles...

Cities save money through competitive tendering of waste services contracts. This study finds municipalities that have their waste services provided through contracted operations have substantially lower average costs per household than municipalities with few of their services provided through...

The bailouts carried out by governments for large banks and other financial entities in the recent financial turbulence are often characterized as a Too-Big-To-Fail (TBTF) policy. Proponents of such a policy argue that preventing the failure of large banks (and possibly other financial and...

From 1996 to 2007, the poverty rate among the two million Canadians living in lone-parent families fell by more than half – from nearly 50 percent to just over 20 percent – as measured by the low-income cutoff (LICO) rate. The proximate cause is a dramatic increase in employment and hence...

The asset-backed securities (ABS) market suffered a major setback during the financial crisis that began in 2007. Its role in the broader market collapse has been well documented, but the need to restore a healthy ABS market is equally clear. Indeed, North American policymakers have readily...

Providing a comprehensive group-taxation regime would bring fairness, simplicity and certainty of tax outcome for Canadian corporations. Canada’s current approach leads to higher administrative and transaction costs, unfairness among different types of corporations, uncertainty, and weakened...