Ontario Premier Doug Ford should be congratulated for improving Ontario’s marijuana market structure last week. He decided to privatize the retailing of marijuana in the province. That decision represents a reversal of the previous government’s choice to place retailing in the hands of a high-cost government monopoly. This is good news.
However, he also decided to leave a government agency front and centre in the wholesaling of cannabis. Having gone some way to free up entrepreneurial energies and create an expansive marketplace, he balked at the idea that this market could function well without a monopsony, or a single buyer, at its core.
For the benefit of Ontarians, the government should go further, and, in particular…
Canada, like other economies, seeks to attract foreign direct investment to help grow its standard of living. In recent years, however, Canada has struggled to attract such investments.
Foreign investments that are “direct,” in contrast to portfolio investments in which investors acquire smaller portions of equity or debt in a company, entail the investor acquiring some control over how their new Canadian business is run. In turn, this typically means that a foreign direct investor is making a long-term commitment to Canada.
FDI by and large supports Canadian productivity and relatively high-wage jobs in Canada, because it helps integrate Canada’s economy into the global economy – into value chains where each part…
Many Canadian employers are facing a tightening labour market due to labour shortages. Imbalances between labour supply and demand exist across population groups and regions. Addressing these disparities through improvements in labour mobility and employment of underrepresented groups would have a positive impact on the Canadian economy.
According to Statistics Canada, the number of job vacancies (unadjusted for seasonality) rose by 19.3 per cent to more than 462,000 in the first quarter of 2018 compared with a year earlier. This led to an increase in the job-vacancy rate − the share of unfilled jobs out of all available jobs − from 2.6 per cent to 2.9 per cent, pointing to a need for more workers.
On the other hand,…
