In a now familiar move, the government of Alberta is hoping to put the province back in the black in part by keeping a lid on health spending over the next few years.
The province is hardly alone in adopting this tactic. Provincial health spending has entered a new era of restraint, with Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick at the head of the pack. But it is unclear whether publicly funded health systems have achieved lasting efficiency gains by “bending the health-care cost curve,” as Finance Minister Joe Ceci has repeatedly remarked.
After all, we have witnessed a similar narrative before: in the mid-1990s, many provincial governments managed to reduce health spending — Alberta the most dramatic among them. However, in the…
Earlier this week, The Globe and Mail revealed internal research by government officials showing a global trend toward older normal pension ages, with most OECD countries’ target policy retirement age to be raised to at least 67 by around 2050. An eventual increase in the normal retirement age, here in Canada, appears inevitable.
Despite this trend, Ottawa recently reversed course and cancelled a scheduled gradual increase in the Old Age Security (OAS) eligibility age from 65 to 67, to be fully implemented by 2030. The recent decision fails to recognize longer life expectancy since the 65-year-old benchmark was adopted, and the current marked trend towards later retirements. Projections show that by 2030, about 40 per…
Last week, a new tax introduced by the B.C. government came into effect with the goal of slowing down the unrelenting increases in Vancouver-area house prices. The additional 15-per-cent transfer tax specifically targets foreign nationals looking to buy real estate.
We must ask whether it will meet its stated objective of making Vancouver housing more affordable for the so-called middle class and, perhaps more important, what are its unintended consequences?
Whether or not Vancouver housing prices fall – or their increase moderates – as a result of this tax depends on a host of factors. There are many different possible reactions by foreign buyers.
I’ll focus on three possible scenarios.
In the first, foreign…
