Wouldn’t it be great if more government infrastructure were built faster and cheaper? The Ontario government certainly thinks so and is creating the Ontario Infrastructure Bank (OIB) to get that done.
Unfortunately, inadequate funding is not the problem plaguing infrastructure investment. The province never comes close to spending the money it allocates to infrastructure. In 2022-23 alone, it underspent its infrastructure budget by a whopping $3.4 billion (15 per cent). Under-spending has happened every year in recent memory.
What’s more, increasing funding over time has not increased actual infrastructure output. According to Statistics Canada, the combined capital expenditures of all levels of government in Ontario have…
Headline inflation in January moved back into the Bank of Canada’s 1- to 3-per-cent target range. Yet on Wednesday, the bank again held its target for the overnight rate at 5 per cent.
Why is the bank reluctant to cut? There are two main impediments: core inflation, and concerns over expectations. Both are fair reasons to keep rates where they are, but both measures are easing or should ease soon. An April rate cut may therefore be in the cards.
The bank’s mandate is to target 2-per-cent headline inflation. But headline inflation contains a number of volatile items, such as energy, and so to get a sense of underlying price pressures, many central banks have measures of core inflation that strip away these components…
Great economic legacy, Brian Mulroney. It’d be a shame if something happened to it - Globe and Mail
There’s good reason to celebrate the late Brian Mulroney’s courage in embarking on the quest for a free-trade agreement with the Americans in his first term as prime minister. While eliciting strong opposition in many quarters at the time, it was a historically bold move, and the Mulroney government’s milestone achievement in getting Washington to sign the 1987 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, or FTA, has to be viewed in that light.
Equally significant was FTA’s successor, the North American Free Trade Agreement, bringing in Mexico as a partner in 1994. While NAFTA came into force under prime minister Jean Chrétien, it was negotiated and concluded under Mr. Mulroney, and stands as another fine achievement of his time in office.…
