Published in the Financial Post
Canada has not had a bank failure in over 30 years. But banking is changing, and so bank regulation may need to change, too.
Bank runs can now cripple an institution in a matter of hours, not days. Deposit insurance can no longer be counted on to prevent such runs. And a very different regulatory environment has emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis. Last year’s sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in the U.S. and slower demise of Credit Suisse in Switzerland are examples of crises Canadian regulators might struggle to cope with if something similar happened here.
As banking evolves away from the system that existed in the last century, the risk of bank runs is likely to…
Published in the Financial Post.
The crisis in Canada’s primary care is reaching a breaking point. A staggering 6.5 million Canadians are without a family doctor or nurse-practitioner (NP). A recent C.D. Howe report by one of us (Zhang) calculates we would need at least 7,844 more family physicians to meet current demand — an increase that could take up to a decade to achieve. With the population both growing and aging, waiting that long simply isn’t an option. It’s time to explore alternative solutions. More NPs should be one of them.
The International Council of Nurses defines nurse-practitioners as integrating “clinical skills associated with nursing and medicine in order to assess, diagnose and manage patients”…
Published in the National Post.
The C.D. Howe Institute has invited me to use this column to summarize the Regent Debate that the institute held in Toronto on Sept. 24. It was a well-attended and rollicking affair with a learned audience of several hundred or more people. The former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, and I defended the motion that the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States would be an opportunity for Canada. Our very worthy opponents were the former minister of finance John Manley, and the former Liberal politician and chair of the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, Martha Hall Findlay. It is well-known that after Christie described president Trump as “Donald Duck…
