The knock-on effects from the failure of Silicon Valley Bank also spread to stablecoins. The day after SVB’s failure, USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin, announced it had $US3 billion on deposit with SVB and promptly, but briefly, lost its peg to the U.S. dollar. Some people will see this as another nail in stablecoin’s coffin. In our view, it’s another example of why the federal government needs to establish a legal and regulatory framework for stablecoins that seek to serve as money. If it aims to be money, and it could be money, let’s regulate it like money.

Bitcoin may get all the headlines, but without any asset backing it, it has no future as money. Stablecoins do. They are crypto assets in that they…

City budgets are a mystery to most Canadians. The municipal services they fund are central to our quality of life, and they affect our property taxes and charges for services such as water access and garbage collection. Yet few of us delve into these seminal documents that lay out plans for revenue and expenses for the coming year – and if we do, we likely come away bewildered. Canadians need and deserve more transparent city budgets.

If you have not yet peered into the murk of municipal budgets yourself, we encourage you to visit your own city’s website and search for its most recent budget. We are now well into March, so your municipality’s 2023 budget should be online. If it is not – the lateness of many city budgets is a…

With the worst of COVID-19 behind us, the federal government needs to re-focus on long-standing stresses, including tax rules that limit many Canadians from saving as much for retirement as they would like and may need, and that force them to draw their retirement saving down faster than is prudent.

MPs and federal public servants have tax-backed plans that guarantee them indexed payments for life. Most Canadians cannot look forward to retirement incomes that are anything like as generous or secure. The C.D. Howe Institute’s 2023 Shadow Budget contains measures to reduce this unfair gap — measures Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland could bring out of the shadows next week!

1. Let Canadians…