Canada’s competition laws do not need to be fundamentally rewritten for “big tech.” The best approach to ensuring Canadians benefit from digitization lies, not in devising new competition principles targeting a few large players, but in modernizing the application of principles we already have.
Data has always been at the heart of relations between businesses and their customers and suppliers. There has also always been a market for the attention of potential customers. What digital technologies have done is massively enhance our ability to collect and analyze this kind of data. Businesses can reach customers and suppliers on a previously unimagined scale, yet with pinpoint precision, an effect called “mass customization.”…
Wednesday’s inflation report from Statistics Canada showed October’s consumer price index up 4.7 per cent from a year earlier. We are still hearing about “transitory” inflation from many forecasters and central bankers. Canadians dismayed by recent higher prices for food, energy, appliances and much else should not take much reassurance from this term.
Many transitory events – storms, pandemics, recessions – leave lasting effects. With the benefit of hindsight, the inflation from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s was transitory. It came and went. Two-per-cent inflation was common until 1965 and became an official Bank of Canada target after 1995. But between those two dates, the consumer price index more than quintupled. The…
Alors que les gouvernements craignent de taxer davantage le carbone pour en décourager l’usage dans l’économie, le marché du pétrole en augmente brutalement le prix, se fichant éperdument de la colère des électeurs.
Nous nageons en plein paradoxe. Depuis longtemps, les économistes s’époumonent à demander aux gouvernements de hausser le prix du carbone, par une taxe ou une bourse, pour favoriser la transition vers les énergies propres, mais les politiques n’osent souvent que des pas timides.
Or, c’est le marché qui fonce présentement. Depuis le creux de la pandémie, le prix nord-américain du pétrole a bondi de 145 %, au-dessus des 80 $ US le baril, et celui du gaz naturel a triplé. Si on remonte à peu avant…
