Op-Eds
By Benjamin Dachis and Grant Bishop
The main elixir the incoming government promised for Canada’s slow economy was infrastructure spending. Smart investments in infrastructure can help long-term growth, but the roots of Canada’s growth challenges go deeper than poor transit and crumbling bridges.
Navdeep Bains, the incoming Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, will play an essential role in addressing those challenges. There is no magic potion for lacklustre economic performance, but we offer four things the minister can do to spur the Canadian economy.
First, he should make Canada’s Competition Bureau a world-leading competition enforcement agency. The bureau is the referee of the rough and…
By Anita Anand
This month, Suncor Energy Inc. made a hostile bid to acquire Canadian Oil Sands and in particular its 37 per cent in Syncrude Canada Ltd. The Suncor bid raises questions about the appropriate legal regime governing takeover bids in Canada. Securities regulators have not historically operated on the basis of harmonized rules governing defensive tactics that a target board, like Canadian Oil Sands, can adopt prior to or in the face of a bid. This disunity may fade away as the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) stand poised to adopt a new takeover bid regime.
Under the CSA draft rules, a takeover bid would have an irrevocable 50 per cent minimum tender condition. Once met, the rules would require an…
By David Johnson
Teacher salaries must be attractive enough to draw talented people into the profession. The interesting question is: is there evidence on how much is enough? In Canada, provinces that pay their teachers more do not achieve better student results.
To come to this conclusion, some background is necessary. The first step is to see how teachers' salaries stack up versus other earners in the province, as a way of measuring the attractiveness of teaching relative to other jobs. I compared 2013/14 teacher salaries, adjusted for age and education, to earnings of all employees and similarly educated employees in each province.
Surprisingly, teachers' relative earnings vary a lot depending on the province.…Published in the Financial Post on July 27, 2015
Lawrence L. Herman, founding partner at Herman & Associates, practices international trade law and is a Senior Fellow of the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto.
Americans provide billions in protectionism to dairy that will have to be given up for trade deal.
We rail against Canada’s supply management system. Rightly so. It’s a Soviet-style regime that is out of step with Canada’s international trade interests and objectives.
Every credible Canadian think-tank has said that supply management is a regressive system that distorts the market by guaranteeing dairy, poultry and egg producers a positive return on production, inhibiting competitiveness and, in the…
Published in the Globe and Mail on July 27, 2015
Daniel Schwanen is vice president of research at the C.D. Howe Institute.
On Tuesday, the trade ministers of 12 countries negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement will meet in Maui, the first such encounter since the U.S. Congress granted Trade Promotion Authority to President Barack Obama last month.
With this “fast track” authority in its pocket, Mr. Obama’s administration can credibly commit to concluding trade agreements with other countries. It is now quite possible that the negotiations, which Canada joined in 2012, could be completed this year.
The TPP encompasses economies accounting for about 40 per cent of global income. It would…
