Op-Eds
The way we watch television is changing rapidly, but our regulations aren’t keeping pace. The federal government’s recently announced review of Canadian content and communications policies is an opportunity to catch up. The review should replace Canadian content rules with direct subsidies, focus regulatory hearings on the benefits of competition between technologies and drop ownership restrictions.
Ottawa now supports Canadian content in many ways. It requires broadcasters to offer a certain proportion of Canadian content, and funds that content either directly or by requiring broadcasters to chip in. And it financially supports the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
The government regulates the sector through the…
December 14, 2015
A fundamental public policy question is how to address the possibility of inflated real estate values and excessively high levels of household indebtedness.
There is little question that these trends have been fuelled by exceptionally low interest rates. However, the Bank of Canada’s mandate is to set monetary policy to achieve the 2-per-cent inflation target. In recent years, that objective has called for exceptionally low interest rates.
This has been supportive to the economy through a number of channels, such as reducing the cost for business investment and helping with international competitiveness through a weaker Canadian dollar. But what if the seemingly low-forever interest rates are…
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.…