Op-Eds
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…
Published in the Financial Post on July 24, 2015
Benjamin Dachis is a Senior Policy Analyst at the C.D. Howe Institute. Anindya Sen is the author of the C.D. Howe Institute study Peak Power Problems: How Ontario’s Industrial Electricity Pricing System Impacts Consumers.
The cost to an industrial business of consuming electricity during a single High-5 hour is $52,000 per MWh
A clumsy Ontario government program threatens Ontario’s industrial businesses with inordinately high electricity costs this month. The result is that businesses either shut down production or go off-the-grid to save money. But there is a better way.
July is historically the hottest month of the year in Ontario, giving July…
Published in the Globe and Mail on March 23, 2015
By: Benjamin Dachis and Lawson Hunter
Benjamin Dachis is a senior policy analyst and Lawson Hunter is a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute and co-author of “Scrambled Signals: Canadian Content Policies in a World of Technological Abundance”. From 2003 to 2008, Mr. Hunter served as executive vice-president and chief corporate officer of Bell Canada and BCE Inc.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) wants to give Canadians greater affordability and choice in their television viewing. But will the CRTC’s Thursday ruling, mandating partial channel unbundling, help on either of these counts?
Starting next…
Published in the Globe and Mail on February 20, 2015
By: Marcel Boyer
Marcel Boyer is the author of the recent C.D. Howe Institute publication “The Value of Copyrights in Recorded Music: Terrestrial Radio and Beyond.”
Anyone who watched this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony saw musicians calling for “fair pay across all platforms” through higher royalty rates, including radio and the Internet. Artists in Canada should be protesting too: The competitive value of recorded music is about 2.5 times greater than the current level of royalty payments.
Authors and composers (music publishers) and performers and makers (record labels) own the copyright for a set period on their musical works and…
