Op-Eds
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…
Interest is ramping up again in Calgary and Ottawa about new NHL arenas for each city’s downtown, after earlier projects failed to launch. Modern downtown arenas would have obvious attractions for owners and fans in both cities. If the projects proceed, however, it’s a lock that taxpayers will be asked to provide financial support. Should they? And, if they do, on what conditions?
The main purpose of any new building is to help the private owners of the franchise make more money by selling more tickets, luxury boxes, refreshments and advertising, including naming rights. In an ideal world, buildings would be completely privately financed and operate profitably thanks to strong demand, with frequent use…
Yet another alarming inflation number from Statistics Canada — 7.7 per cent from May to May — has underlined that something is seriously wrong with Canada’s economy. Prices are rising fast because spending is rising fast while production is not. The capacity of our economy to produce is flatlining because business investment has been so weak that the stock of productive capital per worker is falling. If we do not turn that around, the outlook for real growth in living standards in the coming months, years and decades is bleak.
The basic problem is chronically low business investment, which has been the highlight — or lowlight — of Statistics Canada’s quarterly GDP reports for several years now. The cumulative effect of low rates…
The recent terrible B.C. floods have confirmed how unprepared we are for climate change and severe weather events. The extensive damage in British Columbia has been in the spotlight; a similar event in another province would have many of the same disastrous consequences. The federal and B.C. governments announced this week they will spend $228-million to help affected farmers and their communities return to normal production activity.
What can be done to help protect the value of physical assets from climate risk – specifically housing and commercial buildings? More universal access to flood insurance is the most obvious risk-management tool, along with significant investment in public infrastructure to build resilience. However…
Former Prime Minister Kim Campbell got pilloried in 1993 for saying an election is no time to discuss serious issues. Yet in September 2021, her words ring true. Foreign policy? We all but ignore the rest of the world. Monetary policy? Not something to think about, even with inflation above 4 per cent. Fiscal policy? Almost no one is talking about whether, over time, we will be willing and able to finance all the goodies being added to the federal budget.
The thing about serious issues is that, whether we discuss them during an election or not, they don’t go away. Even if borrowing stays cheap, the binge of deep-discount government spending is ending. Our discussions about fiscal policy will get serious when we are back to paying…
