In the remaining days of this campaign when policy experts and politicians assert that the government needs to intervene to correct a market failure, we shouldn’t merely accept their claims. Canadians ought to push them for evidence that the real problem is a case of the market malfunctioning and not the government short-circuiting the market’s signalling device.
Housing is scarce because our municipal political system does virtually nothing other than get in the way of development. It’s scarce because people resist any kind of change to their local neighborhoods.
In this Hub Dialogue, The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer speaks to Trevor Tombe, a University of Calgary economist.
Nearly half of Canadians fear the government spent more money than was necessary to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, according to exclusive polling conducted for The Hub by Public Square Research and Maru/Blue.
No party platform or national leader has much of anything to say about the country’s pernicious, now decade-long acceleration towards a central bank coordinated economy and a low-growth economic order that will negatively impact everything from the social safety net to healthcare spending to our ability to fight climate change.
Western intellectuals may have balked at giving up the perks of capitalism — summers on Martha’s Vineyard don’t pay for themselves — but they set about enthusiastically implementing the other parts of the Marxist project in every institution from the national government down to the family.
“He ran explicitly against me and Alberta in the last election, saying in Quebec in the last week, in French, that we need a prime minister who will stand up to Jason Kenney and the big Alberta oil companies,” said Kenney, in an exclusive interview with The Hub.
Here’s a motivating question to get our policymakers thinking in the right direction: what would it take for Canada to achieve a $200,000 per capita GDP by 2050?
To claim that reducing or eliminating this one program means ending support for poorer provinces is manifestly unfair. Equalization could be abolished tomorrow and the wealthier jurisdictions will still be having billions redistributed to the so-called ‘have-not’ provinces through other programs.
Throwing around infrastructure money in the run-up to an election is a time-honoured tradition. A very bad tradition we should stop immediately.
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