Pas facile de se faire une tête dans ce dossier, où promoteurs et opposants présentent des arguments valables, mais aussi des positions critiquables. Prenons de la hauteur pour en juger. 

L’argument central avancé dans ce journal par le ministre de l’Économie, de l’Innovation et de l’Énergie, Pierre Fitzgibbon, est de « développer au Québec une économie basée sur des secteurs d’avenir » et de « réduire notre écart de richesse avec le reste du Canada » pour financer la santé et l’éducation.

Des objectifs louables, certes, mais le gouvernement de la CAQ ne semble appliquer qu’une moitié de la stratégie préconisée pour lutter contre le réchauffement climatique, qui est de s’attaquer tant aux risques…

Wouldn’t it be great if more government infrastructure were built faster and cheaper? The Ontario government certainly thinks so and is creating the Ontario Infrastructure Bank (OIB) to get that done.

Unfortunately, inadequate funding is not the problem plaguing infrastructure investment. The province never comes close to spending the money it allocates to infrastructure. In 2022-23 alone, it underspent its infrastructure budget by a whopping $3.4 billion (15 per cent). Under-spending has happened every year in recent memory.

What’s more, increasing funding over time has not increased actual infrastructure output. According to Statistics Canada, the combined capital expenditures of all levels of government in Ontario have…

Headline inflation in January moved back into the Bank of Canada’s 1- to 3-per-cent target range. Yet on Wednesday, the bank again held its target for the overnight rate at 5 per cent. 

Why is the bank reluctant to cut? There are two main impediments: core inflation, and concerns over expectations. Both are fair reasons to keep rates where they are, but both measures are easing or should ease soon. An April rate cut may therefore be in the cards.

The bank’s mandate is to target 2-per-cent headline inflation. But headline inflation contains a number of volatile items, such as energy, and so to get a sense of underlying price pressures, many central banks have measures of core inflation that strip away these components…