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…
La réponse à ma question provocatrice dépend du sens donné à l’expression. Non, si on considère la caricature faite par la droite dure aux États-Unis. Oui, si on retient l’orientation d’un rapport sur l’avenir de la gouvernance d’entreprise au Canada.
Si on redonne au mot woke son sens « d’éveillé », à l’évidence il y a longtemps qu’on demande aux administrateurs de ne plus dormir au gaz. Mais on s’attend maintenant à ce qu’ils « s’éveillent » à un plus large éventail de questions sociales et environnementales.
La gouvernance d’entreprise réfère à l’ensemble des règles et des comportements d’un conseil d’administration, notamment sa relation avec le PDG pour établir la stratégie et en…
The New Year traditionally arrives with resolutions and a fresh start at self-improvement. Here’s one simple suggestion for all political leaders: Embrace more realism in public policy. Let’s consider five areas in which Canada has clear goals, but falls short of realistic plans to achieve them.
First, inflation control. Fiscal authorities must not add more fuel to the inflation fire with new spending even as the Bank of Canada wields its interest-rate hammer. Ottawa needs to show more realism about its spending ambitions. Inflation control is a whole-of-government responsibility. After years of record-breaking spending and deficits, we need a credible plan to improve the nation’s finances and ensure that the…
Before the federal government’s Fall Economic Statement last month, we often heard words like “restraint” and “prudence.” Less so afterwards. The statement’s projections confirm that every new forecast from Ottawa shows the federal government getting bigger faster, with every area of spending swelling more by the year.
The government’s last pre-COVID projections were in its 2019 fall statement. The final fiscal year in those projections was 2024/25, when federal spending was slated to hit $421 billion.
The government used the pandemic as an excuse to present no budget in 2020, an unprecedented failure for it and for Parliament as a whole. It did present a fall statement late in the year, however. To compare that…
Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office just did something important and long overdue. For the first time, the country’s official financial watchdog quantified the costs of climate change for Canada’s economy, showing that worsening climate impacts are a drag on economic growth. This is a crucial step in beginning to reduce the economic risks Canada can expect in a warming world.
There’s still a long way to go, however, and recent moves by Australia and the United Kingdom can point us in the right direction.
In Canada, our long-term economic projections are largely based on historical averages of productivity that do not account for the fact that the climate is now changing rapidly, bringing with it more…
