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The Study in Brief Competition policy and enforcement need to be able to keep pace with business models that have emerged in the digital age. Fittingly, Canada is in the midst of a review of its Competition Act that is addressing this question. A key goal of any reform should be to deter anti-competitive practices by firms whose business models rely on gathering and leveraging large troves of…

A presentation to “Pharmacare Back on The Radar: Canada’s Need for Federal-Provincial Cooperation,” a C.D. Howe Institute webinar held on October 26, 2023. Marcel Saulnier is a health policy consultant, Associate with Santis Health and a former Associate Assistant Deputy Minister of the Strategic Policy Branch at Health Canada. He was also Executive Director responsible for the secretariat…

The Study in Brief As a primary pillar of Canada’s social safety net, Employment Insurance (EI) has proven itself to be slow to react to downturns, weakening its ability to automatically stabilize the economy. It has also gone off track from its original main goal: to provide insurance against unpredictable job losses. EI should be modernized with an eye to making it a more effective counter-…

The Study in Brief Provincial and municipal governments should cut excessive regulations on new housing development projects and lower the upfront costs on homebuyers to help Canadians grapple with skyrocketing housing prices.  The author estimates the gap between the marginal cost of construction for new housing and the market price in major Canadian city areas. This gap shows the extent…

The Study In Brief The 2022 federal budget launched consultations on the implementation of new proposed rules for a Global Minimum Tax of 15 percent, which was endorsed in principle by members of the OECD and G20 in 2021. In simple terms, the tax rules would apply to multinational enterprises (MNEs) with annual consolidated revenues generally of EUR 750 million. However, none of this is simple.…

The Study In Brief Canadian and global climate change ambitions are generally associated with a goal of reducing reliance on fossil fuels as a mechanism to reduce carbon emissions. Within this context, the Canadian oil sands have been characterized as “too expensive” to maintain production if global crude oil demand falls, a view that appears regularly in the media and even in government reports…