Category: Canada

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Canada Government

Jason Kenney gets a growth portfolio

Jason Kenney has long been one of Stephen Harper’s trusted lieutenants and after yesterday’s cabinet reshuffle, he is now Minister of National Defence. In Harperland, this is a decisive promotion: from the “ugh, why are we still doing this?” of Employment and Social Development to the prestigious, patriotic defence portfolio. While the Conservatives promote an image of sound economic and fiscal management, it is clear that they will attempt to frame the upcoming election in large part in terms of security and terrorism — and Jason Kenney will now be instrumental in their fear-mongering campaign.

For Kenney this is a move to a more prestigious post, one likely to be even more visible as election campaigning heats up.  Yet, Kenney is perhaps best known as a dedicated believer in small government — a belief that brought him the leadership of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation before he became an MP. Yesterday, in becoming Minister of National Defense, he has inherited a portfolio where more spending is encouraged by the Conservatives.

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Austerity Canada

Three planks for a possible anti-austerity

What would anti-austerity in Canada look like? There are really two types of questions here. There are those of analysis: what has Canada’s austerity looked like, what makes it distinctive and how does it appear in people’s everyday experience? The others are those of political strategy. These are questions that will have to wait for a social, political force ready to meaningfully take up the cause of anti-austerity. With none on the immediate horizon, I don’t intend to pontificate on what Syriza can teach Canada; best look first at what we can learn of our own situation.

When I interviewed him last week, Yanis Varousfakis, now the Finance Minister of Greece, laid out three very general planks of Syriza’s anti-austerity program. Of course, Greece is the unenviable victim of the cruelest austerity experiment in the North, but simplified to their most basic form the three planks articulated by Yanis have broad applicability. To paraphrase, they are

  1. dealing with debt;
  2. increasing social spending;
  3. generating public revenue.
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Canada Political Eh-conomy Radio

Talking Canada’s economy with Jim Stanford

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Today’s episode is the last of 2014 as I’ll be away spending the holidays with family. For a bit of a year-end summary of Canada’s economy, my one guest is Jim Stanford who joins me for an extended conversation. Jim is the chief economist at Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, and author of the popular economics book Economics for Everyone. Our chat touches on everything from the consequences of the falling oil price to the new batch of free trade agreements to Canada ‘s economic standing stands six years out from the global meltdown all the way to popular economic education and its lessons for today. My conversation with Jim Stanford.

As always, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. You’ll hear from me again in 2015!
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Canada Technology Workers

Robots, migration and the future of work (Briarpatch Magazine)

I have a longer read in the newest issue of Briarpatch Magazine, which is dedicated to the world of work. If you don’t know Briarpatch, be sure to check out the other articles in this issue and consider subscribing; this is one of Canada’s oldest independent left publications and definitely worth supporting. My piece has the rather grand title “Robots, Migration and the Future of Work” but it’s really about trying to see how we are often pitted against one another and encouraged to see external threats, like machines and migrants, to our well-being rather than working together in solidarity against systemic causes.

The past several decades have not been kind to workers, as most of us know only too well. Those making minimum wage are making a penny more in real terms than they were in 1976, union membership continues to fall, and wage growth for most has been anemic – far outstripped by rising productivity. And this is to say nothing about how unfulfilling the jobs that swallow the waking hours of our lives can be. Yet when workers speak out, whether about our own crappy working conditions or the absurd enrichment of those at the top, we’re greeted by a familiar chorus that is often loudest inside our own heads: just be happy that you have a job at all.

For some, the implied culprit in the background of this story is the much poorer worker in the Global South, whether at a maquiladora in Mexico, a sprawling electronics factory in China, or a call centre in India. As Canadian workers have been integrated into a globalized economy, the story goes, they can be kept in check by what happens halfway across the world. Labour discipline isn’t just – or perhaps even mostly – a function of globalization, however. There are many domestic pressures keeping workers in line and the economy unkind.

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Canada Inequality Tax

Forget income splitting, tax the rich!

For now, I’ll keep double-posting my pieces for Ricochet here. The latest is on income splitting and taxing the rich more generally. The idea is that even though taxing the rich won’t get generate huge revenue, there are lots of other good reasons to do it, like even just slightly shifting the balance of power in the workplace. On the flip side, the income-splitting tax cut does more than just funnel money disproportionately to the rich, it also reinforces 1950s-style gender roles. Here is the piece in full:

Tax may not to be a four-letter word, but neither is it a one-trick pony. Rather than merely being tools to raise government revenue and redistribute income, taxes can affect the distribution of power in the home and at work.

The tax reform centrepiece just introduced by the Conservatives not only cuts the government’s ability to raise revenues, it is also openly touted as a way to reinforce the 1950s nuclear family. Instead of cutting taxes on the wealthy to make the home more unequal, let’s tax them to get some power back in our workplaces.

Leave it to income-splitting Beaver

First, a quick recap. There are two major pieces to the Conservatives’ most recent “tax reform”: income-splitting, or the Family Tax Cut (FTC), and the extension of the Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB). Income-splitting is a tax cut that allows families where one person earns more to share income with their partner to lower the overall tax bill. Benefits from this are very disproportionately going to go to families earning above the national median.

The extension of the UCCB is an additional cash transfer, although limited to those with children – in other words, new government spending. The upside? It boosts the incomes of the working and middle classes. The downside? It doesn’t satisfy fans of targeted transfers, as it also benefits the wealthy thus wasting resources and it doesn’t satisfy fans of universal programs because it benefits the rich without getting their support for high-quality public services.

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Categories
Canada Climate change Extraction

Let’s not be too quick to cheer for the market as oil prices slump

Another title for this piece could be oil prices and politics. The last few weeks have been full of worries about the fate of Canada’s oil sector. Global oil prices are falling, pipelines are stalled and a few prominent tar sands investments have been canceled. All of these stories have been accompanied by cheering from the barricades representing those who want to Canada ween itself off its high-carbon fossil fuel industry as quickly as possible.

I, too, won’t be shedding any tears for the tar sands but it is good to keep things in perspective. Questioning the market for allocation of investment towards more fossil fuel development and more climate change, the lesson of the week is not to cheer too quickly for the market’s changing fortunes. Here’s a few charts that provide some of that perspective.

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Categories
Canada Government Welfare state

On childcare in Ricochet

I forgot to post the piece I wrote on the NDP’s universal childcare proposal for Ricochet. Here it is belatedly. It was published last weekend and tries to situate the childcare proposal in the context of broader changes to the welfare state.

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Canada Government Political Eh-conomy Radio Welfare state

Looking towards childcare in Canada, with lessons from Sweden

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This week, the federal NDP reignited a national debate over childcare by proposing a universal $15 per day childcare program. This is the focus of today’s episode, which features two guests. First up, Angela MacEwen. Angella is an economist with the Canadian Labour Congress and has long been a strong advocate for public childcare in Canada. I spoke with her about the economics of universal childcare.

My second guest is Petter Nilssen, who is the press secretary for the Left Party in the Stockholm municipality and is a board member of the Institute for Marxist Social Studies, also in Stockholm. I spoke with him about the recent history of the Swedish model of the welfare state, something he wrote about recently in Jacobin Magazine under the title, “Sweden Without Illusions“.

Remember, you can now also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, directly via this link.

141016 Childcare poster
Categories
Canada Inequality Tax

Is Canada the Sweden of anything?

There was an odd article last week on the explainer site Vox that argued Sweden doesn’t achieve its relative equality with very progressive, “soak the rich” taxation. While Matt Bruenig and Mike Konczal have already provided excellent, US-centred rebuttals to this argument, I thought this would be a good occasion to take a look at some comparative facts about Canadian inequality and overall redistribution.

First, notice that on the chart in the original article, Canada is very close to the US, as being among the “least redistributive”. This goes against the national image of a kinder, gentler capitalism more akin to the various North European countries clustered around the middle and top of the chart.

Source: Vox.
Source: Vox.

The chart, however, is based on an odd measure of redistribution: the percentage of total income tax paid by the richest households (the Vox article doesn’t specify exactly, but it could be this OECD measure of tax revenue paid by the top 10%).  As Bruenig and Konczal both point out, defining the degree of redistribution like this has many problems: for example, it can make a very unequal society with low and flat(ish) taxes appear to be much more redistributive than a fairly equal society with high and progressive taxes. In many ways, the Vox article is simply measuring the degree of inequality in multiple ways rather than relating it to tax progressivity.

In light of this, what does it mean that Canada is right down there clustered with the US as a country that supposedly taxes progressively but doesn’t redistribute? Is this something the chart nevertheless gets right? Is it that while Canada is often presented a kinder, gentler state that can be set alongside its Northern European counterparts (themselves no absolute paragons and eroding slowly), the gap between it and the US is really not that wide?

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Canada Education

Means-test the rich, or another argument for eliminating tuition

Here’s an oversimplified choice for how to fund post-secondary education. Imagine you have two options for dealing with how people pay for post-secondary education:

  1. Universal free tuition, means-testing to see if you are rich enough to pay
  2. Universal tuition fees, means-testing to see if you are poor enough to not pay

Either of these can be brought into being in many ways. At base, however, these are two roughly symmetrical ways of achieving the same thing. Right now in Canada, we have a version of (2): tuition and a complex system of need-based grants and scholarships, student loans and tax rebates largely available if you prove yourself poor enough to deserve them. The thought of (1) instead occurred to reading Dr. Dawg’s excellent reply to the pro-tuition argument. Dawg, however, ends by saying that “[post-secondary education] should not be means-tested, any more than medicare or our highway system should be.” But why not means-test those who can afford to pay for higher education in a society as unequal as ours and where the benefits from education are so unequally distributed?

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