The Abacus survey on carbon taxes, released last week for the Ecofiscal Commission, revealed that 18 per cent of Canadians considered it a “very good” idea for governments to tax carbon. Twenty-eight per cent consider it “good,” 33 per cent say “acceptable,” and 22 per cent think it’s “poor” or worse. More interestingly, almost two-thirds […]

The federal equalization program is up for review this year, and the University of Toronto Press has published a timely new book on the subject: Fiscal Federalism and Equalization Policy in Canada. While the authors defend equalization transfer payments to poorer, have-not provinces, many of the facts that they report confirm that politics and partisan […]

Andrei Sulzenko is a former trade negotiator and is currently an executive fellow at the School of Public Policy, University of Calgary Imagine a conversation between President Donald Trump and his hawkish trade advisers. “I need to do something big to fulfill my election promise to get tough on trade! So far, I’ve received no […]

Turning Canada’s heavy oil sands into a more marketable kind of crude is making a comeback, or rather half a comeback. Alberta’s government’s C$1 billion dollar pledge ($780 million) will help support the construction of smaller and cheaper varieties of upgraders. The so-called partial upgraders would process the sticky oil just enough so that it […]

Calling it his happiest moment since becoming finance minister, Joe Ceci recently informed Albertans that their province should wrap up the fiscal year at the end of this month with a $9.1-billion deficit. That’s not something you would normally expect a finance minister to be particularly cheerful about but, as Ceci explained in his third-quarter […]

A new report from the University of Calgary shows Alberta is losing about $7.2 billion each year in government revenues because of a lack of pipeline capacity and limited access to markets for heavy oil. The university’s School of Public Policy produced the study that shows Alberta is losing about $6.60 on every barrel of […]