Showing posts with label canadian economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label canadian economy. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

The Vindication Of Thomas Mulcair

Some will remember the abuse heaped upon NDP leader Thomas Mulcair back in 2012 when he said that Canada was suffering from the same Dutch disease that afflicted the Netherlands after natural gas fields boosting that nation's currency reduced the competitiveness of its exports back in the 1970s. The culprit in Canada was the unrestrained exploitation of its oil fields, leading at one point to our dollar being valued higher than the American one. Exports suffered, manufacturing continued to decline, and the Harper regime gleefully denigrated the NDP leader for an inconvenient truth.

It would seem that Mulcair's analysis has been validated by both statistics and analysis.

Says Bank of America Merrill Lynch economist Emanuella Enenajor,
"The currency's appreciation of almost 60 per cent over the last 15 years has really hurt the manufacturing sector".
The fact that oil prices have now dropped is not having the salutary effects one might hope for:
Just because low oil prices are reducing transportation and energy costs, and the floundering loonie is making Canadian exports attractive again — it doesn't mean the sector will bounce back immediately.

You can't just turn the lights back on in the factory and start sending the widgets out the door again.

When the energy sector started to lose steam, the old stalwarts of the economy weren't there to pick up the slack.

"The Dutch disease that Canada has experienced has been more than a decade in the making, and I think it has really hurt business confidence," added Enenajor.
Of course, with an election in the offing, expect the Harper regime to give no quarter, evidenced by party stalwarts like the redoubtable, predictable and hyper partisan Pierre Poilivre:
"The leader of the NDP calls [the natural resources] sector a disease!" Pierre Poilievre sneered at Mulcair across the floor of the House of Commons last week.

Here is the interview with Emanuella Enenajor:

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

A Shocking And Inconvenient Truth



It is a statistic that should disturb even the most unflappable among us. It is also a window through which we see the bald lie in the Harper claim that his government is the best one to manage the nation's economy.

An RBC survey has revealed that three-quarters of Canadians are imprisoned by debt, exclusive of their mortgages, to the tune of an average $16,000.

That number reveals a myriad of truths. It reveals that good jobs are becoming increasingly scarce. It reveals that the precariat is extensive, and hardly limited to university grads carrying heavy debt and contending with contract work. The statistic attests to a world in which minimum wage jobs are proliferating, new jobs being created are largely part-time ones. food bank use is rising. and increasing numbers are facing retirement with little or no savings.

But of course, the wily Harper has a secret weapon at his disposal: people's greed and self-interest. Because deficit reduction continues apace, it is doubtlessly his strategy to go into the 2015 election with it eliminated so that he can make good on his promise to allow income-splitting for parents with children under 18; under the proposal, people would be allowed to split up to $50,000 of income with their partner. It is a scheme, as pointed out by Andrew Jackson and Jonathan Sas, that

will further shrink the federal tax base with little economic or social gain for most families. What it will achieve is the hamstringing of future federal governments, whose ability to make needed public investments and fund critical social programs like child care, parental leave, good pensions, or world-class public health care will be blunted.

As well, the authors go on to cite this study:

A detailed analysis for the C.D. Howe Institute calculates that 40 per cent of the benefits of family income-splitting would go to families earning more than $125,000. David Robinson of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives calculates that 61 per cent of the benefits would go to families earning more than $100,000.

And, as Thomas Walkom points out in today's Star, while the spectacle of the Prime Minister giving non-answers to Thomas Mulcair's probing inquiries about the Senate scandal is diverting, it masks a deeper rot which the Prime Minister refuses to acknowledge: his inept handling of our economy.

Quite a legacy the man will leave, when he is finally forced from office.






Sunday, June 23, 2013

He Certainly Has Mr. Harper's Number



It is always heartening to me, and I am sure to countless others, to see that some members of the Canadian electorate are not asleep at the proverbial wheel but instead busy exercising their critical-thinking skills. Peter Dick of Toronto is one such citizen. Not content to blithely and blindly accept the official mythology that the Conservative government is an able manager of the economy, Mr. Dick, in today's Star, offers the following trenchant observations about a naked emperor and his entourage:


Re: Parliamentary session over for summer, but scandals still remain, June 20

Government House Leader Peter Van Loan continues to spout the Stephen Harper party line in Thursday’s Star, saying: “We’ve been working hard to strengthen our economy, create jobs and support Canadian families.” If only repeating this, ad nauseam, made it true! People outside the 1 per cent know how bad things are. Economies suffer and degrade when people don’t spend money, and people don’t spend money when they are unemployed, in a precarious job or making less than a living wage.

As long as Harper continues to create and support policies that export Canadian jobs, put downward pressure on Canadian salaries, weaken unions and destroy any semblance of job security, he is sabotaging the economy for us all. Add to this the deliberate degradation, rather than bolstering, of the Canada Pension Plan and employment insurance benefits, and you ensure that fewer and fewer Canadians have disposable income to spend. How strange that an “economics guy” like Harper does not make the connection between a precarious, low-paid workforce and a tanked economy. Harper’s policies contradict everything that comes out of his mouth, and your wallet already knows this. Vote accordingly.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

An Insane Country, Or An Insane Government?

Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By that standard, we can perhaps infer that Canada is insane.

As we are reminded in a very interesting column by Thomas Walkom in this morning's Star, Canada has a long history of staking its economic well-being on the export of its resources. Citing political economist Harold Innis,

... Canada’s history was dominated by natural resource exports, which he called staples. That Canada has exported raw materials is hardly novel. What Innis grasped, however, was that these staple exports created a pattern of development, both political and economic, that over time was hard to escape. To use the language of one of his students, the Canada that Innis described kept enmeshing itself in a “staple trap.”

Whether the resource was wood or beaver pelts, the government would spend substantial sums building up the infrastructure to cultivate its exports, only, of course, to have any given staple ultimately fall out of favour. The same thing is happening today with our almost total dependency on the tarsands as the country's economic driver, to the exclusion of any real diversification or environmental oversight.

Walkom calls attention to a new study called The Bitumen Cliff which observes that our dirty oil requires vast quantities of money... not just to extract...but to transport it by rail, pipeline or ship.

There are other causalities of this insanity as well:

Again, other economic activities are given short shrift. In this case, the high dollar created by Canada’s soaring oil exports has eaten into the ability of manufacturers to compete abroad.

And again, the political system wraps itself around the staple, with Ottawa’s Conservative government gutting environmental laws for fear that they might interfere with pipelines and resource extraction. (For an example of the latter, take a look at this story about how the pipeline industry essentially dictated the changes to Navigable Waters Protection Act included in last year's omnibus bill which will result in far less protection than existed beforehand, all in the name of pipeline expediency.)

The folly of this approach is that, like our staples of the past, our oil will fall out of favour:

Suddenly, the politics of climate change have made Alberta’s carbon-emitting bitumen less welcome in the United States. More to the point, technological changes that favour the production of cheaper shale oil and gas, are transforming the U.S. from an energy pauper into one of the world’s big petroleum players.

To put it another way, Canada’s biggest export market no longer needs the tarsands quite as much as it did.

So the damage will have been done, and all we will be left with is a fractured economy and environmental despoliation, only to await the cycle to begin all over again.

Come to think of it, perhaps it is not our country that is insane, only our political 'visionaries'. Yet one more aspect of what will be Stephen Harper's sad and dishonourable legacy.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

The Good News: It's a New Year - the Bad News: Expect More of the Same

Best wishes to everyone in 2013. I would like to express my hope that all will enjoy a prosperous 12 months ahead, but given both domestic and international realities, I know that will not be the case for many.

This, despite the self-congratulatory tone Stephen Harper frequently strikes when talking about how Canada is doing so well vis-vis the rest of the world. Yesterday, this boast was placed in its proper context by The Globe's Lawrence Martin, who offers the following observation:

If Canada’s doing well compared with other well-functioning economies, it’s something to boast about. But if the barometer is basket cases, let’s not get out the pompoms. It’s no great measure of success.

He points out, for example, that only a half-point separates our unemployment rate (7.2%) from that of the United States (7.7%).

Martin suggests that our real economic state is hidden:

We have a manufacturing sector that’s in steady decline, leaving an economy overly dependent on staples and their price fluctuations. It’s chiefly our natural resource endowments that have helped us outperform others. Should we pat ourselves on the back for that? What country, blessed with such abundances, couldn’t have done the same?

His piece goes on to adumbrate our myriad failures both internationally and domestically, a few of which I reproduce below:

- On climate change, this great green land has taken on the reputation (Liberal governments share the blame) of a black sheep.

- In regard to first nations, the acute adversities find little alleviation.

- We left Afghanistan with our mission mostly unaccomplished. We now witness the F-35 muck-up.

- On foreign affairs, our long-time open-minded country is now steering closer to a path of unilateralism. Our self-righteousness is striking, and we’ve become a United Nations basher.

- While other jurisdictions move progressively on criminal justice, we renew our emphasis on incarceration. While other jurisdictions move to decriminalize soft drugs, we maintain a war on them.

Martin ends his piece by reminding us of how much our beloved democracy has suffered under the Harper cabal. It does not take a long memory to recall unnecessary omnibus bills, parliamentary prorogation, and the contempt shown both inside and outside of parliament for those who dare disagree with the Tory agenda.

I am well past the age where I make New Years' resolutions, but my resolve is the same as it has been since 2006, when these renegades first came to power: to do everything I can to inform as many as possible about the true nature of this government, and to encourage as many as possible to engage or reengage in the political process.

May it be a productive year.