The B.C. government balked at applying the foreign buyer tax to pre-sale contracts, so property flipping won’t slow down and it certainly won’t stop
Everyone knew that Vancouver housing prices were criminal, they just didn’t know by how much. By now, many citizens are aware that offshore money, mostly from China, has been laundered through casinos and invested in properties that have often been flipped through shady realtors and unlicensed brokers. The new government in British Columbia talked a…
Selling slow-moving, inflexible Toronto Hydro would benefit both taxpayers’ pocketbooks and the service they receive
By Ian Madsen and Alexandra Burnett Frontier Centre for Public Policy Increasingly, Toronto Hydro Corp. poses an expensive risk to all Toronto citizens. The century-old electricity distribution company’s aging equipment is breaking down, and the utility can’t keep up with the building boom in the Greater Toronto Area. It can take months for a new…
The protection of minorities does not include minority rule or the raising of minority interests above those of the majority
In today’s colleges and universities, ‘progressive stacking’ is recommended to deal with diversity among students. The professor sorts out students according to categories, using criteria of suffering and victimhood. In this social justice vision, black and Indigenous women are the most oppressed, then white women, then black and Indigenous men, then finally the privileged white…
A student may be able to decode every single word in an article but still be clueless about the meaning since they know virtually nothing about the subject
Walk into an elementary school classroom and you’ll probably see a lot of books on the shelf. Take a closer look and you’ll often find a coloured dot, a number or a letter on each book’s spine. Those dots, numbers and letters show the reading level of each book. Books are assigned levels so students…
Unsustainable debts, regulatory structure and evolving market conditions are holding utilities back
North American power utilities are grappling with a growing crisis and dramatic changes are needed. Nearly all the utilities on the continent (privately held or Crown corporations), and even some Brazilian hydroelectric companies that trade on the New York Stock Exchange, have negligible or outright negative free cash flow. The reasons should concern Canadian taxpayers…
As the taxi industry faces off with Uber, governments should let the marketplace sort out the winners and losers
What do creation, destruction, sharing and profit have in common? When it comes to the sharing economy, the answer is everything. In slightly over a decade, Uber and Lyft have gone from San Francisco startups to worldwide juggernauts. Their march to becoming international multibillion-dollar companies has sometimes met fierce resistance from taxi companies and community…
A society can’t be at the same time egalitarian and hierarchical, decentralized and centralized, kin-oriented and law-oriented, secular and religious
Like disciplined anarchy, monogamy with multiple spouses and promiscuous chastity, multiculturalism is an incoherent and self-contradictory idea. So is Canada’s multiculturalism in a bilingual society. Culture is the way of life of a people. In the 19th and 20th century, culture was the central concept of anthropology, a tool to guide the study and understanding of peoples…
As Canadians try desperately to prove we’re not Trump’s America, we make grievous social and political errors
The election of President Donald Trump in the United States is changing the political world in Canada. To his critics, Trump’s the worst of everything a human being can be. His detractors call him names that would have been considered extreme even for a president as divisive as Richard Nixon. According to his supporters, he…
Canada’s dysfunctional reserve system has produced far too many marginalized and vulnerable girls and women
An Indigenous spokesperson interviewed on CBC Radio the day after a jury acquitted Raymond Cormier in the death of Tina Fontaine said the case is a symbol of the way our society doesn’t seem to value the lives of Indigenous females as much it does those of other women. He’s right. Indigenous girls and women…
The simple solution to overcrowding in our hospitals is to allow Canadians to purchase health insurance that covers medically-necessary care
Delirium can result from waiting too long in an emergency room. And the chances of that happening in Canada have never been greater. The Canadian Institute for Health Information released a report in January that showed the average wait time in an emergency room in 2016-17 was up by 11 per cent. An unacceptable one…
Everyone knew that Vancouver housing prices were criminal, they just didn’t know by how much. By now, many citizens are aware that offshore money, mostly from China, has been laundered through casinos and invested in properties that have often been flipped through shady realtors and unlicensed brokers. The new government in British Columbia talked a…
