As a libertarian conservative, he’s a minority in the economics profession. Stir in the fact that he’s Black and you get a rare bird indeed
Thomas Sowell celebrated his 90th birthday this summer by publishing his 56th book. Entitled Charter Schools and Their Enemies, the book returns to one of his recurrent themes. He believes that the American public school system fails children from impoverished backgrounds by prioritizing the interests of teacher unions and their political sponsors. In Sowell’s reckoning,…
The single biggest day-to-day expense for the Alberta government is labour costs
The single biggest day-to-day expense for the Alberta government is labour costs. And with taxpayers footing the bill, we deserve to know just how much we are paying for all government employees with six-figure salaries. While Alberta’s sunshine list discloses the salaries and benefits of bureaucrats making more than $111,000 per year and employees of…
By reducing business profits, unionization ultimately makes workers worse off, diminishing employment and wages
A recent story in The Monitor – a magazine published by the left-wing, union-friendly think-tank Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – provides an important lesson in basic economics. The headline triumphantly proclaims: “Gig workers win the right to unionize.” The end result was unfortunate for the workers, however. An editor’s note at the top of…
Struggling families and businesses can’t afford to pay big property tax bills to fund bloated municipal governments. Alberta municipalities need to reduce that burden by addressing the cost elephant in the room: labour. For many Albertans working outside of government, the last five years have been nothing short of a nightmare full of job losses,…
Most of Canada’s transportation system, from Halifax to Vancouver, has been undercapitalized for years
After a harvest from hell across the country, farmers now have to deal with a new problem: the CN strike. Over 3,000 Canadian National Railway Co. employees out of about 24,000 in Canada and the United States are off the job. They’re asking for better working conditions and safety improvements. Perhaps it’s not the most…
The 1990s were a great time in Canadian political history. They marked a course correction after many years of higher taxes, increased spending, and never-ending deficits. Premiers Ralph Klein in Alberta, Roy Romanow in Saskatchewan and Mike Harris in Ontario changed all that and Ottawa followed. In recent months, those provinces have stemmed the growth…
To listen to the teacher unions and their supporters, the sky is about to fall if class sizes for secondary schools get bigger. The evidence shows they're dead wrong
Class war may soon break out in Canada. More than half of Canadian high school students are in Ontario or British Columbia. Teacher negotiations continue in both provinces with secondary school class sizes a central issue that could trigger strike action. The B.C. Teachers’ Federation wants to retain or lower high school class size limits…
Unionization would mean fewer jobs and fewer hours of work. The workers might be unsatisfied with their current position, but it’s certainly better than unemployment
The push for unionization among some food couriers at Foodora Canada and among hundreds of Uber drivers in Canada will ultimately do more harm than good for workers in the gig economy. The drive for unionization will actually result in increased unemployment and underemployment. Unionization defies the law of demand, a central economic concept. Unionizing…
Unions harm workers more than they help. And they seek a bigger slice of the economic pie, even while shrinking the pie through productivity loss
Labour Day is a day, as its name suggests, to celebrate labour. This is entirely appropriate – labour is a necessary input for the production of goods and services on which our standards of living rely. We make a mistake, however, when the celebration is of labour unions instead of the workers who supply the…
Imagine you are a public school principal. You need to hire a teacher and you have two applicants who meet the basic job requirements. The first applicant has 10 years of teaching experience and regularly scores outstanding performance reviews. The second has 15 years of experience but receives only satisfactory performance reviews. Which teacher would…
Thomas Sowell celebrated his 90th birthday this summer by publishing his 56th book. Entitled Charter Schools and Their Enemies, the book returns to one of his recurrent themes. He believes that the American public school system fails children from impoverished backgrounds by prioritizing the interests of teacher unions and their political sponsors. In Sowell’s reckoning,…
