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…
The dangerous, violent seeds of the communist revolution were being sown in Canada
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike, the most dramatic moment in our nation’s labour history and one highly romanticized ever since 1919. All of this romance seems to have caused people to forget what was really at stake. In 1919, the communist movement was gaining ground in Europe and elsewhere.…
Into the U.K.’s Winter of Discontent came a woman of sharp edges and a clear mind about how change would be managed
On May 3, 1979, United Kingdom voters trooped to the polls and produced a result that nobody would have countenanced a mere five years earlier. Defeating the sitting Labour government, Margaret Thatcher led the Conservatives into a lengthy sojourn in office. The novelty derived from the U.K. never having had a female prime minister, let…
Only a free market will balance out pay inequities. If a company fails to compensate fairly, employees will simply move on
From conception to implementation, pay equity is a sham. It’s obscured in double speak, packaged in seemingly laudable goals and promises great results. However, it can’t deliver them because it’s based on false premises. Any good that comes of it is far outweighed by the harm. That’s why Canadians should be wary of any legislation…