October 17, 2023 | The federal government is under pressure to carve out exemptions to its carbon pricing system, particularly for rural home-heating fuel in Atlantic Canada. Keeping essentials like energy affordable is a serious concern, but carbon-pricing exemptions are the wrong solution.
September 16, 2023 | On September 6 the Bank of Canada decided to hold interest rates steady after two years of high inflation and 18 months of rising interest rates. The premiers of Ontario, British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador each wrote to the Bank of Canada urging it not to raise interest rates, following the critics from Justin Trudeau's caucus stating that the government has lost focus on affordability issues, especially regarding housing.
September 14, 2023 | In an opinion piece by David Parkinson he talks about the influx of students that are going to have their first serious exposure to economics in a university setting. He has interviewed Chris Ragan to discuss the value of learning more about economics. A key point from the conversation was that there is a fundamental misunderstanding surrounding economics where it's perceived to be all about money. Whereas it's more about scarcity and the decisions made to allocate limited resources.
August 30, 2023 | The Council of Alberta University Students is demanding more government action in the wake of a survey suggesting 50% of respondents have experienced some form of sexual or gender-based violence as a post-secondary student. Executive director and Max Bell School graduate Alexandra Ages said she is exited with working with the ministry on next steps.
July 2, 2023 | Ten finalists have been chosen for the Hunter Prize for Public Policy, along with their groundbreaking ideas to fundamentally improve Canada’s health-care system. The finalists were picked from over 200 entries and the winning entree will be chosen by an esteemed panel of judges.
August 1, 2023 | The article in The Globe and Mail provides highlights from the report created by Taylor Chase, Alison Clement, Sandrine Desforges and Anmol Gupta for Canada’s Federal Housing Advocate as part of the Policy Lab 2023. There is a lack of leadership when it comes to veteran housing, which is split between several federal departments with no central co-ordination. They also warn that the federal government does not have a clear picture of the problem because it is not adequately tracking veterans and their housing status.
July 23, 2023 | In this opinion piece by Taylor Owen and Supriya Dwivedi, they reflect on the passage of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, where the government is hoping that Google and Meta would expand the deals they currently have with some Canadian publishers to a wider range of outlets. On the other hand, tech companies are clearly using Canada as a trial to other jurisdictions in the process of enacting similar policies. The piece the highlights where to go from here.
July 4, 2023 | In an interview conducted by Wesley Wark Vincent Rigby reflected on whether he might be prepared to play beyond the boundaries of his recent testimony on June 8 to the Standing Committee on Procedures and House Affairs, in order to enlarge on some of the issues he raised. The Q&A provides an unedited conversation between Wesley Wark and Vincent Rigby about his testimony.
July 3, 2023| In an interview with CBC Pearl Eliadis reflects on provincial government's plan to protect reproductive heath. Some health and legal experts have been questioning a provincial government plan to protect reproductive rights, after the minister responsible for women's health proposed to enshrine a women's right to abortion.
June 14, 2023 | Former product manager at Facebook, Frances Haugen, released thousands of internal Facebook documents that showed the social media giant was aware of harms caused by its products. One article in a Wall Street Journal series revealed that Facebook’s own research found that its Instagram app worsened body image issues for one in three teen girls who faced those concerns.
June 08, 2023 | The courts were asked by twenty-three municipalities to suspend parts of Quebec's new language law, which they describe as abusive. Mayors are concerned about communications, illegal searches and seizures, government grants and the obligation, set out in the law, to discipline public employees who break the rules by working in English.
May 26, 2023 | Following the controversial law in China that compelled companies to hand over platforms' user data if Beijing deems relevant to Chinese security, serious concerns were raised in Canada. Following this update most of the provinces and public institutions prohibited TikTok on government-owned devices. Former ByteDance executive has claimed that TikTok provides the Chinese government 'supreme access' to user data, indicating that the Chinese government is able to obtain information collected on Canadians' phones.
May 23, 2023 | New and often radical ideas have emerged about how much governments can spend and how trade should be conducted following COVID-19 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Chris Ragan says most people at the Bank hold conventional views on how trade should be conducted, despite public discourse about concepts like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). He has mentioned that he doubts that anyone in Finance or the Bank of Canada is taking MMT seriously
May 1, 2023 | In her an opinion piece by Tasha Kheiriddin states that there is a sense of the liberal party at a crossroads, if not in a crisis.
"Every week brings fresh drama, whether it’s inaction on foreign interference, the cost of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest vacation, or his brother Sacha testifying about shady donations to the family’s eponymous foundation." she said.
April 19, 2023 | Human rights activists in Latin America hope that a historic court hearing over the case of a Salvadoran woman who was denied an abortion despite her high-risk pregnancy could open the way for El Salvador to decriminalize abortions – and set an important precedent across the region.