The Harper government's economic policy, as enunciated in the Throne Speech and the Budget, is properly described by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty as "stay the course" or business-as-usual (that is, what business wants business gets). That is, we are offered more of the same old neo-liberalism and globalization with wealth for the few and austerity for the many — with only a brief panic-stricken Keynesian moment — that got us into the messes we're in.
Government finance
OTTAWA – The Harper government’s budget fails to measure up to its own job creation promises, says the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), a progressive think tank.
Instead of fixing the job crisis as it promised in yesterday’s Throne Speech, the Harper government appears to be coasting on last year’s stimulus budget, offering no meaningful new initiatives to get Canadians working again.
As Canada's recession winds down, there is growing talk of housing and debt bubbles but there is an even bigger bubble that's set to burst.
It's the Harper government bubble – that carefully crafted, out-of-touch universe our Prime Minister has been living in since recession threw hundreds of thousands of Canadians out of work.
Within the Harper bubble, the recession is over and so it's time to turn the taps off stimulus funding and get back to the original extreme Conservative program of gutting public services.
Determined to benefit from the shock of a global recession, conservatives are whipping up unnecessary hysteria over the fiscal deficits governments have incurred in the past year’s efforts to protect their citizens.
In anticipation of Tuesday’s provincial budget, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives warns that further cuts to public spending will impede the economic recovery, which is already expected to be slow and jobless.
“There is no ‘fat’ to trim from public services as BC’s public sector is already among the smallest in Canada,” says CCPA economist Iglika Ivanova. “Recent rounds of spending cuts have compromised much-needed social services and removed a potential source of stimulus at a time when the provincial economy needs all the help it can get.”
It is a little known fact that BC’s public sector has been shrinking both in terms of employees per capita and expenditures relative to GDP (or the size of the economy) since the early 1990s. This is because our public service already went through several comprehensive reviews in recent years that looked for ways to cut costs. Simply put, BC entered the recession with one of the leanest public sectors in the country and there was little room for cuts without compromising much-needed public services.
On February 17, 2010, the Mayor’s Executive Policy Committee (EPC) passed a motion to provide a grant in the amount of $225,000 per year for 15 years in support of the Youth for Christ Centre of Excellence. On February 24th, Winnipeg City Council will vote on the motion.
As service providers working with inner-city youth, our organizations strongly agree that we need to increase recreational opportunities for inner-city youth in Winnipeg. However, we strongly oppose public funding for the Youth for Christ Centre.
In Nov. of 2009, the Nova Scotia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives hosted a conference in Halifax, named "Visioning Nova Scotia in 2020: Advancing research and policy for sustainability". Its purpose was to identify the key issues facing the province, and envision the kind of policy decisions that would help solve those problems.
In this clip, Christine Saulnier, Director of the CCPA-NS office, introduces the conference.
In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein shows that a perceived crisis can be used to frighten people into accepting unpopular “reforms” as “solutions,” such as shrinking of the state, privatization and the loss of public services. But, she notes, a crisis can also motivate people to defend the institutions they have built to make their lives meaningful and to help one another.
This in-depth analysis of Ontario's proposed Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) shows the tax is virtually revenue neutral when viewed as part of a total tax package that includes increased sales and property tax credits and a significant decrease in personal income tax rates.