Opinion
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The Toronto Mayoral Election That Was: An Analysis
One day after the New York Times wrote a piece saying that Toronto had gone from ‘a city that works’ to a ‘city in crisis’ Toronto elected former Councillor and NDP MP Olivia Chow its new mayor. Looking back on the election that shouldn’t have been, it was a race that can be divided into…
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Toronto’s Mayoral Race: Good Morning, Toronto
Next Tuesday morning Toronto will awake to a new mayor. And, if all the polling is accurate, that mayor will be Olivia Chow. The notion that any of the contending candidates can build a united front seems far fetched. Olivia appears to have geographic strength across the City building out from a strong downtown base…
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Crypto Won’t Stay Dead: A Conundrum for Regulators and Central Bankers. An Opportunity for Canada.
The demise of “crypto exchange” FTX (only a short time ago), and the resulting collapse in the value of crypto, may have been greeted by central banks and financial services regulators with relief. Some pronounced private digital currencies like bitcoin officially dead. Others believed there would be time to figure out what to do about…
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Budget 2023: Big Spending To Placate The NDP and Confront A Competitive And Dangerous World
The NDP are the big winners in Budget 2023. The Liberals have delivered what the NDP needs to continue to shore up the Minority Liberals: a national dental care plan, a prohibition on the use of replacement workers during strikes and the requirement that recipients of investment tax credits pay a fair wage (whatever that…
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Ontario Budget 2023: A Budget for Uncertain Times
The Ford government released its 2023 Fiscal Plan with very little of the “pre-conditioning” announcements that have been de rigueur for governments of all stripes the last two decades. Indeed, until yesterday morning’s papers, there’s been nary a whisper, hint or smoke signal as to what Finance Minister Bethlenfalvy had in store for Ontarians. Well, it’s…
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The Federal Mini Budget: Keeping Their Powder Dry, Not So Much
The federal government delivered a Fall Economic Statement this week. These Statements have morphed into ‘mini budgets’ full of pricey ‘goodies’ that used to be reserved for full budgets. Minister Freeland and the government are clearly preparing for challenging times next year and presented a “downside scenario” if growth continues to slow. In that eventuality,…
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What happened?: Analysis of the 2022 Ontario Election and its meaning for the parties
In one of the strangest elections in recent Ontario history, voters gave Doug Ford’s Conservatives a resounding victory with an even stronger majority in the Legislature at 83 seats. While the election night results were stunning for the Conservatives, it was a significant setback for the NDP which lost almost a quarter of its caucus (reduced…
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Ontario Budget 2022: Analysis – A campaign budget to differentiate the Conservatives from the Opposition Parties
With mere days to spare, the Ford government released the 2022 Ontario Provincial Budget which will serve as the basis of their election platform. While almost all of the big-ticket items were already announced over the last several weeks, the Ford government’s budget lays a path that is intended to differentiate them from the Liberals and…
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Budget 2022: Why We Spend
Some Budgets are introduced with Speeches that are written in poetry, others in prose. It is either clarion call or laundry list. This one was somewhere in between. The Speech, and the Budget it introduced, had many masters: a global pandemic; a war featuring a nuclear power and autocrat brutally attacking a neighbour; and a national…