Apr 3 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — The nature of a contagion is that it grows at a speed that always just exceeds our awareness. It seems dormant for a long while, then suddenly it is surging. No sooner have we adapted to this than we find it has grown still further, faster. It is like a tsunami in this respect. Far […]
Mar 31 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Should we sacrifice Grandma for the GDP? That more or less sums up the debate in much of the U.S. media over the past week, ever since U.S. President Donald Trump mused aloud to a Fox News reporter about relaxing the already patchy American shutdown of social and economic activity in time for Easter – […]
Mar 27 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — By now, it is clear the coronavirus pandemic is a shock to the economy unlike anything we have ever seen. In the past week, nearly one million Canadians filed claims for Employment Insurance – twice as many jobs, proportionately, as were lost in the worst month of the Great Depression. Many more are likely to […]
Mar 25 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Every day the wartime analogies seem more apt. Governments are borrowing massive amounts – as much as 10 per cent of GDP – to bankroll equally massive increases in spending. Central banks are pledging to buy all of that newly issued government debt, if necessary, and every other kind of debt besides, in whatever amounts […]
Mar 21 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — This is a unique event in the history of the world. We have seen worse pandemics, though not since the 1918 influenza pandemic, killer of an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide. But we have never seen the kind of sharp and sudden economic contraction around the world that is now under way in […]
Mar 13 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Modernity made us rich. It also makes us vulnerable. Vulnerability is the inescapable condition of modern life, the price of our prosperity. Globalization – the knitting-together of countries around the world through trade, travel and communication, assisted by advances in the technologies of transmission, computation and transportation – is only an aspect of modernity, one […]
Mar 11 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — The sudden collapse of world oil prices has focused much attention on the province of Alberta and its finances. Rather less attention has attached to Newfoundland and Labrador. Sliding toward bankruptcy even before the current crisis, the province may soon be hurtling over the proverbial fiscal cliff. Alberta’s net debt as of last year stood […]
Mar 6 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — No one knows how bad the coronavirus epidemic will get. The current case count is almost certainly an underestimate, and even the reported numbers, outside China, continue to grow exponentially. There’s a slim hope, still, that public-health authorities may contain it. Modern technology has enabled the spread of the disease, but technology – for testing, […]
Mar 4 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Ever since last fall’s election, the federal Conservatives have been under pressure to drop their opposition to carbon pricing – the test, increasingly, of whether they are serious about reducing Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions, especially in Ontario and Quebec. The Conservatives’ failure to put forward a credible emissions-reduction plan – the party campaigned on repeal of […]
Feb 28 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Voters in the election for leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in 1968 had their choice between, among others, Pierre Trudeau, Robert Winters, Paul Martin Sr., John Turner and Allan MacEachen – cabinet ministers all, men of great accomplishment and/or promise. The previous year had seen a race for Progressive Conservative leader that included […]
Feb 26 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Justin Trudeau came to power promising reconciliation, resource development and carbon pricing. On present form, he may leave having achieved none of the three. The past few days alone have seen deepening national divisions over the paralysis of the country’s rail system by protesters acting, so they claim, in the name of Indigenous rights; the […]
Feb 21 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — On Wednesday morning, a small group of protesters calling themselves the “Cuzzins for Wet’suwet’en” erected a makeshift barricade at a CN Rail crossing in Edmonton, joining similar blockades in other parts of the country. By midday, an even smaller group of counterprotesters converged on the site and dismantled the barricade, carrying its pieces off in […]
Feb 18 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — In the 12 days or so since the Coastal GasLink pipeline dispute blew up from a localized confrontation in the British Columbia interior to a national crisis, two schools of thought have predominated. The first holds that the protests that have blocked rail lines and closed ports across the country are fundamentally legitimate and should […]
Feb 14 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — For most of Canada’s history the guiding philosophy of its leaders was essentially triage. You dealt with problems in order of their urgency, the urgency of a problem being defined by the capacity of whichever group was involved to make trouble for the party in power. It wasn’t necessarily the most enlightened form of government, […]
Feb 11 2020 — Andrew Coyne — Globe and Mail — Perhaps Coastal GasLink imagined, when it obtained an injunction from a British Columbia Supreme Court judge in December ordering members of the Wet’suwet’en Nation to cease blocking construction of its planned natural gas pipeline across the province’s north, that construction would then resume.