Jun 22 2018 — Matthew Gouett and Bridget Steele — Policy Options — Canada is being praised in some quarters for taking a strong stance on supporting women’s empowerment as host of the G7 leaders’ summit earlier this month, but the praise is somewhat misplaced. There was a $400 million investment in women and girls’ education; a commitment to raise $3 billion to support women’s economic participation in […]
Jun 21 2018 — Policy Options — Naval procurement has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. First up is the ongoing legal squabbling over the former number two in the Canadian military, Vice Admiral Mark Norman, who is charged with breach of trust for allegedly leaking cabinet secrets to Quebec’s Davie shipyard. Then, the government is refusing to […]
Jun 20 2018 — Jaymie Heilman — Policy Options — Today, on World Refugee Day, Canadians might see yet another news story about the traumas of young Central American girls and boys being separated from their asylum-seeking parents by US immigration officials. As the American Civil Liberties Union recently reported, children who flee to the US unaccompanied are also being brutally mistreated: child immigrants in […]
Jun 19 2018 — Luis Rubio — Policy Options — Before NAFTA, Canada and Mexico maintained relations that were friendly, albeit of little substance. Mexico’s request to negotiate a free trade agreement along the lines of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement changed all that. Canada wanted to avoid the “hub and spoke” relationship that two bilateral relationships with the US would have produced, and went […]
Jun 18 2018 — Mark Winfield — Policy Options — Incoming Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s platform commitments present the new Progressive Conservative government with a complicated fiscal situation. There will be lost revenues if he goes forward with the elimination of the greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program and cuts to gasoline, corporate and income taxes. When you combine this with his spending promises, the government will […]
Jun 18 2018 — Policy Options — Governments have good reason to take consumer protection seriously, and not just because of the massive contribution consumer spending makes to the economy, nor the fact that consumers are also voters. Consumers today are key drivers and sources of innovation. The demanding and well-informed consumer helps to drive competition and forces firms to innovate. When […]
Jun 15 2018 — Agustín Barrios Gómez — Policy Options — The current President of the United States won his election thanks to Mexico. In June 2015, on the night he launched his campaign, he was 12th out of 15 Republican candidates, until he called Mexicans “rapists.” Soon afterward, he reached #1, a position he never really lost. He consolidated his campaign with the slogan “Build […]
Jun 14 2018 — Policy Options — It’s no secret that Canadians currently pay some of the highest prices in the world for our Internet services. Year on year it’s the same old news, which was confirmed yet again in a report released just weeks ago by the consulting firm Rewheel: Canada placed dead last (or close to it) in just about […]
Jun 13 2018 — Jennifer Ditchburn — Policy Options — In the political honeymoon days for the Liberals following the 2015 election, CBC’s The National did a pretty cool TV experiment where they let individual Canadians interview Justin Trudeau. One of those interviews was done by a struggling worker from the London, ON area named Neil Piercey. Piercey told Trudeau that he had lost his […]
Jun 7 2018 — Teresa Scassa — Policy Options — Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) sets standards for the collection, use and disclosure of personal information by Canada’s private sector. Unfortunately, it was designed for an economy in which personal information was a by-product of doing business, rather than a core commercial asset capable of limitless exploitation.
Jun 5 2018 — Trevor Deley and Julia Szwarc — Policy Options — Over the last decade, predictive statistical models have emerged that can uncover private traits about individuals without their consent. These traits, such as personality or mood, are predicted through various machine learning methods, using digital records of online activity such as social media data. Predictive models have allegedly been used by “propaganda machines” that target […]
Jun 4 2018 — Policy Options — Up until the rise of the Internet and digital technology, consumers were, as Daniel Defoe noted in The Complete English Tradesman (1726), “the last article” or “utmost end” in a trade chain. As buyers of goods and services, consumers were passive actors in the market economy. Starting in 1970s, the regulation of consumer rights (through […]
May 22 2018 — Larry W. Smith — Policy Options — In April, Senator Peter Harder, the Trudeau government’s representative in the Senate, shared the government’s agenda for the upper chamber. His paper aims to advise senators from all parties and groups on how they should conduct themselves when reviewing government legislation.
May 18 2018 — Paul Thomas — Policy Options — Unlike the partisan and relatively docile “old” Senate of the past, the “new” Senate is becoming a political force to be reckoned with in the national policy process. The government, the bureaucracy, interest groups and other policy actors must anticipate and be prepared to accommodate the divergent perspectives represented in an upper house that can […]
May 16 2018 — Douglas Sanderson — Policy Options — The challenge of reconciliation hinges on a series of fundamental questions: How will Indigenous and settler Canadians live side by side? How are we to understand one another’s cultures and values? How are we going to divide economic and political resources in a way that is fair and justifiable in a modern liberal democracy? These […]