Alberta’s budgets may appear bigger nowadays than in years past, but that’s not necessarily a sign that more of your tax dollars are being spent. That’s according to a new report, co-authored by Ron Kneebone and Margarita Wilkins of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, which examines changes to the province’s accounting conventions […]

What’s the price of oil these days? Calgary is one of the few places where you can ask someone that question and reasonably expect them to know the answer. As a city, we follow the ups and downs of this particular commodity with an intensity that borders on obsessive. Our collective mood rises and falls […]

Canadian provinces should spend more on social services instead of health care in order to improve the overall health of the population, new Canadian research suggests. While health spending increases seem like a common sense approach, the study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) on Monday suggests that increased social spending is more […]

High-wage workers are under-covered by Canada’s employment insurance system and should have a voluntary top-up option, according to a new research paper from the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. And, if the federal government won’t do it, provinces like Alberta should consider creating their own parallel EI system, say the paper’s authors. That’s […]

Alberta may have lost the policy battle over the Energy East pipeline, but there’s one more battle to fight: the huge jurisdictional overreach by the National Energy Board’s addition of upstream emissions to the review of TransCanada pipeline’s application. Changing the rules in the middle of the game was the straw that broke the camel’s […]

Andrei Sulzenko is a former Canadian trade negotiator and is currently an Executive Fellow at the School of Public Policy, University of Calgary. Well, the gloves are off – and maybe the helmets too. Only this time it’s not hockey. It’s trade negotiations. Let’s hope our Canadian players are good at both games. Last month, […]

Only one in three Albertans with disabilities are benefiting from the federal disability tax credit, according to a report from the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. People with disabilities often face hidden (or non-itemizable) costs, and barriers that can lead to lower income and employment rates. The tax credit is designed to support persons with disabilities by […]

An important new study has for the first time calculated the total amount the federal government and four largest provinces spend on subsidizing businesses — a staggering $29 billion a year — and it estimates more than half of that spending is wasted. The aim of the spending in most cases is to improve economic […]

A tax tsunami is set to wallop the global economy this week as the U.S. proceeds with its most extensive tax package since 1986. U.S. tax reform will have an immense impact on the global economy, not just in terms of investment but also corporate bond flows and the distribution of government tax revenues. As […]