The federal equalization program is up for review this year, and the University of Toronto Press has published a timely new book on the subject: Fiscal Federalism and Equalization Policy in Canada. While the authors defend equalization transfer payments to poorer, have-not provinces, many of the facts that they report confirm that politics and partisan […]

Andrei Sulzenko is a former trade negotiator and is currently an executive fellow at the School of Public Policy, University of Calgary Imagine a conversation between President Donald Trump and his hawkish trade advisers. “I need to do something big to fulfill my election promise to get tough on trade! So far, I’ve received no […]

Turning Canada’s heavy oil sands into a more marketable kind of crude is making a comeback, or rather half a comeback. Alberta’s government’s C$1 billion dollar pledge ($780 million) will help support the construction of smaller and cheaper varieties of upgraders. The so-called partial upgraders would process the sticky oil just enough so that it […]

Calling it his happiest moment since becoming finance minister, Joe Ceci recently informed Albertans that their province should wrap up the fiscal year at the end of this month with a $9.1-billion deficit. That’s not something you would normally expect a finance minister to be particularly cheerful about but, as Ceci explained in his third-quarter […]

A new report from the University of Calgary shows Alberta is losing about $7.2 billion each year in government revenues because of a lack of pipeline capacity and limited access to markets for heavy oil. The university’s School of Public Policy produced the study that shows Alberta is losing about $6.60 on every barrel of […]

Health care and early social supports are failing victims of childhood abuse who go on to comprise a large portion of the city’s chronic homeless population, says a University of Calgary study. A survey of 300 of those who sleep on the streets or in Calgary emergency shelters found those people are five times more […]

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 […]