Ed Broadbent on ways to bridge Canada’s growing income gap, and why the one per cent should care Canada is careering “strongly and wrongly” toward increasing inequality, Ed Broadbent told a crowd last Thursday night at the Steelworkers Hall in Toronto. With social implications that will be felt across the economic strata, we all ought […] More »

Forecasts of a coming economic storm may not be far off in light of the recent frenzied trading of frightened investors. Although this would bring further turmoil on a global scale, it would also create a perfect storm for profound change. The Euro zone has so far been unable to extract itself from a debt […] More »

  The meat counter at the Cambie Street Whole Foods in Vancouver is thirty feet long, filled with choice cuts of beef, lamb, chicken, pork, and at least 20 different kinds of sausages. Two clerks, dressed in white smocks, black aprons, and Whole Foods caps, hustle around behind the counter, making sure everything looks just […] More »

Paul Frazer is an invisible Canadian. He doesn’t live in Canada, and hasn’t for more than two decades. But he works for us, and he represents us abroad, and he holds sway over the leaders and big businesses that affect our lives. In many ways, he has power over the powerful. But here at home, […] More »

When the first Canadian case of Mad Cow disease was discovered near Wanham, Alberta in 2003, sensationalist news coverage sparked widespread fear over the safety of Canadian beef. Forty-one countries closed their borders to our beef, and in the following 18 months producers suffered $5 billion in losses. To date, only 19 cases of mad […] More »

British Columbia introduced its Instant Towns Act in 1965 during the height of an industrial boom. The policy’s purpose was exactly what the quirky name suggests: to allow the government to instantly grant municipal status to the many informal settlements surrounding its natural resources. The idea was that instant towns could prevent some of the […] More »

[Note: this editorial appears in the November-December 2011 edition of This Magazine, which will be on newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes in early November.]  Looking back on autumn 2011, it seems increasingly clear that the movement known as “Occupy Wall Street” will be viewed as a genuinely important historical moment for the West. The idea, […] More »

Apparently, some Canadians find it troubling that some First Nations citizens do not pay taxes. This supposed unfairness is the subject of frequent criticism. For example, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy  reprinted an article (originally appearing in C2C Journal) reading: “Tax relief and tax reform must be based on the principle of fairness. Taxes […] More »

Could you live on $14,000 a year? Could everyone in Canada? And could we live on $14,000 a year for the rest of history? That’s the sort of uncomfortable, prickly question Peter Victor likes to ask. And the way you answer might say a lot about the future of the planet. That’s because Victor is […] More »

The hotel hallway is empty, save for trays of dirty dishes stacked on the muted blue carpet and on a room-service cart along the beige walls. A man in a loose tie bends over the cart, holding a glass of red wine and stooping tentatively over a half-eaten plate of food. He reaches for a […] More »

The governing Conservatives are about to table a budget that spends many billions of dollars. It sets the agenda of virtually every government department and it means a lot to anyone who pays taxes in Canada. But when the budget is introduced by the finance minister tomorrow, the prevailing Ottawa groupthink says it’s not about […] More »