By Abdul-Hakim Fuseini  April 23, 2024 In recent times, the issue of corporate concentration has been making headlines, and rightly so. With big firms dominating the market, and taking up a larger share of the Canadian economy, it has become a source of worry for small businesses. This is not a ‘today’ problem; it has persisted for over 30 years and Canada cannot afford to remain silent on this issue. In the past two decades, industries including manufacturing, automotive, retail, banking, air travel, telecommunications, etc. have seen increased levels of concentration. As a ..read more

  By Marc Garneau and Goldy Hyder Canadian business leaders participating in this week’s Team Canada Trade Mission to South Korea have an opportunity to bolster an increasingly important international partnership. In addition to being located on opposite sides of a shared ocean, Canada and Korea have much in common. As two middle powers and stable democracies that respect the rules-based international order, our countries share strong economic and cultural ties that stretch back to the 19th century. Both Canada and Korea are champions and beneficiaries of free trade – 68 percent of Canada ..read more

Courtesy UBC By Dr. Benoît-Antoine Bacon April 21, 2024 Last year, Canada experienced its most devastating wildfire season in recorded history, both in terms of carbon emissions and area burned. Our community experienced that firsthand when wildfires forced the sudden evacuation of the University of British Columbia‘s beautiful Okanagan campus last summer. Already, this year is predicted to be at least equally dire. Dozens of “zombie fires” — remnants of last year’s wildfire season — are still smouldering underground beneath remaining snow and ice in the boreal forest. Combined with widespread ..read more

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder By Salman Rushdie Penguin Random House/April, 2024 Reviewed by Lisa Van Dusen April 21, 2024 When the news broke on the afternoon of Friday, August 12th, 2022, that Salman Rushdie had been attacked by a knife-wielding assailant on a stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, the question of whether he would live was more than a humanitarian, medical, legal or celebrity angle. What happened to Rushdie that afternoon was not just about a catalogue of injuries and the police-blotter details of a crime scene; the event would not be adequa ..read more

Adam Scotti First of all, federal budgets are, like so many things, more complicated than they used to be. The 2024 model by Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland landed in: a post-pandemic, polycrisis-besieged, propaganda-addled geopolitical context; a poll-dominated, tactically polarized, propaganda-addled political context; and a post-pandemic, monetary policy-dominated economic context which, as Policy contributors former Privy Council Clerk Kevin Lynch and former White House economic aide Paul Deegan remind us, was labelled the “Tepid Twenties” last week by the Int ..read more

Chief Greg Desjarlais of Frog Lake First Nation signs historic equity partnership agreement with Enbridge on September 28, 2022 By Mark Podlasly, Shaun Fantauzzo and Michael Gullo April 19, 2024 Many different perspectives have emerged about the federal budget tabled earlier this week, but everyone should agree that launching a national Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program is good news for the country. The untapped value of economic reconciliation is enormous. Canada must attract and incentivize more capital investment to meet the economic and energy challenges ahead. Leveraging Indigenous partne ..read more

  By Don Newman April 18th, 2024 One day fourteen years ago, after speaking to what was then called Ryerson University in Toronto, I was walking down a hall packed with students going to their next assignment as classes changed. Everyone, it seemed, was twenty years old except me. Suddenly, a middle-aged woman smiled and waved at me from a classroom doorway. She was a professor, and she had a question for me: What did I think of Justin Trudeau, who was then contemplating a run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada? I replied rather flippantly that I had trouble taking serious ..read more

WP By Lori Turnbull April 18, 2024 At a press conference in Hamilton in August of 2023, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility.” He went on to concede that the issue is something that the federal government “can and must help with” but resisted embracing a leadership role. Clearly, his thinking on this has evolved. The 2024 budget proposes $52.9 billion in new spending over the next five years on a range of measures including rental construction and housing infrastructure like sewer and water systems. However, there is only so much the federal g ..read more

By Yaroslav Baran April 18, 2024 This year’s federal budget was presented against a challenging background. The Liberals face a public opinion crisis, consistently lagging their Conservative challengers by 12-20 percent in opinion polls – a “new normal” for almost a year. The economy is just marginally in positive growth. Higher interest rates have plateaued. Inflation is coming down, but not sufficiently to rewind the cost-of-living crisis that has plagued households since the pandemic. Debt is at an all-time high, creating pressure for lower spending, all while NATO allies rightly demand we ..read more

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on budget day/Adam Scotti By John Delacourt April 17, 2024 The parliamentary convention – notably, not the obligation in Canada – of governments to table an annual budget is a ritual that is never solely about defining an economic narrative for a fiscal year. The primary objective for doing so, however, is straightforward enough: the government is outlining policy priorities and commitments that will extract more growth and productivity from the economy, and fuel more of the electoral oxygen of hope and optimism for an electo ..read more