For years, successive Canadian governments have been overpromising and under-delivering on defence procurement. Timetables have slipped even as repair and maintenance costs for aging equipment have soared, while elaborate rules have obscured the acquisition process in a bureaucratic fog. This...

While Canada has socialized most of the costs of treating illness, Canada has maintained a reliance on individuals interacting through private markets to invest in upstream health promotion and disease prevention. The failure of the market to provide the efficient level of upstream investment in...

In the 11 years since the Romanow Commission warned that the income of physicians was threatening to become a significant driver of Canadian health-care costs, doctors in this country proceeded to chalk up some of their most rapid gains in earnings since the implementation of medicare. Since...

While much of the developed world struggles with debt and chronically low growth, Canada, one of the best-performing members of the G-7, remains on firmer footing. However, this country still has to cope with slower growth, cutbacks and aging infrastructure. As this paper argues, reconciling...

The future of the western industrialized economies, including Canada, depends on healthy and innovative high-tech sectors. In 2010, this realization spurred the Canadian government to commission a blue-ribbon panel charged with assessing the state of programs designed to support business and...

Canada's natural capital — its resources, ecosystems and wildlife — are indispensable to the productivity of industry. Despite this, both the public and private sectors have failed to adequately factor in the consequences of production and consumption on the natural environment. There is a...

Most privatizations in Canada occurred in the 10-year period from the mid-1980s to the mid- 1990s, and while many of the remaining candidates are both politically and economically problematic, the Harper government has signaled its renewed interest in more privatizations. This paper, written by...

In recent years, Alberta’s fiscal stance has shifted from large surpluses to deficits, and a large part of the blame appears to be due to rising public sector salaries. Since 2000, the province’s public sector wage bill has shot up by 119 percent — almost double the rate of growth in the...

Funding for Canadian public health care has long relied on a “pay-as-you-go” funding model: for the most part, government pays for health costs each year from taxes collected in that fiscal year with effectively nothing put aside for projected rising health-care costs in the future. But the...

Innovation is critical in the knowledge-based economy. It is generally accepted that governments have an important role to play in promoting innovative activity and R&D. Both the federal and provincial governments in Canada provide tax subsidies, and other forms of support, for R&D. Changes to...