Homelessness in Alberta is overwhelmingly concentrated in Calgary and Edmonton, with almost two-thirds of total provincial shelter usage in the former. Calgary also experiences much greater fluctuations in shelter use. Three interconnected economic factors — the supply of rental...

This paper exploits the fact that a confluence of events in the mid-1990s caused Canadian provincial governments to re-examine the design of their social-assistance programs. Three provinces in particular - Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario - chose to introduce substantial changes to the...

This paper reviews the recent history of federal and provincial deficits and debt in Canada with the purpose of investigating whether rules of behaviour need to be imposed on fiscal authorities as a way of controlling the growth of these deficits and debt. The evidence suggests that the need for...

Canada's federal government established the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1905, making them approximately equal in area, population, and economy. Roughly one hundred years later, Alberta has three times the population of Saskatchewan and a gross domestic product (GDP) that is more...

The feasibility of a monetarist policy rule has been the subject of a good deal of research, all of which has implicitly assumed a unitary state. In this paper, the question is reexamined for the case of a federal state with deficit-financing nonfederal governments. The results of the paper...