Corporate Canada tops global list of cash hoarders

Published March 25, 2014

You won’t hear the Harper government boast about Canada leading the G7 in this category: the amount of “dead money” being stashed away by corporations. The International Monetary Fund looked at the amount of “dead money” held by non-financial firms, and found corporate Canada is leading the G7 pack. This cash stash in Canada has […]

New Finance Minister supports tax loophole that 86% of families won’t benefit from

Published March 20, 2014

Joe Oliver has never really been the type to paddle against the current. So it’s not super surprising that Stephen Harper’s new Finance Minister has come out in favour of family income splitting, even though the $3 billion Mad Men Giveaway has been criticized by think tanks across the ideological spectrum. For all the knocks against Oliver’s […]

What’s with all this praise for Jim Flaherty’s record?

Published March 19, 2014

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was written and published on March 19, 2014, immediately after Jim Flaherty’s resignation. If you listen to the way some pundits are describing the close of Jim Flaherty’s long tenure as Finance Minister – how he used his “steady hand” to “steer Canada through some very challenging times” – you can […]

Corporate Canada’s cash hoard exceeds national debt

Published March 17, 2014

This is quite a milestone. The amount of cash held by private non-financial corporations in Canada stood at $626 billion in the fourth quarter of 2013, up from $591 billion in the third quarter, according to Statistics Canada. The big jump means corporate Canada’s accumulated stock of cash now exceeds the federal government’s accumulated deficit, […]

Why expanding CPP is a no-brainer

Published March 10, 2014

Need more proof the Harper government is wrong to oppose the expansion of the Canada and Quebec Pension Plans? A new report released Monday lays out why the Conservatives’ big idea to solve the country’s pension crisis — to encourage people to plough more money into private investments, such as RRSPs — works well for the […]

Harper hypocrisy: “free market” obsession goes against the grain

Published March 5, 2014

Why won’t the Conservatives in Ottawa do anything to help Prairie farmers get their grain on trains and — wait for it — stave off a national Cheerios shortage? Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz says that “the railways have arbitrarily decided that they’re not going to run cars that direction… They are a service industry that […]

Tag: policy