I’m not exactly Dave Veale, but I do understand the importance of leadership to successful organizations. As I see it there are leaders who are the hardest working people you will ever meet. They are also usually smart. They have…
Continue ReadingLet’s have a fact-based conversation about property taxes
It would be kind of cool if we could use facts when debating public policy options in New Brunswick. I’m not a big fan of property taxes. I pay something like $4,500 a year on my house and it is…
Continue ReadingWhere do good ideas come from?
Walking around London and Paris these last few days I keep bumping into some of the biggest thinkers of the past 400 years or so. We walked around Bloomsbury and I was reminded of Keynes and his Bloomsbury group. We…
Continue ReadingNew Brunswick’s Rodney Dangerfield problem
The 1980s comedian/actor Rodney Dangerfield used to say he “gets no respect”. Sometimes I feel that way about New Brunswick. When you eat at a restaurant in New York you order “Nova Scotia salmon” even though Nova Scotia doesn’t actually…
Continue ReadingGuaranteed minimum income: Permanent underclass or innovative way to share prosperity?
Niall Ferguson is one of the more interesting historians out there today. He is a prolific writer and out there in a very public way espousing history as a tool to influence current public policy. In the past few years…
Continue ReadingWhy the bond rating agencies’ opinions matter
To clear things up DBRS did not downgrade the bond rating. It confirmed New Brunswick at A (high) and R-1 (middle) but it changed the trend from stable to negative. This matters because in the fairly arcane world of bond…
Continue ReadingAttracting and retaining international students. Two thumbs up!
Liberally applying Bryan Adams’ lyrics inappropriately, I have been writing about the importance of international students ’til my fingers bled. I was glad to hear the feds are now taking this seriously in Atlantic Canada. There is so much to like…
Continue ReadingThe myth of the full time worker
If most of us were asked to describe what ‘work’ looks like I suspect we would talk about getting up in the morning, going off to work – maybe fighting rush hour traffic, putting in eight hours and then going home. The…
Continue ReadingIt’s time to end the EI fiction
There’s a story on the CBC website this morning about the plight of workers on EI that work seasonally at Kings Landing. It’s unfair, they say, because they get fewer weeks of EI than their counterparts in the Village historique…
Continue ReadingThe disappearing wage gap between NB and Ontario
Someone asked me about the wage gap between New Brunswick and Ontario after reading my column this week. Happy to accommodate. If you go back to the 1950s, depending on the measure you use the wage ‘gap’ between New Brunswick…
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