Calgary’s Mount Royal University has a new logo courtesy of a Toronto design firm. The decision to use a Toronto designer rather than a Calgary firm has ruffled the feathers of those who feel a local supplier should have got the gig.
When a local project sources the services of a business located somewhere else, it often leads to these sorts of complaints. But consider this: what if the University of Toronto used a Calgary design firm to create its new logo? Folks in Toronto would likely have the same complaint: why didn’t the U of T use a local designer? Calgarians, on the other hand, would likely see this as an example of an open Canadian economy… Read More
When the Opening Ceremony of the Vancouver Paralympics is presented on Friday it will no doubt escape much of the public scrutiny that followed the Olympic ceremonies—the benefit of drawing a smaller audience. Largely due to the success of the Olympic games themselves, there was certainly no shortage of opinion on what should and should not have been presented to the world as the proper representation of Vancouver and Canada. Opinions abound on the need for more French culture, more local Asian influences, less Canadian odd-ball humour, more Celine and Cirque (or perhaps more Celine with Cirque?) and less giant flying moose.
While I’m having a hard time figuring out which ceremony was hated more (I’m leaning towards the Closing… Read More
Given that a prorogation of the House of Commons was required to put it together, yesterday’s 2010 federal budget was quite a disappointment. Minister Flaherty’s document is thick with announcements related to the government’s much publicized “Economic Action Plan” but despite a thorough scan not much else is new in terms of economic policy. The overall opus is 450-pages long but the complete list of genuinely new announcements could probably fit on a business card.
A large section of the budget consists in a report concerning the Action Plan, a report that the government was due to release anyway. The bulk of it deals with infrastructure spending. Of specific interest to the West, over this year and the next… Read More
So here we are, deep in deficit again. It’s easy for some to say that Canada’s deficit and debt remain quite manageable compared to those of other Western economies. The problem is, the debt and the deficit could both have been considerably easier to deal with. Mr. Flaherty’s government tinkered with the GST rate in 2006 and 2007 for reasons that were more political than economic, and now you can see the result. If you know a single Canadian economist who thought that lowering the GST rate was a good idea, and if that economist doesn’t happen to be a Prime Minister, you are a very lucky person. Go buy a lottery ticket right away.
In fact, a simple calculation… Read More
The big news from yesterday’s budget includes the $49.2 billion deficit and the plan to reduce the red ink to just under $2 billion by 2014/15.
There are lots of other announcements and dollar figures in the budget document entitled “Leading the Way on Jobs and Growth.”
I stumbled across more than a few items, however, that don’t seem particularly “budgety.” For example, there is a short section on “modernizing Canada’s currency” on page 117 (the budget document is a whopping 451 pages). The section notes that new “bank notes will have increased security features and will be printed on a polymer material, which lasts significantly longer than the current cotton-based paper, thereby reducing production costs and the impact… Read More
