Mar 20, 2019 in Economics, Quick Fix
The 2019 Budget introduced by the Liberal government includes one of the worst policies I’ve ever seen.
The CMHC First-Time Home Buyer Incentive provides up to 10% of the purchase price of a house (5% for existing homes, 10% for new homes) to any household buying a home for the first time with an annual income up to $120,000. To qualify, the total mortgage must be less than four times the household’s yearly income and the mortgage must be insured, which means that any house costing more than $590,0001 is ineligible for this program. The government will recoup its 5-10% stake when the home is sold.
The cap on eligible house price is this program’s only saving grace. Everything else about it is awful.
Now I want to be clear: housing affordability is a problem, especially in urban areas. Housing costs are increasing above...
Dec 9, 2018 in All About Me, Politics
“Hi, I’m Zach! I’m out here knocking on doors for Tenille Bonoguore, who is running to represent you in Ward 7. Do you have any questions for her, or concerns that you’d like her to know about…” is now a sentence I have said more than possibly any other.
Ontario had municipal elections on October 22nd. I looked at the bios of my local candidates, emailed all of them to find out more about their platforms, met with two of them, and ultimately decided that I wanted to help Tenille. Soon after that, I had been drafted to help manage canvassing efforts (although my colleague Tanya did more of that work than I did) and I was out knocking on doors again.
I knocked on countless doors and talked to an incredible variety of people. I don’t even know how many times I went out canvassing, but it was...
Jul 11, 2018 in Economics, Politics, Quick Fix
Last week I explained how poor decisions by central bankers (specifically failing to spur inflation) can make recessions much worse and lead to slower wage growth during recovery.
(Briefly: inflation during recessions reduces the real cost of payroll, cutting business expenses and making firing people unnecessary. During a recovery, it makes hiring new workers cheaper and so leads to more being hired. Because central bankers failed to create inflation during and after the great recession, many businesses are scared of raising salaries. They believe (correctly) that this will increase their payroll expenses to the point where they’ll have to lay many people off if another recession strikes. Until memories of the last recession fade or central bankers clean up their act, we shouldn’t expect wages to rise.)
Now I’d like to expand on an offhand comment I made about the minimum wage last week and explore how it can affect recovery,...
Jun 11, 2018 in All About Me, Politics
“Hi I’m Zach. I’m out here canvasing for Catherine Fife, Andrea Horwath, and the NDP. I was wondering if Catherine could count on your support this election…” is now a sentence I’ve said hundreds of times.
Ontario had a provincial election on June 7th. I wasn’t fond of the Progressive Conservative (PC) Party’s leader, one Doug Ford, so I did what I could. I joined the PC party to vote for his much more qualified rival, Christine Elliot. When that failed, I volunteered for Waterloo’s NDP Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP), Catherine Fife.
As a volunteer, I knocked on more than a thousand doors and talked to more than two hundred people. I went out canvassing eight times. According to Google Maps and its creepy tracking, I walked about 24 kilometers while doing this (and have still-sore feet to prove it).
Before I started canvassing, I knew...
Mar 4, 2018 in Model, Politics, Quick Fix
Tanya Granic Allen is the most idealistic candidate I’ve ever seen take the stage in a Canadian political debate. This presents some awkward challenges for the candidates facing her, especially Mulroney and Elliot.
First, there’s the simple fact of her idealism. I think Granic Allen genuinely believes everything she says. For her, knowing what’s right and what’s wrong is simple. There isn’t a whole lot of grey. She even (bless her) probably believes that this will be an advantage come election time. People overwhelming don’t like the equivocation of politicians, so Granic Allen must assume her unequivocal moral stances will be a welcome change
For many people, it must be. Even for those who find it grating, it seems almost vulgar to attack her. It’s clear that she isn’t in this for herself and doesn’t really care about personal power. Whether she could maintain that innocence in the face of...
Feb 26, 2018 in Economics, Model, Quick Fix
No, this isn’t a post about very pretty houses or positional goods. It’s about the type of beauty contest described by John Maynard Keynes.
Imagine a newspaper that publishes one hundred pictures of strapping young men. It asks everyone to send in the names of the five that they think are most attractive. They offer a prize: if your selection matches the five men most often appearing in everyone else’s selections, you’ll win $500.
You could just do what the newspaper asked and send in the names of those men that you think are especially good looking. But that’s not very likely to give you the win. Everyone’s tastes are different and the people you find attractive might not be very attractive to anyone else. If you’re playing the game a bit smarter, you’ll instead pick the five people that you think have the broadest appeal.
You could go even...
Feb 10, 2018 in Economics, Politics, Quick Fix
I don’t understand why people choose to go bankrupt living the most expensive cities, but I’m increasingly viewing this as a market failure and collective action problem to be fixed with intervention, not a failure of individual judgement.
There are many cities, like Brantford, Waterloo, or even Ottawa, where everything works properly. Rent isn’t really more expensive than suburban or rural areas. There’s public transit, which means you don’t necessarily need a car, if you choose where you live with enough care. There are plenty of jobs. Stuff happens.
But cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and San Francisco confuse the hell out of me. The cost of living is through the roof, but wages don’t even come close to following (the difference in salary between Toronto and Waterloo for someone with my qualifications is $5,000, which in no way would cover the...
Jan 6, 2018 in Economics, Falsifiable, Politics
Since the minimum wage increase took effect on January 1st, Tim Hortons has been in the news. Many local franchisees have been clawing back benefits, removing paid breaks, or otherwise taking measures to reduce the costs associated with an increased minimum wage.
TVO just put out a piece about this ongoing saga by the Christian socialist Michael Coren. It loudly declares that “Tim Hortons doesn’t deserve your sympathy”. Unfortunately, Mr. Coren is incorrect. Everyone involved here (Tim Hortons the corporation, Tim Hortons franchisees, and Tim Hortons workers) is caught between a rock and a hard place. They all deserve your sympathy.
It is a truism that a minimum wage increase must result in either declining profits, cuts to...
Sep 3, 2017 in Politics
I’ve been ranting to random people all week about how much I love the Westminster System of parliamentary government (most notably used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK) and figured it was about time to write my rant down for broader consumption.
Here’s three reasons why the Westminster System is so much better than the abominable hodgepodge Americans call a government and all the other dysfunctional presidential republics the world over.
And more importantly, the head of state is a figurehead.
The president is an odd dual-role, both head of government (and therefore responsible for running the executive branch and implementing the policies of the government) and head of state (the face of the nation at home and abroad; the person who is supposed to serve as a symbol of national...
Aug 27, 2017 in Economics, Politics
It used to be a common progressive grumbling point that the social safety net subsidized the low wages of McDonald’s and Walmart (and many less famous and less oft grumbled about enterprises). The logic went that employees at those companies just weren’t paid enough; they wouldn’t be able to survive – a necessary prerequisite to showing up at work – without government assistance. The obvious fix for this would be forcing these companies to pay their employees more – raising the minimum wage.
In my last piece on the minimum wage, I said the existing evidence pointed towards minimum wage hikes having few negative consequences. Recent evidence from Seattle suggests this may not be the case (although there are dueling studies, further complicated by accusations of academic misconduct against the scientists who found the hike had no effect). If my...
Jul 3, 2017 in Model, Politics
There is perennial debate in Canada about whether we should allow a “two-tiered” healthcare system. The debate is a bit confusing – by many measures we already have a two-tiered system, with private clinics and private insurance – but ultimately hinges on the ability of doctors to mix fees. Currently it is illegal for a doctor to charge anything on top of the provincially mandated fee structure. If the province is willing to pay $3,000 for a procedure, you cannot charge $5,000 and ask your patients (or their insurance) to make up the difference.
Supporters of a mixed system argue that it will alleviate wait times for everyone. Detractors argue that it will create a cumbersome, unfair system and paradoxically increase wait times. It’s enough to convince me that I don’t know what the fuck a two-tier healthcare system would have as its first order effects.
But I...
Jun 3, 2017 in Economics, Politics
ETA (October 2018): Preliminary studies from Seattle make me much more pessimistic about the effects of the Ontario minimum wage hike. I’d also like to highlight the potential for problems when linking a minimum wage to inflation.
There’s something missing from the discussion about the $15/hour minimum wage in Ontario, something basically every news organization has failed to pick up on. I’d have missed it too, except that a chance connection to a recent blog post I’d read sent me down the right rabbit hole. I’ve climbed out on the back of a mound of government statistics and I really want to share what I’ve found.
Reading through the coverage of the proposed $15/hour minimum wage, I was reminded that the Ontario minimum wage is currently indexed to inflation. Before #FightFor15 really took...
Jun 3, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Quick Fix
I predict that within five years of the implementation of the new $15/hour Ontario minimum wage, we’ll see an increase in the labour participation rates of women and a decrease in the labour participation rates of people with disabilities or developmental delays.
May 30, 2017 in Model, Politics, Quick Fix
I’d like to expand on one of the points I raised yesterday about Canadian social conservatives and the sorts of things they can expect from Andrew Scheer, because I think the Canadian approach to “family values” conservatism is desperately under-theorized.
Yesterday I claimed that the main way that Harper pushed so-called family values was through economic incentives to have a 1950s-style nuclear family. Both income splitting and the Universal Child Care Benefit were designed to make it more feasible to have a single income family.
This is a radically different tack than taken by American family values candidates, who primarily exercise their beliefs by banning sex education, fighting against gay marriage and adoption, and restricting access to abortion1. The American approach attempts to close off all alternatives but a heterosexual, monogamous, child-producing marriage. The Canadian approach is to bribe people into this (and to...
May 28, 2017 in Politics
Yesterday generic conservative Andrew Scheer was crowned leader of the Conservative Party of Canada in a nail-biting 14 ballot process. His margin of victory over the libertarian Maxime Bernier was less than 2%.
Reuters managed to get pretty much everything about this story subtly wrong, from the number of votes political observers expected – by the final week, most of us remembered that there were so many low support candidates that it would probably go to the very final ballot – to Scheer’s position in the party. Reuters has Scheer pegged as a social conservative, whereas people watching the race were much more likely to describe him as the compromise candidate.
The Conservative Leadership race was one of the high points of my engagement in Canadian politics. I haven’t been this engaged since the 2011 election (I was out of country for the 2015 election which limited my involvement...
May 13, 2017 in Biology, Politics
If you don’t live in Southern Ontario or don’t hang out in the skeptic blogosphere, you will probably have never heard the stories I’m going to tell today. There are two of, both about young Ontarian girls. One story has a happier ending than the other.
First is Makayla Sault. She died two years ago, from complications of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She was 11. Had she completed a full course of chemotherapy, there is a 75% chance that she would be alive today.
She did not complete a full course of chemotherapy.
Instead, after 12-weeks of therapy, she and her parents decided to seek so-called “holistic” treatment at the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida, as well as traditional indigenous treatments. . This decision killed her. With chemotherapy, she had a good chance of surviving. Without it…
There is no traditional wisdom that offers anything against cancer. There is no...
May 7, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Quick Fix
A friend asked me what I thought about the candidates in the leadership race for the Conservative Party of Canada. I found I had more to say than was strictly reasonable to post in a Facebook comment. I posted it anyway – because I’m sometimes unreasonable – but I found I also wanted to record my thoughts in a more organized manner that’s easier to link to.
Right now, I think there are a few meaningful ways to split up the candidates. You can split them up based on what block of the party they represent.
The way I see it, you have:
It might be possible to collapse these categories a bit; unobjectionable compromise candidates and Harper clones don’t have that much difference between them, for example. But I think I’m clustering based on salient differences in what the candidates are choosing to highlight, even when their policy positions or voting records are very similar.
Apr 26, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Quick Fix
Back in February, I predicted that the slew of scandals Trudeau was facing wouldn’t decrease his approval ratings. To put numbers on this, I gave my confidence intervals for Trudeau’s approval ratings in April.
Thanks to the “Leader Meter”, it’s easy for me to check up on how Trudeau is doing. As of right now, the most recent poll has him at 48% approval (this is conveniently the first poll since April 1st, making it useful for the purposes of checking my prediction), while Éric Grenier’s model has him at 50.6% approval.
Both of these are within all three probability intervals I offered. In addition, Trudeau was polling higher in March than he was in February, further evidence that the scandals in February (and the abandonment of electoral reform) haven’t hurt his popularity.
I continue to believe that the erosion of political norms around scandals during Steven Harper’s time in office has played a large role in Trudeau’s enduring popularity.
Feb 6, 2017 in Model, Politics
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rang in 2017 with an ethics scandal. Electoral reform and President Trump might have pushed it out of the news, but it still bears talking about.
Maybe it’s just that my memory is fuzzy before 2004, but I feel like there was a point in Canadian politics when scandals weren’t a run of the mill occurrence. It seems like we’ve been treated to a non-stop parade of them since the sponsorship scandal. There was the In-and-Out scandal, that time Maxime Bernier left classified documents with his Hell’s Angels girlfriend, that horrible mess with Afghan detainees, the Robocalls (and associated criminal charges!), the F-35s, the senate, and now the Aga Khan.
There’s also been a host of minor scandals that didn’t even make it into this list, like the $50 million of G8 money spent to make Tony Clement’s...
Jan 21, 2017 in Politics
Note: A previous version of this post referred to Kellie Leitch as “Ms. Leitch” instead of “Dr. Leitch”. I don’t know how I forgot she was a doctor, but I’m deeply sorry that I did.
Nick Kouvalis (campaign manager for Canada’s cheap knock off demagogue, Kellie Leitch) bragged in Macleans1 about how he’s deliberately spreading “fake news” on Twitter to help him identify liberals who are joining the Conservative party to vote against Kellie Leitch.
“We call it Operation Flytrap,” Kouvalis says. “We did it knowing that people who aren’t real Conservatives can’t help themselves, so they post something negative about me, or Kellie. Some of them use real names. We find out who they are, and check them against the membership list. I’m going to challenge as many as I can.”
But there are further layers of dishonesty going on here....
Dec 8, 2016 in Politics
This is the final post in my public safety green paper consultation project. This time around, I’ll be focusing on just the questions dealing with secret and classified evidence.
This section is a mixed bag. I think lawyers with security clearances are a great idea (although I have nagging worries about access to them; for all its potential for abuse, at least the special advocate program is free), but I’m deeply creeped out by the concept of classified evidence. It feels fundamentally at odds with a free and democratic society.
I recognize that I’m coming from a place of feeling safe. Terrorism doesn’t feel like much of a threat to me. I care far more about democratic values than the small chance of dying a really horrible death. I even care more about democratic values than the small chance of my loved ones dying horrible deaths. But I understand that other people make that...
Dec 6, 2016 in Politics
This is a special edition of my public safety green paper consultation project. This time around, I’ll be focusing on just the questions dealing with digital investigations, encryption, etc. It’s all one section on the consultation website.
In contrast to many of the other sections, where I felt that the questions were leading in a positive direction, I’m deeply worried with where the government wants to go with digital investigative powers. I feel like there’s a fundamental disconnect between how the government thinks online security and encryption works and how they actually works. I hope that others who understand the value of encryption can join with me in voicing our fears to the government.
Dec 6, 2016 in Politics
The Canadian government is currently reviewing the national security framework and is soliciting public comment. I’ve decided to post my comments publicly, in the hopes of spurring discussion and providing model comments for others to riff off of.
If you care about limiting government spy powers and government accountability, I urge you to read the Green Papers and comment yourself.
In Part 3, I cover Procedures for Listing Terrorist Entities and Terrorist Financing.
I noticed that the listing process doesn’t officially include an arms embargo, which seems to be required under UNSC Resolution 2253. I assume that the legislation listed as stemming from UNSC Resolution 2253 included an arms embargo, but it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to automatically forbid Canadian companies and citizens from selling any arms or military equipment to any entity listed through the...
Dec 4, 2016 in Politics
The Canadian government is currently reviewing the national security framework and is soliciting public comment. I’ve decided to post my comments publicly, in the hopes of spurring discussion and providing model comments for others to riff off of.
If you care about limiting government spy powers and government accountability, I urge you to read the Green Papers and comment yourself.
In Part 2, I cover Information Sharing, The Passenger Protect Program, and Criminal Code Terrorism Measures.
One person’s lawful protest is another person’s riot. Whether protestors are given sympathetic treatment or labelled as an unruly mob often depends on...
Dec 4, 2016 in Politics
The Canadian government is currently reviewing the national security framework and is soliciting public comment. I’ve decided to post my comments publicly, in the hopes of spurring discussion and providing model comments for others to riff off of.
If you care about limiting government spy powers and government accountability, I urge you to read the Green Papers and comment yourself.
In Part 1, I cover Accountability, Prevention, and Threat Reduction.
Yes. The recent revelations about metadata collection show that oversight bodies need to be strengthened. In addition, it may be very useful for review bodies to be allowed (and required) to do some amount of independent investigation, without having to wait for a complaint to be made. Preventative audits of our national security services would help increase Canadian’s faith...
Nov 23, 2016 in Advice, Ethics, Politics
A couple months ago, I wrote of Kellie Leitch:
I remain genuinely unsure what Kellie Leitch’s goal is. I went into this blog convinced she was another hypocrite who was only using queer Canadians when it suited her racists agenda. And yet, she voted yea to Bill 279 (to treat gender identity as a protected class) despite almost every single one of her cabinet colleagues opposing it. She does appear to have a principled and reasonably long standing support for queer rights. She voted the party line on whipped bills (as does basically every MP in Canada), but when she’s allowed to vote her conscience, we see that it is rather different than many of the other Conservatives. She may be a political opportunist who can sense which way the wind blows. Or she may be trying to change the conservatives from within.
I spent weeks wondering: is Dr. Leitch just a political opportunist, or is she driven by real (albeit misguided) principles?
Sep 3, 2016 in Falsifiable, Politics
Note: A previous version of this post referred to Kellie Leitch as “Ms. Leitch” instead of “Dr. Leitch”. I don’t know how I forgot she was a doctor, but I’m deeply sorry that I did.
Kellie Leitch recently put out a survey that asked potential Conservative voters “should the Canadian Government screen potential immigrants for anti-Canadian values as part of its normal screening process for refugees and landed immigrants.” This has proved controversial, to say the least. It’s been described as a dog-whistle and has prompted other candidates to ask her to leave the race.
Dr. Leitch later clarified that she meant immigrants should be screened for: “intolerance towards other religions, cultures and sexual orientations, violent and/or misogynist behaviour and/or a lack of acceptance of our Canadian tradition of personal and economic freedoms”.
I have a lot of conflicted feelings about this. First, I’ve heard Canadian progressives wish...
Aug 16, 2016 in Falsifiable, Politics
This post is a response to a recent Slate article.
A quick summary: the coup attempt in Turkey, terrorist attacks in France, Brexit in the UK, and rise of Trump in the US are all connected and can be viewed as the four horsemen of the end of liberal democracy. As the last defenders of liberal democracy struggle with the spectre of illiberal democracy (the will of the people unadulterated by any pesky rights for minorities) they throw up roadblocks in the form of undemocratic liberalism (rights for minorities without any of that pesky voting). Defenders of liberalism need to restore the core promise of democracy – that it will lead to ever increasing wealth if we’re to keep the “fact” that no wealthy, consolidated democracy has ever fallen true.
I didn’t buy the theory. I think some of this came from me having factual disagreements with it – Chile...
