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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • As someone who sees MS Word forms regularly force Canadians to use Month/Day/Year formats which were never native to Canada and don’t meet the ISO standard either, I am inferring the impetus transition.

    But truly, I old enough to recall many standards being harmonized in the early 90s in the wake of the North American free trade agreement.

    Whether or not a digital archive document demonstrates that Canada Post intentionally harmonized to match the US is TBC.

    But it is a verifiable fact that the two-letter standard for provinces and territories has not been commonly established in all federal regulations or data standards or in provincial and territorial data systems standards.

    That is to say, it has not been formally adopted as by Canada or as the ‘Canadian data standard.’














  • Here’s the key issue and principle buried deep at the bottom of the article.

    She said a main area of discussion at the confab is how globally-minded digital companies had “really revolutionized our industries for a lot of good reasons” and added: “No one is saying to get Facebook or Google out of Canada — Canadians love and appreciate these services.”

    Tait said Canadian broadcasters and services were required to pay taxes and services and invest in Canadian content, meaning companies as powerful as Alphabet and Meta would simply be paying into a existing system. “We all have requirements regarding local news so that there is a provision in a country of only 40 million to support our own domestic industry,” she said. “We would ask Facebook to be held responsible in the way we treat our own companies.”


  • Actually, the independence of central banks, or in other words the isolation of monetary policy from fiscal and interventions to counteract market failures, is not a settled or proven essential for developed economies.

    A basic knowledge of dynamic macroeconomic theory and evidence shows that some level of coordination of monetary and fiscal policy is essential to avoid bad corner outcomes. That means coordination between the finance/treasury minister and the central bank.

    Most of the time, independent monetary policy is fine to contain inflationary pressures, especially when most of them are externally driven in an open economy like Canada’s. But not always. In those cases, when fiscal and monetary policy move in opposite directions, the trajectory will be poor.


  • One of the biggest questions is whether she’s willing, as finance minister, to take on the Bank of Canada.

    Monetary policy isn’t the only macroeconomic tool, and it’s one that should be coordinated with fiscal and other measures.

    In this case, the inflation fighting interest hikes can be argued to be having a ‘perverse effect’ of keeping the housing stock tight without cooling demand while at the same time being completely ineffectual for the other major inflationary drivers of food and fuel.

    Food inflation needs antitrust action, while fuel is a long term necessary adjustment to move the market away from fossil fuels. Interest rate hikes have nothing positive to contribute to those concerns.

    The Bank of Canada isn’t constitutionally independent no matter how much certain previous governors have tried to make that case. It only has responsibility for one macroeconomic tool, and isn’t democratically elected, rather appointed by the executive.

    The current governor of the Bank sounds increasingly like John Crown did in the early to mid 1990s when he put Canada into a deeper and deeper recession/depression because he placed inflation-fighting above all, and used the bank. He claimed however that no government should tell him how to manage monetary policy, and made speeches about the need for a constitutionally independent governor. Then, it took the electoral near eradication of the Progressive Conservative Party at the federal level plus the eventual exasperation of Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien to push Crow out.