Week's End News Round-Up

Canada's Dutch Disease:  Fact or Fiction?  Today Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney defends Canada's growing economic reliance on energy, increasing commodity prices be damned.  If you want to see his take on the energy sector vs. manufacturing sector debate, check out Maclean's Stephen Gordon's "annotation" to Gordon's speech--you'll feel like your an economist for a day!  And you'll see evidence that Canada and America's trading relationship may be changing in the coming decade:

So what treatment does [Carney] suggest? A good summary of his recommendations is “eat your vegetables.” Firstly, Canadians should get past the notion that the path to prosperity lies in being the low-cost exporter of manufactured goods to the United States... 

Carney's answer:  Dutch disease worries are a "caricature" which would limit the positive growth of Alberta's oil sands.  Naturally, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) disagrees.

Reforming Canada's Healthcare.  The Hill Times' opinion page offers a strong argument to allow a mixed-healthcare system in Canada (i.e. allow Canadians to pay for private care).  Some interesting parts from the piece: 

If all of this bureaucratese sounds familiar, you’re right. This is the 19th major examination of the Canadian health-care system in the past 15 years. Yet, once again, the “nail” each study has continued to hammer is stuck in the paradigm that Canada’s health-care system must remain a government run monopoly.

That paradigm was starkly enunciated by Health Council of Canada member and former Vancouver General Hospital president Charles Wright who stated: “Administrators maintain waiting lists the way airlines overbook. As for urgent cases, the public system will decide when their pain requires care. The individual cannot decide rationally.”

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If so, they should take heed of a recent Ipsos Reid survey that shows 76 per cent of Canadians support a “mixed model” of health care giving them the option of spending their own money for private care.

Job Growth Pushes The Canadian Dollar Up Against the Dollar.  Canada added 30K+ jobs last month, pushing up the Canadian dollar.  But Canada's 7.3% unemployment rate hasn't changed; though, British Columbia's unemployment has gone down.  America's job-outlook:  not so great.  

The Mega-Rich America's New Successionists?  Mike Lofgren, a longtime U.S. Congressional budget committee Republican staffer, writes in The American Conservative:

If a morally acceptable American conservatism is ever to extricate itself from a pseudo-scientific inverted Marxist economic theory, it must grasp that order, tradition, and and stability are not coterminous with an uncritical worship of the Almightly Dollar, nor with obesisance to the demands of the wealthy.  Conservatives need to think about the world they want:  do they really desire a social Darwinist dystopia?

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Now, almost two decades later, the super-rich have achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the very society they rule over. They have seceded from America.

Agree or not, Lofgren's new book, The Party Is Over:  How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted is worth checking out, as is the rest of his article Revolt of the Rich.

Canada Gets Out of Iran.   Canada today severed diplomatic ties with Iran, closing up their embassy and giving Iranian diplomats 5 days to get out.

Ontario Gets a Minority Liberal Government (Again).  After two by-elections in Ontario, the Conservatives lost a seat they held for 22 years, and the NDP won a seat the Liberals held since 2001.  The result?  The Liberals fell one-seat short (again) of a majority government.  As for the Conservatives' shutout, Progressive Conservative Ontario leader Tim Hudak is keeping his job.  Interesting note:  the byelection was engineered by the Liberals to win a majority.