Glasstry news

Ontario raised the minimum hourly wage to $14 in January 2018, with a raise to $15 scheduled for January 2019.  David Olive in the Toronto Star notes that most economic forecasters predicted the sky would fall . In one of the more embarrassing incidents in recent Canadian economic history, the 2017 consensus of economic forecasters was that Ontario would suffer major job loss from the $14 Ontario minimum wage that went into effect Jan. 1, 2018. To cite only a handful of the alarmists, the Bank of Canada, TD Bank, National Bank Financial and the Financial Accountability Office (FAO), the Ontario government watchdog, all predicted that Ontario would lose between 50,000 and 140,000 jobs because of the new $14 minimum wage. As it happens, though, Ontario has gained so many jobs since Jan. 1 that by August, the Ontario jobless rate had dropped to an 18-year low, of 5.4 per cent, second-lowest in the country after B.C. But Ontario elected a Conservative government this summer and it can...

Joe Martin and Christopher Kobrak have recently published From Wall Street to Bay Street , a comparative history of banking systems in Canada and the United States.  Starting from the observation that Canadian banks suffered nothing like the damage that hit American banks in the 2008 financial crisis, they offer a general reader's history of the banks back to the 18th century.  They like what they see in Canada The authors trace the roots of each country�s financial systems back to Alexander Hamilton and insightfully argue that while Canada has preserved a Hamiltonian financial tradition, the United States has favoured the populist Jacksonian tradition since the 1830s. The sporadic and inconsistent fashion in which the American system have changed over time is at odds with the evolutionary path taken by the Canadian system. Think on that next time you consider the whopping fees and enormous profits of whichever megabank has you in his clutches. Public Affairs Publishing in the...