As I pointed out in Part 1, the debate about the impact of having children on well-being or life-satisfaction is ongoing in our cultural conversation. This is surely due to the fact that for many, especially among the educated upper class, becoming a parent is now an option rather than a taken for granted life-stage, and a highly deliberate and reflexive decision. Like many of my friends who benefited from the democratization of higher education, my partner and I came in relatively late in the game of making and raising children. She was 34 and I was 36 when we had our first one. My perspective on parenthood is different from my younger cousin who lives in the countryside and who had her kids more than 10 years before me. A significant number of adults decide for a variety of reasons to be childless, and some on both sides of the existential fence enjoy discussing the respective value of both lifestyles.… Continue reading
The honeymoon is over. Three months more or less to the day after having been voted into power in Quebec City with a shiny new majority, Philippe Couillard’s government finds itself embroiled in its first, honest-to-god political scandal. It seems that Yves Bolduc, a physician, who is now in Cabinet as the Minister of Education, but who was Minister of Health under Jean Charest, racked up $215 000 worth of bonuses as a practicing physician while he was in opposition. The opposition, and a good part of the chattering classes, are now clamoring for his head. No less a figure than Claude Castonguay, the father of Quebec’s system of public health insurance, wrote an open letter to Philippe Couillard calling upon the Premier to sack his Minister.
Some context: somewhere close to 30% of Quebeckers do not have a GP. In order to attempt to lower that number, the Charest government (with Bolduc as Minister of Health) instituted an incentive scheme to get general practitioners and family physicians to take on more patients.… Continue reading
Kevin Milligan and I had a little back and forth a couple weeks ago about the use of privately owned corporations by the wealthy to reduce their tax liabilities (in the comments here). This provoked a few thoughts, which I was going to write up. I was inspired to move them back to the front burner today, while reading Andrew Coyne’s provocatively titled column, “If we really want to soak the rich, we should abolish the corporate income tax.” He wrote this, it would appear, after having read the recent Mowat Centre working paper, Corporate Tax Reform, by Robin Boadway and Jean-François Tremblay.
First a bit of housecleaning. Not only is the headline misleading, but Coyne mucks things up when stating their central thesis:
… Continue readingIf you want to soak the rich, in other words, abolish the corporate income tax — and with it the tax break on dividends and capital gains.
I just finished reading Daniel Carpenter’s book, Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA. I won’t say that it was fascinating all the way through, but for a 700 page book about the history of the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, it was pretty good. I picked it up because, over the space of about 3 months last fall, two people recommended it to me. I thought to myself, what are the chances that two people would independently come up to me and say “you must to read this 700 page book about the FDA” unless it was a really amazing book?
The reason they were recommending it to me was that I’ve been interested in administrative discretion and the way that it is dealt with by public servants (see here). This is part of a more general interest that I’ve developed in the executive branch of government, along with the view that the executive is seriously undertheorized in normative political philosophy.… Continue reading
A new gallup poll finds that Canada is in the top ten countries in the world, when it comes to how much “freedom” its citizens enjoy (details here).
The question was, “In this country, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what to do with your life?” The number one country in the world was New Zealand, where 94% reported themselves satisfied. Canada was tied for 9th place with Finland, Denmark and Iceland, with 91% reporting themselves satisfied. Sweden, the other usual nordic suspect, was in second place with 93% satisfaction. Must have something to do with the fact that we enjoy more real freedom, as opposed to liberty.
Now I suppose most people saw this coming, but the United States did quite poorly, in 36th place, with only 79% of respondents declaring themselves satisfied. On the other hand, the trend shows a fairly steep decline since 2008, so I suspect a lot of this is just anti-Obama grousing.… Continue reading
Guest post by Lisa Kerr
We are now familiar with the major criticisms of federal Conservative crime policies, especially their introduction of mandatory minimum sentences. Adrienne Smith, a health and drug policy lawyer with Pivot Legal Society, aptly summarized the problem with mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes as follows: “they are expensive and they don’t work.” Yet apart from the cost and the absence of deterrent effects, there is an additional problem that is worth drawing attention to. The removal of discretion from sentencing judges causes significant growth in female rates of incarceration.
Indeed, in the notorious American imprisonment binge of the last four decades, women have been the fastest growing inmate population. The number of imprisoned women rose from 15,118 to 112,797 between 1980 and 2010. If we include local jails in that figure, more than 205,000 American women are now incarcerated. The female rate of incarceration increased at nearly 1.5 times the rate of men (646% versus 419%).… Continue reading
Par auteur invité Martin Papillon
Ça y est, c’est fait. La Cour suprême a reconnu pour la première fois à une nation autochtone un titre ancestral sur ses terres traditionnelles. La nation Tsilhqot’in est donc en quelque sorte propriétaire de plus de 2000 km2 dans le centre de la Colombie-Britannique. Elle pourra ainsi gérer ces terres à sa guise et, surtout, en bénéficier de manière exclusive.
Cette décision de la Cour suprême a fait couler beaucoup d’encre. Plusieurs commentateurs parlent de révolution, d’autres d’une décision aux conséquences dramatiques pour l’économie du pays. Plusieurs s’interrogent en particulier sur l’impact de cette décision sur les projets d’oléoducs, en pensant au controversé projet Northern Gateway, qui vient tout juste de recevoir l’approbation du gouvernement fédéral. Qu’en est-il au juste? Cette décision change-t-elle radicalement le rapport de force entre les peuples autochtones, l’État canadien et les principaux acteurs de l’économie extractive?
Il faut d’abord préciser que cette décision est loin d’être une surprise.… Continue reading
The New York Times ran a piece in the Saturday edition by psychology prof Eli J. Finkel on the “trauma of parenthood.” He stresses that postpartum depression and the drop in well-being are not only a hormone-induced phenomenon. “The circumstances parents face,” he writes, “are often demonstrably miserable.” Perhaps insisting on purely biological changes helps us cope better with postpartum ordeals, but life-conditions and other environmental factors also play a large role in what is considered the poorer quality of life of parents. We all know how hard it can be for the new mothers, but he also points out “that men on average experienced significant increases in depressive symptomatology across the first five years of fatherhood (if and only if they lived with their child).”
The “trauma” of parenting? “Bleak” and “miserable” circumstances? As a dear friend—a working mother of two—replied when I emailed her the piece: “Dude, really? Read the paper.… Continue reading
John Kenneth Galbraith famously wrote that “the modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” I must admit to having shared this suspicion myself on more than a few occasions. I do, however, try to resist this claim, partly because for liberals it seems too self-congratulatory by half, and partly because many conservatives seem quite earnest in their rejection of it.
There are, of course, some exceptions to this, Ayn Rand being the most notable. Indeed, part of the reason that liberals love Rand – or love to pick out Rand as a focus of opprobrium – is that she divides things up in a way that they find quite congenial. In her view, the left believes in altruism and morality, while the right rejects the idea that anyone is obliged to care about the well-being of anyone else.… Continue reading
One of the great fringe benefits of my job is that I often get invited to some pretty great cities for work. I’ve just returned to Montreal from a week in Paris. I love Paris. What I love most about Paris are its neighborhoods. Walk a few kilometers outside the tourist center, and you will find fantastic inner city areas that each have their distinctive character and identity. For a long time, I used to hang out in the 14th arrondissement (intra muros Paris, the Paris that lies inside its internal ring road, le Périphérique is divided up into 20 boroughs). These days, I am more likely to try to find a place in the 20th, which is one of Paris’ most riotously multicultural neighborhoods. On this recent trip, I watched Chile win a World Cup match in a Chilean bar, watched Brazil triumph in a Brazilian restaurant, and don’t even get me started about what happened when Algeria beat South Korea!… Continue reading