admined

100% agree. But for the vast (and growing) proportion of Canadians who are already good and done with school (not to mention the CBC), there are helpful online resources available. And that's besides the endless free raw government and financial data out there waiting to be parsed and interpreted.

I used to teach (non-finance subjects) in high school. But every year I would try to take just an hour or so to talk about avoiding and managing debt, budgeting, cost-benefit analysis, and the basics of buy-and-hold investments. It really isn't hard. I learned those things as a kid from my parents and other responsible adults in my life. But a lot of kids don't.

Well I guess fighting that was supposed to be the job of the public school system and the media (i.e., CBC and TVO). But that really doesn't seem to be a big focus now (Translation: those institutions are, broadly speaking, far too consumed by ideology to worry about little things like financial literacy). New platforms for independent journalism (like Paul Wells, The Bureau, The Audit, and others) can certainly help.

It's interesting that the OAG website explicitly encourages the public to submit petitions concerning environmental issues, - to be forwarded to the appropriate ministers - but not on other topics. I had to dig pretty deep even to find mention of protocols for internal whistleblowers.

This article describes the good work that the Auditor General has done (including busting open the ArriveCAN scandal). But the article also points out the mega-tonnes of waste and scandal that are being missed. Who decides what the AG examines? Are those decisions political?

I don't believe that corruption is a result of poverty. It's much more the result of bad character. So I don't think paying people more will lead to a more honest civil service. Of course, that doesn't mean I feel they should be paid less either.

Well this particular issue had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with corruption. Even a mediocre - but loyal - civil servant will know that public funds aren't meant to be distributed freely among friends.

I strongly suspect that data and objective analysis have all that much to do with government decisions. As this article argues (based on official Canadian severe weather event data), complex systems are notoriously difficult to fully understand and government policies are unlikely to get it right.

According to this report, ArriveCan wasted millions of dollars of taxpayers' money on an overpriced and useless product because of “decades of underfunding”. So I guess the secret of fighting corruption and waste is to throw away so much money that no one will even want to steal it. Gotcha.

I think car theft is definitely a very big deal. Besides multiple neighbors having their cars stolen off their driveways over the past couple of months, watching my auto insurance rates rising year after year isn't fun. I guess setting mandatory sentencing limits can't hurt. But the problem probably won't come under control until the business model is disrupted, which might involve technology as much as policy.

While no one was looking, it seems that Loblaw Companies Ltd's for-profit Maple has grown into a major medical services provider. Is this the beginning of the end for public healthcare in Canada?

We now all know how Global Affairs Canada had enjoyed using our tax dollars to support Hamas. But who's keeping an eye on where else they're spending our money? It looks like they've been throwing billions into disease prevention that isn't preventing diseases.

What's really annoying is the way Chow described her plan to protect tenants from her property tax hike: "An excuse" Like the only reason she could imagine landlords ever raising rents was as an plan to get super-rich by sucking the last pennies from their poor tenants. I'm not a landlord myself, but I know how stretched many of them are and how easy it is to fall into losing money month after month. The mayor's attitude is insulting.

Why should professors feel any pressure to hold back when the federal government has been actively funding UNRWA for many years, including a quarter of a billion dollars since 2016 - all while claiming to be fully aware of how the money was spent. It's true, of course, that even if the government had been consistently opposed to funding terror there would still be academics - and academic institutions - choosing the wrong side. But at least they couldn't claim to represent the establishment view.

The delicious thing is that the government itself (back in 2021) claimed to have already spent "more than $100B" in "clean growth" And what did all that spending get us? I just happened to be researching that today. Here's the most recent data from the government's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program: ...In other words, $100B (and whatever else they've spent since 2021) bought us MORE emissions!