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Trudeau urged to boost Canada’s post-COVID economy by investing in nature – Cowichan Valley Citizen

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By Carl Meyer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter. National Observer

Federal Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson says the government remains “fully committed” to preserving a quarter of natural land and ocean habitat by 2025, following a call from hundreds of groups to ensure conservation is at the heart of any post-pandemic recovery.

In an open letter published July 13 to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, 235 environmental organizations, including about 50 B.C.-based groups, said they “stand ready to provide staff, research and resource support” to help Canada devise a strategy to achieve its biodiversity and climate targets.

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The letter argues that government investments in forests, wetlands, grasslands, oceans, lakes and rivers can create jobs and help boost Canada’s economic recovery as it works to build capacity following the initial wave of COVID-19.

“Over the next six to 18 months, we urge the government to support investments in a variety of economic recovery solutions that support climate and biodiversity outcomes,” reads the letter, signed by Nature Canada, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, the David Suzuki Foundation and others.

“Over the longer term, expert advice should be sought by relevant departments on how to structure programs and investments in order to achieve the transformative relationship between society and nature that is needed to ensure a healthy and sustainable future for Canadians.”

Canada set a target to conserve at least 17 per cent of land and freshwater, and 10 per cent of marine areas, by this year, as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity. According to federal government figures, by the end of 2019 it had reached this goal for marine areas, but not for land and freshwater.

Those figures show that Canada conserved 13.8 per cent of its marine territory, and 12.1 per cent of land and freshwater by the end of 2019. The proportion of conserved land and water varies widely across the country, with British Columbia conserving the most, at 19.5 per cent.

Last year, dozens of scientists warned the Trudeau government it was not on pace to meet its conservation goals. During the federal election campaign, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to increase the amount of land, freshwater and marine areas conserved to 25 per cent by 2025.

The goals under the convention say the original target should be achieved “by 2020,” but Trudeau said during the campaign that the government was “on track” to its 17 per cent goal “by the end of next year.”

In July, Canada also joined the Global Ocean Alliance, which has as its goal the protection of 30 per cent of the oceans by 2030. Meanwhile, Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan said Canada will work toward a new biodiversity target under the Convention on Biological Diversity, next year in 2021.

Harry Crosby, president of North Vancouver-based BC Nature, a federation of more than 50 naturalist clubs across the province, said in an interview that he was “encouraged by the promises and the concern which the federal government is showing” on the issue of biodiversity and land protection, but wanted to see more details.

“Our concern is that there needs to be a coherent policy developed,” Crosby said. “It’s great to talk about spending money on biodiversity, but our concern is looking at the difference between the general policy statements and the practice, what’s actually happening on the ground.”

Wilkinson’s press secretary Moira Kelly said the government’s priority remains COVID-19, but “climate change and biodiversity loss still present a threat to our economic and physical well-being.”

“We remain fully committed to preserving 25 per cent of Canada’s land and oceans by 2025 and ensuring that nature-based climate solutions are embedded in our plans to fight climate change,” Kelly said.

“We are always open to hearing innovative and green ways to grow our economy while protecting the environment, and will consider these recommendations with interest.”

The letter points out that biodiversity loss is accelerating worldwide, and Canada has a responsibility, as a country with a large land mass containing many ecosystems, “for the welfare of planetary diversity.”

Out of 80,000 species in Canada, there is only enough information to assess the health of 30,000 — of which a fifth are imperiled, they said.

Natural landscapes are key to storing up to 20 per cent of carbon pollution over the next 30 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a fact that is key to avoiding the more severe effects of the climate crisis.

In Canada, human disruption is leading to habitat loss, which is putting its Paris climate target at risk, the letter said.

In addition to BC Nature, officially the Federation of British Columbia Naturalists, there are 47 other B.C.-based organizations that have put their names to the letter, including West Coast Environmental Law, Wildsight and the Great Blue Heron Nature Reserve Society.

Carl Meyer / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer

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Economy

Bobby Kennedy And The Ownership Economy – Forbes

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In recent decades, populist presidential campaigns have arisen from the left (Bernie Sanders) and the right (Pat Buchanan). Both of these campaigns had limited appeal across the political spectrum or even attempted to engage Americans of diverse political views.

Over the past year in his independent presidential campaign, Bobby Kennedy Jr. has sought to bring together members of both major political parties, with a form of economic populism that expands ownership opportunities. In contrast to Sanders, Kennedy’s goal is not to grow the welfare state or state control over the economy. His economic populism is free-market oriented, aimed at building a broader property-owning middle class. It is aimed at widening the number of worker-owners with a stake in the market system, through their ownership of homes, businesses, employee stock and profit sharing, and other assets.

Whether Kennedy’s economic strategies can achieve the goals of ownership and the middle class he has set, remains to be determined. But his “ownership economy” is one that should be discussed and debated. Currently, it is largely ignored by the legacy media—or subsumed by the parade of articles speculating about of how many votes he will “take away” from President Biden or President Trump.

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I wrote about Kennedy’s heterodox jobs program late last summer. In the eight months since, he has sharpened his jobs agenda, and connected it to a broader platform of worker ownership. It is time to revisit the campaign’s economic themes, briefly noting three of the subjects Kennedy often speaks about in 2024: the abandonment of vast sections of the blue collar economy, low wage workforces, and the marginalization of small businesses.

Abandonment Of Blue Collar Economy

“Compensate the losers” is the way that political scientist Ruy Teixeira characterizes the Democratic Party approach to the blue collar economy since the 1990s. According to this approach, workers whose jobs are impacted by environmental policies (oil and gas workers) or trade polices (heavy manufacturing workers) will be retrained for jobs in the green economy or in advanced manufacturing or even as white collar fields like information technology (the oil worker as coder). Since the 1990s a vast network of dislocated worker programs and rapid-response programs have arisen and are prominent under the Biden administration.

As might be expected, retraining hasn’t proved so easy in practice. One example: here in Northern California, the Marathon Oil
MRO
refinery closed in October 2020, laying off 345 workers. The federal and state government immediately came in with the union offering a range of retraining and job placement services. A study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that even a year after closure, a quarter of the workers were still unemployed. Those that were employed earned a median of $12 less than their previous jobs. Other studies similarly have identified the gap between theories of skills transference and re-employment and the realities for most blue collar workers—including the realties of alternative energy jobs today that usually pay considerably less than oil and gas jobs.

Each refinery closure or plant closure has its own business dynamics, and in many cases, like the Marathon Oil refinery, the facility will not be able to avoid closing. Re-employment cannot be avoided. Kennedy has spoken of improving the re-training and re-employment process for laid off workers, implementing best practices in retraining with the participation of unions and worker organizations.

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Manufacturing jobs as a share of total jobs have been in decline for the past four decades, and even as he urges trade policies for reshoring jobs, Kennedy recognizes that manufacturing going forward will be a limited part of the blue collar economy. The blue collar jobs of the future will increasingly be in the trades and services. Kennedy has enlisted “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe to highlight the importance of the trades, and identify policies that can improve conditions and wages for the trades. Among these policies: a greater share of the higher education federal budget redirected from colleges into training in the trades, and support for the workers who seek to enter and remain in the trades.

Improving the economic position of blue collar workers also means expanding employee stock ownership and profit sharing. While worker cooperatives have failed to gain traction in America, forms of employee stock ownership and profit sharing are being implemented in companies with significant blue collar workforces, such as Procter & Gamble
PG
, Southwest Airlines
LUV
and Chobani. Kennedy poses the challenge: Let’s have workers-as-owners more fully share in the economic success of their employers.

Inflation Impact On Low Wage Workers

In nearly all of his talks on the economy, Kennedy addresses the issue of affordability, and how inflation has undercut wages of America’s lower wage workforces. He posts regularly on the increased cost of food, transportation, and housing, the financial strains on working class and middle class families, the number of workers who live paycheck to paycheck. When the March national jobs report was issued earlier this month, he noted the slowdown in year-over wage growth (at 4.1% the lowest year-over increase since 2021) and the increase in part-time jobs.

Kennedy recognizes that many of the low wage workforces are in such sectors as long-term care, retail, and hospitality, in which profit margins for employers are tight, and employers have limited flexibility individually to raise wages. Kennedy continues his calls for a higher minimum wage, reducing health care costs, strengthening protections and benefits for workers in the gig economy. He urges a reconsideration of trade and tax policies and the need for immigration policies that secure the nation’s borders. Kennedy’s strict border policies reflect both the “humanitarian crisis” he sees with the drug cartels and migrants, as well as the impact of unchecked immigration on the wages of low wage service and production workers.

Home ownership has a special place in Kennedy’s ownership economy, as part of bringing more workers into the middle class, and he has stepped up his advocacy on home ownership. Across society, widespread home ownership stabilizes communities, promotes civic involvement, serves as a hedge against social disorders.

Small And Independent Businesses

During the pandemic, Kennedy warned that economic lockdowns were devastating the small business economy. Today, in a regular series of podcasts on small business, he highlights the ongoing small business struggles. Just this past week, the National Federation of Independent Business, the nation’s largest small business organization, released a survey showing small business optimism is at its lowest level since 2012.

As with home ownership, Kennedy characterizes widespread small business ownership in terms of the social values as well as the values to the individual owners. Small business drives enterprise and service to others, in providing goods and services that customers value and will pay for. It drives job creation, including for individuals who do not fit easily into larger employment venues. A Kennedy Administration will prioritize rebuilding the small business economy, particularly in rural and inner city communities.

Kennedy’s small business agenda goes beyond a laundry list of small business grant and loan programs. As with the wage question, Kennedy seeks to tie a vibrant small business economy to underlying trade and tax policies. He also seeks to tie this economy to reforms in federal government procurement policies, which he describes as ineffectual.

Economic Challenges And Alternatives

The middle class society and economy of the 1950s that Kennedy grew up in and is central to his worldview was the product of unique economic forces and America’s dominant position in the post-World War II period. There is no way to get back to it, and recreating it will be more difficult than in the past, in the now global economy, and with rapidly advancing technologies.

But a broad middle class of worker-owners, is the right goal, and private sector ownership the right approach. People may find Kennedy’s strategies insufficiently detailed or unrealistic or even counterproductive. But Kennedy raises thoughtful challenges and alternatives to the economic platforms of the two main parties—just as he is raising serious challenges on a range of other issues.

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Economy

Biden's Hot Economy Stokes Currency Fears for the Rest of World – Bloomberg

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As Joe Biden this week hailed America’s booming economy as the strongest in the world during a reelection campaign tour of battleground-state Pennsylvania, global finance chiefs convening in Washington had a different message: cool it.

The push-back from central bank governors and finance ministers gathering for the International Monetary Fund-World Bank spring meetings highlight how the sting from a surging US economy — manifested through high interest rates and a strong dollar — is ricocheting around the world by forcing other currencies lower and complicating plans to bring down borrowing costs.

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Opinion: Higher capital gains taxes won't work as claimed, but will harm the economy – The Globe and Mail

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Open this photo in gallery:

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland hold the 2024-25 budget, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on April 16.Patrick Doyle/Reuters

Alex Whalen and Jake Fuss are analysts at the Fraser Institute.

Amid a federal budget riddled with red ink and tax hikes, the Trudeau government has increased capital gains taxes. The move will be disastrous for Canada’s growth prospects and its already-lagging investment climate, and to make matters worse, research suggests it won’t work as planned.

Currently, individuals and businesses who sell a capital asset in Canada incur capital gains taxes at a 50-per-cent inclusion rate, which means that 50 per cent of the gain in the asset’s value is subject to taxation at the individual or business’s marginal tax rate. The Trudeau government is raising this inclusion rate to 66.6 per cent for all businesses, trusts and individuals with capital gains over $250,000.

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The problems with hiking capital gains taxes are numerous.

First, capital gains are taxed on a “realization” basis, which means the investor does not incur capital gains taxes until the asset is sold. According to empirical evidence, this creates a “lock-in” effect where investors have an incentive to keep their capital invested in a particular asset when they might otherwise sell.

For example, investors may delay selling capital assets because they anticipate a change in government and a reversal back to the previous inclusion rate. This means the Trudeau government is likely overestimating the potential revenue gains from its capital gains tax hike, given that individual investors will adjust the timing of their asset sales in response to the tax hike.

Second, the lock-in effect creates a drag on economic growth as it incentivizes investors to hold off selling their assets when they otherwise might, preventing capital from being deployed to its most productive use and therefore reducing growth.

Budget’s capital gains tax changes divide the small business community

And Canada’s growth prospects and investment climate have both been in decline. Canada currently faces the lowest growth prospects among all OECD countries in terms of GDP per person. Further, between 2014 and 2021, business investment (adjusted for inflation) in Canada declined by $43.7-billion. Hiking taxes on capital will make both pressing issues worse.

Contrary to the government’s framing – that this move only affects the wealthy – lagging business investment and slow growth affect all Canadians through lower incomes and living standards. Capital taxes are among the most economically damaging forms of taxation precisely because they reduce the incentive to innovate and invest. And while taxes on capital gains do raise revenue, the economic costs exceed the amount of tax collected.

Previous governments in Canada understood these facts. In the 2000 federal budget, then-finance minister Paul Martin said a “key factor contributing to the difficulty of raising capital by new startups is the fact that individuals who sell existing investments and reinvest in others must pay tax on any realized capital gains,” an explicit acknowledgment of the lock-in effect and costs of capital gains taxes. Further, that Liberal government reduced the capital gains inclusion rate, acknowledging the importance of a strong investment climate.

At a time when Canada badly needs to improve the incentives to invest, the Trudeau government’s 2024 budget has introduced a damaging tax hike. In delivering the budget, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said “Canada, a growing country, needs to make investments in our country and in Canadians right now.” Individuals and businesses across the country likely agree on the importance of investment. Hiking capital gains taxes will achieve the exact opposite effect.

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