aims

Here is what's new at AIMS, Atlantic Canada's Public Policy Think Tank

In his regular Chronicle Herald column AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley explores the reasons why the debate on health care will take on greater and greater importance in the coming years. Most people are aware that health costs are going up, but few realize that the rate of growth is about to accelerate massively. New technologies, the increased incidence of chronic and new illnesses, and the significant cost of system renewal will force giant leaps in health costs in coming years. While starving funding for education and roads can provide some measure of short-term relief, the pressure is building. The tax system alone will not be able to handle these costs and a new balance of public and private expenditures will have to be found and the debate has barely even begun. Publication: CHH, September 12, 2001

Writing in the Globe and Mail, the Honourable John Crosbie, former federal minister and current AIMS Vice Chairman for Newfoundland and Labrador, reviews the offshore agreements between Ottawa and the Atlantic Provinces. These agreements were intended to ensure that Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador were the “principal beneficiaries” of development. In Crosbie’s view Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador receive resource revenues from the federal government in one pocket, and have most of those revenues taken out of another. This is not what the Atlantic and offshore accords were intended to accomplish. Crosbie believes it is time that Ottawa lived up to its agreements.

Here is what's new at AIMS, Atlantic Canada's Public Policy Think Tank

In taking a serious look at recent proposals for new economic development spending in Atlantic Canada the National Post turned to “Retreat from Growth” as a definitive source for why this is not the way to go. “Retreat from Growth” is AIMS’ most recent book and a finalist for the Donner Book Prize for the best public policy book of 2000. In it, author Fred McMahon notes that by the late 1960s, employment and business activity in Atlantic Canada had nearly caught up to the rest of the country, after suffering years of stagnation, only to lose that ground and more after 1972 when then prime minister Pierre Trudeau lavished transfers, economic development schemes and improved unemployment insurance benefits on the region.

In the August/September edition of Atlantic Business the Honourable John Crosbie, former federal minister and current AIMS Board member, profiles two recent AIMS studies on equalization. In the first part of a serial article for upcoming issues Crosbie argues there can be no question that equalization is a generous program but he looks beyond this generosity to question its effectiveness. Looking at the continuing gaps in provincial fiscal capacity he concludes equalization has failed of its basic intent. Recognizing this failure, Crosbie says we must now look at ways to fix the problem.

In this piece, Daily News columnist Parker Barss Donham takes aim at the position of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies on equalization. Donham responds aggressively to the ideas put forward in two recent AIMS papers, papers that have prompted a debate in the national press on the merits of reform to the current equalization system. Arguing that equalization is achieving its intended goal of delivering reasonably comparable services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation Donham dismisses the idea that equalization has any relationship to economic development or the slow rate of growth in Atlantic Canada.

Here is what's new at AIMS, Atlantic Canada's Public Policy Think Tank

In a review of ACOA spending in Newfoundland published by The Telegram in St. John's AIMS President, Brian Lee Crowley, comments on the lack of a need for small specialized regional agencies to manage federal investment in needed infrastructure. Crowley believes, for example, that Atlantic Canada should receive support for its universities through Industry Canada and Human Resources Development Canada rather than through a special agency that "ghetto-izes" the region. Publication: ETSJ, August 18, 2001

The potential economic and social benefits that Atlantica offers to Atlantic Canada are highlighted in a recent article in the National Post. In exploring efforts to improve the free flow of people and goods across the Canada-US border, the National Post looks at AIMS' recent Pugwash Thinkers Lodge conference on the Atlantica concept - a cross-border region embracing Atlantic Canada, much of New England, northern New York state and Quebec's Eastern Townships. AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley is quoted in the article as saying "Open borders have signalled a renaissance in Europe's previously neglected regions. A very similar development can and will happen across Canada, and there are few places for which it can be more beneficial than Atlantic Canada." As the National Post reports, elected representatives of the people of Atlantica are very much aware of the benefits of closer ties across the border.