Policy Papers

The Canada Summer Jobs Program is the federal government’s primary initiative for subsidizing work for the student-age population during off months at educational institutions. Recently, the program has come under scrutiny for Ottawa’s decision to impose a values test on recipient organizations, bringing the program unprecedented public attention. This paper reviews the national jobs [...]

Missing in Action: School Storm Days, Student Absenteeism and the Workplace by Dr. Paul Bennett makes several recommendations to better serve the education and parents of school-age children such as adapting instructional time as a protected a provincial education priority, along with ensuring students’ safety during severe winter weather. No other region of Canada, [...]

As Canadians, we earn our keep by trading. Millions of Canadian jobs contribute to our international trade, and those jobs, in turn, rely on Canadian businesses having secure access to many foreign markets. Canadians have an even longer history of getting secure access to domestic markets Canadians know a strong and principled commitment to [...]

Student performance can be highly varied in school systems and differences among children and teens from different classes or groups, marked by income, ethnic, or racial disparities, are commonly termed the ‘achievement gap.’ While the school board and schools have introduced programs to improve student performance, there are still hurdles to overcome. (Click on [...]

Craft brewing is a burgeoning industry in Atlantic Canada, yet while the number of small breweries has expanded in the last decade, Atlantic Canadian craft brewers claim that their businesses are hampered by bad government policies. AIMS' latest study Opening the Taps: Liberating craft brewers to grow a new industry by Joseph Quesnel, Patrick Webber and [...]

Young residents of all four Atlantic provinces have made clear for decades that the best economic opportunities lie outside their home province. For every year since 1985-1986, more young people in their early 20s moved out of each Atlantic province than moved into it from elsewhere in Canada. Over the past two decades, the [...]

Across Canada, by far the most common subject of possible reform is the voting system, specifically changes to the so-called "electoral formula." The two main alternatives that have been advanced in Canada are proportional representation and ranked voting. These correspond to two separate complaints about the plurality voting system, the incumbent model at the federal level [...]

Platform for New Brunswick: Public Policies for Growth and Prosperity raises discussion of public policy reform. Author Marco Navarro-Génie, President of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, makes the case for more disciplined fiscal stewardship, better use of market mechanisms in health care, developing New Brunswick’s energy resources, and evidence-based education policy. New Brunswick will [...]

An Untapped Potential for Educational Diversity by Paige MacPherson is the latest study published by AIMS, demonstrating how a review of research on charter schools and the provincial education systems in Eastern Canada shows that such schools offer great potential to widen educational options to students of all income levels, and may be exceptionally valuable [...]

  Canada Should Fix Equalization and Other Regional Subsidies Now, the latest study by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, demonstrates how equalization is unfair, diminishes productivity, holds back economic development, and lacks accountability and transparency. Originally designed to transfer resources to provide for a comparable [...]