Changes to the EI rules announced by the government today are not rooted in any lengthy policy rationale. But Minister Finley and and the media release spoke to the need to "strengthen work incentives." This conjures up images of unemployed workers sitting around and spurning job offers amidst growing labour and skills shortages.

I've commented on federal job cuts many times before (here, here, here and here) and in the interests of beating this particular horse good and dead (no animals were harmed in the writing of these reports), the CCPA is releasing my latest update on the matter:

The significant changes to the Employment Insurance (EI) program which are to be quickly implemented through Budget 2012 with very little consultation have not received enough critical attention.

First, a word on what is not in the budget. It is disappointing, to say the least, that the government is failing to respond to the fact that less than 40 per cent of unemployed Canadians are now qualifying for EI, well below the already low pre-recession rate. And, for all of the talk about skills shortages in Canada, it is notable that there is NO increased investment at all in EI-supported training, which would assist unemployed workers to find good jobs.

Instead, the focus is on tightening discipline over those workers who have managed to qualify for a claim.

I've written before about attempts in Canada to create more separation between university teaching, on the one hand, and university research, on the other. In 2009, I wrote this opinion piece about an attempt by five university presidents to each acquire a larger share of university research dollars. And last year, I blogged about a proposal for the Ontario government to create more separation between teaching and research within the university sector.

Asked by an Anglophone journalist what the Québec student struggle means for the ROC, this is what I had to say.

On my recent book tour to promote Thieves of Bay Street, I have journeyed to Alberta, Montreal and Ottawa. In so doing, I have gotten a taste of the Canada which Stephen Harper and his merry band of Tories are trying to forge.

The CCPA released my report: "The Big Banks' Big Secret" which provides the first public estimates of the emergency funds taken by Canadian banks. The report bases its estimates on publicly available data from CMHC, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, as well as quarterly reports from the banks themselves.

The conventional narrative about the performance of Canada's big banks during the financial crisis goes as follows: while American banks bet heavily on sub-prime real estate and had extensive shadow bank holdings, Canadian banks did not.

In the context of student protests over Quebec tuition fees, my friend Luan Ngo has just written a very informative blog post on Quebec's fiscal situation.

While I encourage readers to read his full post, I do want to use the present space to make mention of three important points he makes:

- On a per capita basis, Quebec spends more on government programs than most other Canadian provinces.

- Residents of Quebec pay more personal incomes taxes than any other province.

- Quebec's debt-to-GDP ratio is significantly higher than that any other Canadian province.

On CBC's The National last week, Rex Murphy weighed in on Quebec's student protests; the transcript can be found here, and the three-minute video here. He calls the protests "short sighted," points out that Quebec already has the lowest tuition fees in Canada, and suggests the students' actions are "crude attempts at precipitating a crisis." He says they are the "actions of a mob," are "simply wrong," and should be "condemned."

I was at a talk on dematerialization a few weeks ago, and one of the speakers told "the parable of the Prius" to illustrate Jevon's paradox that efficiency gains do not necessarily reduce energy consumption (and from a climate perspective, greenhouse gas emissions). In the case of buying a fuel-efficient Prius, one saves a lot on gas bills but may be inclined to drive more since the cost per mile has dropped. Even if mileage is constant, the proceeds could be spent on a vacation to Mexico, offsetting and perhaps then some in GHG terms, the savings out of the tailpipe. It's also possible that savings could be poured into energy efficiency improvements, and seems to me that a rising energy/carbon price can conquer the paradox.