Printer-friendly version

In the United States, Mandatory Country-of-Origin Labeling (MCOOL) was brought into force in 2008. Because of the bill, American retailers must inform consumers about the country of origin of various classes of meat products including muscle cuts of beef, pork, and lamb, as well as chicken, fish products, and other perishable food items.

Printer-friendly version

Fraser Forum is a monthly review of public policy in Canada, with articles covering taxation, education, health care policy, and a wide range of other topics. Forum writers are economists, Institute research analysts, and selected authors, including those from other public policy think tanks.

Printer-friendly version

The problem
In 1976, the Alberta government told an Edmonton farmer his private land was to be turned into a park and offered him a pittance for compensation; it was only in court years later that the province was forced to admit it actually wanted his land for a highway—which would have triggered much higher compensation. In Vancouver in 2000, the City told the Canadian Pacific Railway that CPR land was henceforth to be a public space—and that no compensation would ever be paid; six years later, the Supreme Court of Canada endorsed the de facto confiscation.

Printer-friendly version

The Report Card on Secondary Schools in British Columbia and Yukon collects a variety of relevant, objective indicators of school performance into one easily accessible, public document so that all interested parties—parents, school administrators, teachers, students, and taxpayers—can analyze and compare the performance of individual schools.

Printer-friendly version

The Canadian tax system is complex and there is no single number that can give us a complete idea of who pays how much tax. That said, the Fraser Institute annually calculates the most comprehensive and easily understood indicator of the overall tax bill of the average Canadian family: Tax Freedom Day. This Alert examines what has happened to the tax bill of the average Canadian family over the past 50 years. To do this, we have constructed an index of the tax bill, the Canadian Consumer Tax Index, for the period 1961 to 2011.

Printer-friendly version

This paper compares the economic performance of Canada's health insurance system against the health insurance systems of 27 other countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). According to the most recent internationally comparable data from 2009, Canada had the sixth most expensive health care system (defined by total health spending as a percentage of GDP) among OECD countries without adjusting for differences in the population age distributions between countries. Despite being ranked as the sixth most expensive health insurance system among OECD countries in 2009, Canada ranked below the majority of the other 27 OECD countries in almost every indicator of medical resource availability and the output of medical services for which comparable data were available.

Printer-friendly version

A Sensible Strategy for Renewable Electrical Energy in North America is the fourth in a series published by the Fraser Institute on developing a continental energy strategy. It analyzes the economics of technologies used to generate electricity, technical issues, and, using Ontario’s Feed-in-tariff (FIT) program as a case study, some of the broader effects that renewable energy policies are likely to have on the North American economy.