This Alert provides Canadians with information necessary to judge government performance in taxing, spending, and managing financial resources. Specifically, the Fiscal Performance Index (FPI) measures the performance of the federal and provincial governments on a variety of measures of government spending, tax rates and revenues, and debts and deficits from 2001/02 to 2005/06.

The Social Insurance Number (SIN) has become an integral part of many transactions in Canada, whether with the federal government for programs like the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) or Employment Insurance (EI), or with provincial governments for programs such as welfare, or with the private sector, which uses SINs for identification. The SIN now underpins some $117.9 billion in government spending.

The Independent Summary for Policymakers is a detailed and thorough overview of the state of climate change science as laid out in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report. This independent summary has been reviewed by more than 50 scientists around the world and their views on its balance and reliability are tabulated for readers.