Lessons for Ontario and Canada from Forced Retirement Saving Mandates in Australia examines the options available to the Ontario government for designing its mandatory provincial pension program.  Specifically, it notes that Australia’s system of forced individual retirement saving accounts — which more closely resemble Canada’s RRSP’s — could serve as a model instead of the Canada Pension Plan.

Economic Freedom, Individual Perceptions of Life Control, and Life Satisfaction explores the positive relationship between a country’s level of economic freedom and its population’s level of life satisfaction (or happiness). It finds that living in an economically free country actually plays a greater role in one’s life satisfaction than does income, age, employment or even a country’s political system.

Amid increasing concerns about housing affordability in the Lower Mainland, New Homes and Red Tape: Residential Land-Use Regulation in BC’s Lower Mainland is the Fraser Institute’s first ever survey of Metro Vancouver homebuilders. It compares and ranks jurisdictions across the region on several categories of red tape (construction approval times, timeline uncertainty, regulatory costs and fees, rezoning prevalence and the effect council and community groups have on development) based on the experiences and opinions of industry professionals. The survey — which is part of a broader effort to understand the effects of land-use regulation on Canadian housing supply — finds that the District of North Vancouver and the City of Vancouver are the most regulated municipalities in the Lower Mainland and consequently the most difficult in which to build new housing.