mentalfloss

Angela Merkel will make a special visit to Halifax this week to highlight the work of climate scientists, a stop that underscores the German Chancellor’s focus on science and the environment in a summer when those same issues are dogging Canada’s Prime Minister.

Georg Juergens, the deputy head of mission at the German embassy in Ottawa, said the aim of the visit is to highlight the importance of science as a driver of future growth.

“We always like to include a talk with students or have an event at a university when we do visits like these, because if you talk one leader to another that’s all very fine, but you have to have an impact as well,” he said.

“Universities are our futures. Canada and Germany are both knowledge societies. We are a relatively small amount of people and we need to have an above average amount of brains.”

The Economist, a mostly right-leaning British weekly, criticized the Harper government for giving the opposition an opening by being inflexible and claimed the Prime Minister was “intolerant of criticism and dissent.”

It warned Harper the NDP under Thomas Mulcair was fast becoming “more credible.”

“Thomas Mulcair has started well, imposing party discipline, dropping leftist talk and moving towards the centre. He has called for a balanced approach to developing the tar sands, taking more note of environmental worries. He kept the party quiet during four months of student demonstrations against rises in tuition fees in Quebec — a silence that seemed to flummox the Conservative attack machine,” the editorial said.

This is one of the worst records in Canadian history and one of the worst among developed economies. Unless productivity improves, the Canadian economy will be condemned to a very low rate of growth, and in turn this will impinge upon Canadians’ incomes and the ability of governments to fund the programs the public desires.

Traditionally Canadian businesses blame the tax regime for both outcomes. The large jump from the small business tax rate to the general rate has been described as an obstacle to growing out of the small business tax ranks. And indeed, prior to the beginning of the corporate tax revolution in 2000, businesses faced a higher marginal tax rate on corporate income as they began to lose the small business preferred rate than the marginal personal income tax rate they would face if they took money out of the enterprise. But that is no longer the case. Yet we still observe a cluster of businesses right under the small business income tax threshold.

Similarly, high taxation on capital might have once explained the lack of capital expenditures in Canada but that no longer cuts it as an explanation, especially relative to the United States. Yet, it is puzzling why Canadian businesses didn’t ram machinery and equipment investment through the roof from 2003 to 2007 when they had unprecedented retained earnings..

The allegations of Elections Act violations are listed in the court order compelling Frank Hall, owner of Holinshed Research Group, to produce emails, invoices and other documents related to work he did for Del Mastro.

An invoice submitted in a small-claims-court dispute brought by Holinshed against Del Mastro purports to show that Holinshed performed voter identification work as well as get-out-the-vote calls on election day for Del Mastro’s 2008 campaign. The company, once based in Ottawa, now no longer appears operational.