In the December edition of Policy Options magazine, the cover story was the future of Atlantic Canada. Editor William Watson interviewed AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley, as well as APEC President Elizabeth Beale and MUN economist Wade Locke on their policy prescriptions for the region.
ACCORDING to the HRM's new mayor, Peter Kelly, using existing rail lines to create a light rail transit system is the way of the future. Even though ridership today would be extremely low, he argues that now is the time to build. As people realize the joys of light rail transit, in his view, they will progressively abandon their cars. A line to Bedford will, in a few years' time, be a godsend, as the traffic on the Bedford Highway, for example, becomes even more unbearable. If the mayor's assumptions about light rail were correct, the picture he paints of the future of urban transit would be an attractive one. But, alas, he has his facts quite wrong, and his vision of an urban transit idyll is, in fact, a costly and inefficient nightmare. Publication: CHH, December 20, 2000
At a speech on his first foreign foray since the election, Mr. Chretien made not one, not two, but three blunders, according to AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley. The Prime Minister damaged Canada's interests, risked harming our relations with our biggest trading partner and ally, and displayed a stunning ignorance of current American politics.
Here is a brief overview of just some of AIMS' activities and publications early December 2000
AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley questions the quality of the health care debate during the federal election campaign. At a time when all the indicators show us a medicare system with unsustainable patterns of spending growth, and new trends are about to hit that will force up spending again, the federal party leaders are still insisting on focussing the debate on side issues like whether people are queue jumping or where party leaders have got their health care. Publication: CHH, November 22, 2000
Premier John Hamm created a stir in the provincial legislature recently when he said that the welfare system should never make people better off than people who are working. AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley argues that the evidence supports the Premier's position, so why isn't his government being firmer in its welfare reform plans? Publication: CHH, November 8, 2000
Here is a brief overview of just some of AIMS' activities and publications early November 2000
Both Brian Tobin and Stockwell Day have been wooing Atlantic Canadians with promises to end the anti-development bias of the federal equalisation programme. In an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail, AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley argues that they're on the right track, but neither has gone nearly far enough in their plans to fix equalisation's perverse effects.
How will competition, deregulation and privatization in the continental electricity market affect us?
Here is the Dow Jones News Service report on Tom Adams' keynote speech at Plugging in Atlantic Canada.