Dans sa chronique mensuel pour La Presse, Brian Lee Crowley, le président de AIMS, se pose la question suivante: si les provinces de Terre-Neuve et la Nouvelle-Ecosse remportent leur bataille avec Ottawa pour le contrôle des ressources pétrolières au large de ces deux provinces, que devraient-elles faires des sommes énormes qui renflouerait les caisses provinciales?
Take a gigantic chalkboard eraser and wipe away the borders between Atlantic Canada and the northeastern United States. That's what the creators of Atlantica want to do, especially when it comes to trade. They envision this zone, known as the International Northeast Economic Region, as the next major financial mecca. Read this piece from the Chronical Herald to learn more about how the Atlantica concept is gaining strength across the region.
In accordance with a 2001 US-Canada treaty, Halifax International Airport submitted an application to the U.S. government to allow travelers who originate in Nova Scotia to pre-clear U.S. Customs in Halifax instead of being required to do so in a U.S. airport. The community of Bangor has consistently opposed that application, until now. In this piece to the Bangor Daily News, Joseph M. Baldacci, a Bangor attorney, and chair of the Bangor Mayor’s Special Committee on Halifax-Pre-Clearance, discusses the importance of the agreement just reached that sees Bangor abandon its’ opposition to Halifax’s application, and what that agreement means for our two communities.
This article in The New York Times illustrates how the ports of Halifax and New York/New Jersey are actually complementary. Each can provide what the other can't, which is a significant opportunity for Atlantica.
Now that it looks like Nova Scotia and Nefoundland and Labrador will win the latest federal-provincial debate about natural resource revenues, it is important to remember that an even more important question remains to be settled. What you do with the money once you've got it? Natural resource revenues are not reliable revenues nor are they akin to "normal" government revenues like sales or income taxes. As one time payments based on the fluctuating value of assets that are being permanently liquidated they should not be used to fund current demands that turn into long term commitments. Read this piece to see why and how one time windfalls, as natural resorce revenues inarguably are, need to be invested not wasted. Slightly different versions of this column appeared in both the Chronicle Herald and the Times and Transcript.
No one was surprised when the United States responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks by locking down security wherever people and commerce move. In an interview with Business Voice just after the attacks, Brian Lee Crowley, president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, said “If there’s going to be a North American (security) perimeter, we must be on the inside.” Now, three years later, Business Voice returns to the Canada-U.S. relationship in this cover story and discovers that Canada is increasingly “inside the perimeter” and that things are not as gloomy as many think. Read this piece to see how the concepts underpinning Atlantica: geography, economic trends and trade patterns; common problems and experiences; and politics, are having a positive impact as this region copes with a new reality.
At a meeting in Saint John, New Brunswick, recently, several groups joined together with AIMS to form a new Atlantica Council to promote this cross-border region and its natural economic affinities. Among the groups represented at the meeting were the Atlantic Provinces Chambers of Commerce, Enterprise Saint John, the Eastern Maine Development Corporation, Progress Corp., the Maine International Trade Center and Enterprise Greater Moncton. AIMS took advantage of the occasion to launch its new Atlantica website: www.atlantica.org. This is further evidence of the growing momentum behind this concept, which AIMS has been instrumental in popularizing.
If your top priority was to cut waiting times for vital surgery in our public health care system, the very last thing you would want to do would be to cut the number of operating theatres and their hours of operation, and put surgeons on salary so that the monetary rewards for a hard-working productive surgeon are prety much the same as those for a surgeon who prefers golf to appendectomies. So what have the managers of the Nova Scotia health care system done? They've cut the number of operating theatres and their hours of operation, and put surgeons on salary. How crazy is this? And before New Brunswickers and Prince Edward Islanders get too smug about this, they should recall that Halifax is an important regional centre offering surgical services to patients from these neighbouring provinces.
To consider the issue of how NOT to shorten queues for needed surgery from the NS persepctive, read this story.
If the would-be reformers of the pharmaceutical sector get their way, the whole sector will wind up looking remarkably like the U.S. flu vaccine sector. And yet, according to AIMS author and health economist Brian Ferguson, the flu vaccine crisis was produced by the very policies favoured by those who seek to reform the entire pharmaceutical industry. In this op-ed piece on the Comment page of the Financial Post, he asks, "Any lesson here?"