AIMS cited as model for community leadership
At a speech in Moncton, John Risley, a member of AIMS’ Advisory Council, called on the business community to step forward into a leadership role and push for innovation and accountability in public policy. In this excerpt published in the Chronicle Herald, Risley explains how measuring, reporting and adjusting results is the recipe for turning our economy around. He holds up AIMS’ High School report card as a prime example of how leadership in accountability does not have to come from the public sector in order to change the public sector. By setting and reporting standards AIMS is helping schools identify and respond to their weaknesses so that they can get better. It is this private leadership for the public good that Risley believes the business community must both endorse and aggressively pursue in order to achieve lasting change in this region.
Ecology, economy and justice
The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies presented two breakfast talks with one of the world’s foremost authorities on the impact of environmental activism - Paul Driessen.
Environmental activists stoke anxieties, oppose solutions; AIMS in the CB Post
Many Cape Breton residents, anxious to solve their long-festering tar ponds problem, are frustrated by the latest delays. They can take a measure of comfort from knowing they aren't alone in facing activists who stoke public anxieties, fault every proposed solution, yet offer no workable alternatives, ensuring that problems and health risks remain. In this piece to the CB Post, AIMS speaker Paul Driessen says it is time to demand solutions, not just continued carping that prevents progress in Nova Scotia and elsewhere in developed nations and the Third World.
Challenges ahead for Membertou Inc.’s business based model of aboriginal self-government
Membertou, a small Cape Breton Mi'kmaq community, is widely considered a leader when it comes to advancing itself in the mainstream economy. AIMS’ author Dr. Jacquelyn Thayer Scott, explains in this interview with the CB Post, however, that its future successes will depend on how it resolves a number of significant challenges – with succession and cultural protection as the two biggest concerns. "Deep suspicions remain about the 'corporate model' (for economic development) and among older band members the notion lingers that business development is a bad thing," says Scott.
Big energy projects falling out of favour
AIMS’ President Brian Lee Crowley sets the stage for a rethinking of the Lower Churchill Hydroelectirc project in this piece published across Newfoundland. The U.S. marketplace - the main market for electricity generated in Labrador - is demanding smaller, more environmentally friendly sources of energy, says Crowley. "These big hydroelectric megaprojects are not as attractive as they once were."
Just how “cheap ” are Canadian drugs? AIMS on CBC Radio
On the CBC Saint John radio morning show, AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley challenged the idea that Canadian price controls and patent protections are the chief reasons for "cheap drugs" on this side of the Canada-US border.
Tuition hikes don’t add up
In this opinion piece in the Chronical Herald and the Times & Transcript, Dr. Michael Conlon responds to an earlier piece by AIMS' President Brian Crowley on the topic of rising tuition fees. Watch for Crowley's response in a later piece entitled - low tuition advocates need facts not fantasy.
Property rights work for the seabed too: AIMS at Submerged Lands Management conference
At the 23rd Annual International Submerged Lands Management Conference in Halifax, AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley was asked to present the arguments for a shift from traditional public ownership/trustee arrangements to a regime of mixed public and private property for the management of the seabed.
Economic Development in Vermont
The Atlantica project is examining the International Northeast as one interconnected economic zone. As part of this multi-year research initiative, AIMS is releasing Economic Development in Vermont: Making Lemons out of Lemonade? by Art Woolf, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Vermont. The paper, based on a speech by Professor Woolf, is remarkable for Atlantic Canadians in that its themes are ones that this region is all too familiar with. In spite of what should be some comparative economic strengths (such as the high level of education of its people, and high levels of education spending), the state of Vermont has been complacent in the face of its economic challenges and has allowed poor quality government to become an almost insurmountable obstacle to growth. Yet as Professor Woolf also notes, just across the Connecticut River, in New Hampshire, many of these same challenges have been met and largely mastered.
How the Prime Minister squandered his fiscal legacy and got nothing in return
In his fortnightly column in the Halifax Herald and the Moncton Times Transcript, AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley wrote about the first ministers' agreement on health. His conclusion? "In order to shore up his weak political position in a minority parliament, Paul Martin has largely sacrificed the fiscal maneuvering room he himself won for Ottawa in the early nineties. Yet he got no commitments for reform from the premiers, and only token nods in the direction of greater accountability for results. The Prime Minister has largely destroyed his chief legacy as finance minister and got nothing to show for it other than a year or two of peace on the health front. Like Neville Chamberlain before him, Paul Martin believes that there will be peace in our time. And like Chamberlain, he is likely to be bitterly disappointed."