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Great interview with Josh Andrus! I’m sorry I had never heard of him before.

Not that it relates to the Alberta election, but the big runup in inflation in Canada and the US after the pandemic started was more severe than in other G7 countries, largely because of the US Fed’s adoption of average-inflation targeting and the copycat polices of the Bank of Canada (inflation overshooting at the effective lower bound). This is not so obvious now because of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the sabotage of the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines, which had a much more severe impact on the European members of the G7 than on Canada and the US.

The UCP would do better just to jettison its aspriational net zero emissions target for 2050. Even Joseph Stalin got by with five-year plans. Do they really plan to stay in office that long? This is the more true as it has unwisely come out against any kind of residential tax on GHG emissions. This is odd as the idea of a Canadian tax on GHG emissions, or a carbon tax, arguably had its genesis in a 2008 paper co-authored by University of Calgary economist Jack Mintz in collaboration with BC economist Nancy Olewiler. The tax they outlined was a much saner proposal than the Liberal backup tax. Mintz outlines the differences between their proposal and the Liberal backup tax in his October 25, 2018 FP comment: “The Liberals ignored my carbon-tax plan. Theirs is much worse.” Even 15 years later, the Mintz-Olewiler proposal still constitutes a good starting point for replacing the very flawed Liberal backup tax with something better. If the Liberals lose the next federal election, as seems increasingly likely, this is not an unrealistic hope.

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