Yet more AB EQ BS
Fraser Institute strikes again
It’s an article of faith in Alberta that Equalization is broken so it isn’t surprising that a few days after one think-tank cranked out a paper on how broken Equalization is that an Alberta-based one pumped out another paper written by a couple of people, one of whom only went to university in Alberta - Calgary not surprisingly - talking about how broken Equalization is and this paper makes no more sense than the other.
We dealt with the Trevor Tombe paper on Wednesday and so let’s deal with the latest screed from the Fraser Institute against Equalization.
Let us start at the back with the references.
There are 15.
Take away all those that are just Statistics Canada or federal government information about the program. That leaves us with eight.
Of the eight, one is by the guy who wrote the Wednesday paper, one is an Alberta government paper about how bad Equalization is, and the last is a broken link to a paper from Queen’s University 25 years ago that isn’t about the paper’s topic anyway.
That gives us five, all of which are Fraser Institute publications.
That’s 62.5% of the sources for the new paper nothing but papers criticising EQ produced by the same people with the same assumptions and same conclusion: Equalization is broken.
That doesn’t even pass the most clogged-up-nose sniff test for credibility.
None of them explain - nor does the paper - how measuring the value of goods and services in a province is the only valid measure of whether a province should receive or not receive Equalization.
That’s zero percent.
And yet that’s the whole basis on which the paper claims that Equalization is broken.
The authors don’t even offer a suggestion as to how to tackle the problem they claim they identified.
But that was good enough to get them media coverage from outfits like VOCM that are short-staffed and starved for stuff to fill up space, which is really the goal. Now Fraser can take that stat about how media coverage a paper got and go back to their funders - including rich, right-wing Americans - to give them more money to produce more meaningless insights into nothing.
Equalization isn’t broken.
Canadian think-tanks like Fraser are.
I suggest this type of self-referencing circular argument, it typical of the genre of efforts funded by wealthy / powerful in pursuit of more wealth power, that the disease of wealth makes them believe they rightly deserve.