Catch up on all things MLI with our latest newsletter.
Highlights of this edition include a new instalment of MLI’s Straight Talk series of Q&As with Jeanne Flemming, former director of the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, or FINTRAC. In an exclusive interview, Flemming told MLI about her concerns that Canadians are “extraordinarily naïve” about the dangers of organized crime in this country, and she offered recommendations for using financial transactions intelligence to enable more prosecutions.
Also, in a new MLI commentary paper, senior fellow Linda Nazareth alerts Canadians to the impending end of favourable demographic conditions for economic growth. The demographic “window” that has benefitted much of the developed world for 50 years or so, is about to “slam shut”. In the paper, titled How to Open Economic Doors When Canada’s Demographic Window Closes, Nazareth, an economist and author of the new book Economorphics (economorphics.com), writes that “When the labour force is expanding more quickly than the youth-dependency rate, more money is being paid in taxes and less is going into education, relatively speaking, and strong conditions are created for economic expansion”, but many nations are moving out of this “sweet spot”, with potentially dire consequences.
And on the evening of Feb. 27 at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, MLI hosted the latest in its series of Great Canadian Debates. Globe columnist Doug Saunders and Western University professor Salim Mansur had a lively and respectful debate on the resolution “Muslim Immigration is no threat to Canada or the West”. Saunders argued for the resolution. Mansur argued against. Following the debate, MLI sent out a survey of participants and a large majority supported Mansur’s side. The next debate, on March 27, features Post columnist Barbara Kay and York professor Daniel Drache debating the resolution: “Free speech in Canadian universities is an endangered species”.
Also in this edition of the newsletter, MLI is hiring a new Communications Manager; a two-part Straight Talk Q&A with former Swedish government minister Sven Otto Littorin on health care and unemployment insurance reform; and the latest MLI op-eds, commentaries and media coverage.
