The most recent edition of Maclean’s magazine includes two articles that quote MLI experts on pressing public policy matters. In an article headlined “Companies march to the beat of their own Loonie tune”, reporter Chris Sorensen examines the notion that a falling Canadian dollar will boost manufacturing. He interviewed MLI senior fellow Philip Cross, who has warned that a sagging currency is not good news for Canadians:
“For all I know, all [politicians are] doing is putting lipstick on a pig and making the best of a bad situation,” says Philip Cross, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa think tank. “It’s unlikely to make much of a difference to output and employment of export industries.”
And in the editorial of the same issue, Maclean’s editors cite former StasCan Chief Statistician Munir Sheikh’s recent MLI paper which demonstrates that tax expenditures significantly increase the size of government:
According to recent research by former Statistics Canada head Munir Sheikh, adding up Ottawa’s spending on these sorts of tax expenditures increases the size of government by seven per cent of GDP, a massive sum that, for the most part, lacks regular legislative oversight or public scrutiny.
