This website is about my work as an economic advocate. By economic advocacy, I mean the use of economic facts in argument, whether the debate is in the media, a public policy forum like a legislative committee, in collective bargaining or before an arbitration hearing.

Economic advocacy starts with finding and analyzing numbers. Effective advocacy makes the arguments and the data that support them speak for themselves. That means presenting data clearly, explaining relevance to the argument, and making the point as clearly as possible.

Often I find the clearest way to make a point is with a picture or with a simple calculation, and on the opening page of this site, I’ll be showing examples of the kinds of pictures and calculations that emerge from the work I do.

Here’s my latest favourite. We hear a lot from conservatives about the growing size of government in Canada as they lecture us about the virtues of becoming more like Americans. At the risk of confusing them with facts, take a look at this picture, drawn from that well-known source of radical ideas, the Fiscal Reference Tables, Department of Finance, Canada.

Government outlays as a share of GDP are now almost identical in Canada and the United States. That’s interesting. What’s also interesting is how clearly one can see the effect of the likes of Mike Harris, Gordon Campbell, Jean Charest, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper on the public economy in Canada, as government outlays dropped dramatically from the early 1990s to the present. Also interesting to see the irony in the steady decline in the United States under Clinton followed by the steady increase under Bush.

Finally, think about this in the context of the other reality, that government revenue as a share of GDP in Canada exceeds that of the United States, by a substantial margin. Evidently, Canadians and Americans share a similar desire for public services; the difference is that Canadians -- at least so far -- seem to be prepared to pay the taxes needed to pay for them; Americans appear not to be.