Quebec's political leaders seem to have fallen for the Great Green Dream of economic prosperity without energy or natural resource production. It's a magical vision of a world powered by unicorns and rainbows, where consumer goods are somehow conjured out of thin air rather than being manufactured with resources extracted from the ground. But experience in Europe shows that chasing the green dream is a path to financial ruin, not utopia. Quebec's one-two punch to energy and natural resource production is most likely to hurt the province itself more than the industries who might invest there.

New medicines are a central component of modern medical care. Unfortunately for Canadians, our federal government takes an approach that is slower than others, unnecessarily costly for taxpayers, and is ultimately of questionable benefit to Canadians. Canadian approvals for market access to new drugs take longer than similar approvals in both Europe (under the European Medicines Agency) and the U.S. (under the FDA). Specifically, the median approval time was longer in Canada than in the other jurisdictions in four of the past five years. But would faster approval of new drugs expose us to greater risk? Perhaps.

Earlier this month the Fraser Institute published a report sharply critical of one of the flagship policies of the Ontario government, namely the Ontario Green Energy Act (GEA). Ontario Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli dismissed it out of hand. What makes the Minister's response most disturbing is that it is so disconnected from reality.

Quebec's recent Earth Day 2013 celebrations saw a lot of misguided ideas being bandied about by environmental activists who are determined to radically shrink Canada's energy production and consumption based upon a single value: preventing climate change.

Families now pay more in taxes that they do for basic necessities. While personal income taxes are the single largest type of tax paid by families, they represent less than one-third of the total. There are a host of less visible taxes that Canadians pay but do not see.

There are 3.6-million public sector workers in Canada and 74.5 per cent of those are unionized. One of the most powerful and vocal unions in the country is the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Their opposition to a new Fraser Institute study is both misinformed and worse, based largely on fiery rhetoric and name-calling.

Despite recent criticism of her policies, the Thatcher succeeded. Her attack on inflation, her reform of spending and taxes, of labour laws, the exiting of government businesses, and the re-creation of a Britain that worked, worked.

A National Post article explains that various energy initiatives, such as a plan to convert one of TransCanada's existing natural gas pipelines into an oil pipeline from west to east, came about through discussions with only the relevant parties, which enabled greater cooperation.

There is apparently no shortage of politicians with a not-so-secret Hollywood love affair: they love to throw tax sweeteners and direct subsidies at the film industry, this in an effort to lure film production to their province or state. In British Columbia, the existing film tax credit hit the provincial treasury for $331 million in the last year alone.

Margaret Thatcher, Great Britain's prime minister between 1979 and 1990, understood perhaps better than any other leader in the modern world, why governments ought not to have day-to-day control over the economic aspects of citizens' lives.

A carbon tax is like a tax on tobacco. We need to make sure we are paying the full cost of something that is going to cause havoc down the road. In fact a carbon tax could be even revenue neutral, i.e., the money could be refunded to help the needy. Carbon-based fuels cause pollution and global warming. These hazards will prove costly for future generations.

Quebec gets to have a high quality of life without having to dirty its hands with things like energy and natural resource production, because Canada will make up the foregone revenues through equalization payments. But alas; with the free ride comes dependency, and eventually decay.

]Carbon taxes harm the poor more than the better off. A 2008 analysis of a $30.00/tonne carbon tax conducted by CUPE suggested that the poorest quintile in Canada would lose 1.7 per cent of household income, while the top quintile would lose only 0.86 per cent.

If there was a theme in the recent federal budget, it was how chock full it was with new corporate welfare. The underlying refrain was how big governm...

As Joel Gehrke at the Washington Examiner reports, President Obama's proposed Secretary of Energy for his second term, MIT physicist Ernest Moniz, gav...

We would never suggest that Canada is free of environmental challenges -- it certainly isn't. But an objective view of Canada's environmental trends hardly justify the kind of catastrophic environmental destruction that Thomas Mulcair would have the world believe Canada is enduring. And to so badly distort Canada's record, particularly while traveling abroad, is unseemly in the Leader of the Opposition, who, in theory at least, serves as the "government in waiting." There is still progress to be made in protecting Canada's environment, but hysterical pronouncements of imminent environmental Armageddon do not contribute much to the process.