Jim Stanford

Jim Stanford is an Economist with Unifor, the new union formed in 2013 from the merger of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and the Communication Energy and Paperworkers' (CEP). Unifor represents over 300,000 members in over 20 economic sectors. Jim received his PhD in Economics in 1995 from the New School for Social Research in New York, and also holds economics degrees from Cambridge University and the University of Calgary. He is the author of Economics for Everyone (published in 2008 by Pluto Press and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives), which has been translated into six languages. He writes an economics column for the Globe and Mail, and is a member of CBC TV's regular National News economics panel, "The Bottom Line." He lives in Toronto with his partner and two daughters. Jim's column appears in rabble courtesy of the Globe and Mail.

Columnists

Trump's proven that free trade deals can be rewritten. So let's write better ones.

For years, we've been told the dictates of globalization, and the intrusive and prescriptive terms of free trade agreements in particular, are immutable, natural, and unquestionable. When workers were displaced by the migration of multinational capital toward more profitable jurisdictions, we were told there's nothing we can do about it except join the race to the bottom in a desperate attempt to hang onto our jobs. When investment and employment were undermined by lopsided trade and capital flows, and employers and financiers utilized the leverage afforded them by unrestrained international mobility to ratchet the distributional structure of the economy ever-more-blatantly in their own favour, we were informed this was just the logic of markets. And anyone who questioned

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Denying globalization's downside won't stop right-wing populism

I was somewhat surprised to see Stephen Poloz recently urging economists to do more work identifying and disseminating research on the supposed benefits of free trade. That's slightly beyond his job description (perhaps more fitting with his last position as head of Export Development Canada). But like economic leaders elsewhere in the world, Mr. Poloz is obviously concerned with the disintegration of popular support for neoliberal free trade deals. That disintegration will have tectonic economic and political consequences.

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neoliberalism globalization economic policy trade deals trade policy Canadian free trade

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Canada's highly lopsided economic relationship with China

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China exports Canadian trade deals Canada-China

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New thinking needed on Bank of Canada's approach to monetary policy

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Every five years the federal finance minister updates the "marching orders" that guide the Bank of Canada and its conduct of monetary policy. This process is the one opportunity for democratic oversight of the Bank, which otherwise is deemed to be operating "independently" of government -- all the better to ensure that it has the authority to take away the punchbowl whenever the economic party gets going too energetically.

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bank of canada inflation economic growth monetary policy Canadian economy Finance Minister Bill Morneau

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Is slow 'growth' inevitable? A progressive response to sustained stagnation

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Most of the world economy (including Canada's) has performed sluggishly since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. And many economic and fiscal projections now accept this pattern of slow growth as more or less inevitable, as a "new normal." This argument is typically invoked to justify a ratcheting down of expectations regarding job prospects, incomes and public services.

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neoliberalism economic crisis economic growth Canadian economy progressive economics Canadian jobs slow growth stagnation