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| EST. READ TIME 1 MIN.A Breath of Fresh Air: The state of environmental policy in Canada
Given Canadians' well-known concern for the environment, it may be difficult to find anyone in Canada who is against improving the quality of the environment. However, a reliance on unnecessarily costly and intrusive policies over the past several decades has likely turned some people against environmentalism. But there are a growing number of market-based policy options that would improve environmental quality at a lower cost and with less government intervention than in the past. These policies are a breath of fresh air because they are cost-effective, market-oriented, less intrusive, and more appealing to broader sections of the Canadian public.
The purpose of this book is to outline several market-based environmental policy options, and to explain why the enactment of such policies would improve environmental quality and natural resource policy in Canada. In this book, the authors provide examples of the direct application of market-based policies. These policies include the strong protection of property rights, the use of environmental pricing, the application of cost benefit analyses, and the devolution of the power of decision making to local agents who are most closely connected to the issues and more easily held accountable. The book concludes by describing how Canada can learn from the policy experiences of other countries.
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Glenn Fox
Professor of Agricultural Economics and Business, University of GuelphGlenn Fox, Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute and an agricultural and natural resource economist, has been a member ofthe Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Guelph since 1985 and served as acting department chairman from 2001-2002. His research interests include property rights and natural resource stewardship, regulatory takings, trade and environment, technological change, and transaction costs.Professor Fox previously taught economics at the University of Western Ontario. He completed a Ph.D. in agricultural economics at the University of Minnesota in 1985.… Read more -
Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics, University of GuelphRoss R. McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph and a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute. Heis the author of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy published by the University of Toronto Press in 2010. He has been actively studying climate change, climate policy and environmental economics since the mid-1990s. He built and published one of the first national-scale Computable General Equilibrium models for analysing the effect of carbon taxes on the Canadian economy in the 1990s. His academic publications have appeared in many top journals including the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Journal of Geophysical Research, Climate Dynamics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, The Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Public Policy, Energy Economics, Journal of Forecasting, Climatic Change, Climate Change Economics and Environmental Economics and Policy Studies. He has also written policy analyses for numerous Canadian and international think tanks. Professor McKitrick appears frequently in Canadian and international media and is a regular contributor to the Financial Post Comment page. In addition to his economics research his background in applied statistics has led him to collaborative work across a wide range of topics in the physical sciences including paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement and climate model evaluation. Professor McKitrick has made many invited academic presentations around the world, and has testified before the US Congress and committees of the Canadian House of Commons and Senate. Professor McKitrick is widely-cited in Canada and around the world as an expert on global warming and environmental policy issues. He has been interviewed by Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, the CBC, BBC, ITV, Fox News, Bloomberg, Global TV, CTV, and others. His research has been discussed in such places as Nature, Science, The Economist, the MIT Technology Review, The National Post, The Globe and Mail and in a front page article in the The Wall Street Journal (Feb 14 2005).… Read more -
Holly Lippke Fretwell
Holly Fretwell is an adjunct instructor at Montana State University. She also works with the Foundation for Teaching Economics asa presenter in their Environment and the Economy and Right Start workshops for high school teachers, helping them learn how to use economic tools. She has presented papers promoting the use of markets in public land management and has provided congressional testimony on the state of US national parks and the future of the Forest Service. She has also published a children's book on climate change, The Sky's Not Falling: Why It's OK to Chill About Global Warming. Fretwell holds a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in resource economics from Montana State University.… Read more