PBO: Canada's Labour Shortage, Skills Mismatch Don't Seem To Exist

OTTAWA - Canada's budget watchdog says there's little evidence of serious labour shortages or a skills mismatch problem in the country.

The finding by the parliamentary budget office could once again put it on a collision course with the Harper government.

The government has made much of a skills mismatch to justify measures such as the foreign temporary workers program, stricter employment insurance eligibility rules and the Canada Jobs Grant program.

This Law Allows Genetic Counselors to Turn Away Gays and Unwed Parents

In February, when Arizona state lawmakers passed a bill allowing business owners to refuse service to gay and lesbian customers on religious grounds, a ferocious national backlash forced Republican Gov. Jan Brewer to veto the legislation. But while Arizona legislators were catching heat, controversial "conscience clause" legislation quietly glided to passage in Virginia and was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Now, certain health care providers in Virginia have the right to turn away gays or lesbians or to withhold test results that could cause a patient to consider terminating her pregnancy.

The Other Keystone

Don’t Be a Fracking Gashole. Thus urged one of the signs at a boisterous climate change rally held in front of Baltimore’s City Hall on February 20. As unseasonably warm breezes spun the blades of the tiny windmills many of the 800-plus protesters held aloft, a dozen students carried a mock pipeline made of white plastic through downtown. Black letters on the pipeline announced a new front in America’s escalating battle over fracking and climate change: Stop Cove Point.

It Saves Millions To Simply Give Homeless People A Place To Live

It is cheaper to give homeless people a home than it is to leave them on the streets.

That’s not just the opinion of advocates working to end homelessness, nor is it the opinion of homeless people themselves. It is a fact that has been borne out by studies across the country, from Florida to Colorado and beyond.

Capitalism's Central Contradiction: The Past Devours the Future

Rarely does a book come along, like Karl Marx's Das Kapital, that completely alters the paradigm through which we frame our worldview. Thomas Piketty's magisterial study of the structure of capitalism since the 18th century, Capital in the 21st Century, is such a book. In this important way, he is the Marx of our new age of inequality, albeit absent the historically misguided prescription of communism.

Punitive Isolation Will Do to Russia What Versailles Treaty Did to Germany

PARIS -- Sometimes, I ask myself whether it is possible to be right, though it means dismissing everybody else's opinion. Or, must one surrender to the idea that unanimity should prevail? In the light of what is happening at the moment in Ukraine, I feel reinforced in my initial intuition: It is crazy for the West to turn the Crimean problem into an opportunity for confrontation with Russia.

To embark on such a path is not in Europe's interest. On the contrary, we should be doing everything possible to insure that our important eastern neighbor is integrated with Europe and not isolated from it.