Wonk with Mike Episode 25: Ten years after the financial crisis, with Wayne Swan

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“A senior person said to me: ‘This is not the end, this is not the beginning of the end, it’s just the end of the beginning.’ And I thought that sounds serious.”

Wayne Swan, former Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer of Australia during the Great Recession, joins Mike Moffatt to discuss Australia’s response to the financial crisis with the benefit of a decade of hindsight.

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Wonk with Mike Episode 24: Canada’s Increasing Inequality, with Lars Osberg

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“The inequality story looks pretty different at the very top, in the middle, and at the bottom of Canada’s income distribution.”

Lars Osberg, professor of economics at Dalhousie University, joins host Mike Moffatt to discuss his most recent book The Age of Increasing Inequality: The Astonishing Rise of Canada’s 1%.

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Wonk with Mike Episode 23: Cities on the Move, with Mayor Jeff Lehman

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“Unfortunately most of our services – many of our services anyway – have been built to follow the same model, really a reactive model but they’re full of people who care a huge amount about their community.”

Host Mike Moffatt is joined by the Mayor of Barrie, Ontario, Jeff Lehman to chat about sparking innovation at the municipal level despite regulatory boundaries and how data can be used to act proactively in the community.

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Wonk with Mike Episode 22: “You Can’t Do Nothing” about Climate Change, with Chris Ragan

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“It’s easy to say we don’t like taxes. It’s easy to say all taxes are bad but it’s not so easy to offer an alternative. So let’s actually make sure that people who are opposed to a carbon price are putting something forward as an alternative.”

Host Mike Moffatt sits down with economist Chris Ragan to chat about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report about the need for global climate action and why carbon taxing is a good first step.

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Wonk with Mike Episode 21: Stats Cannabis, with James Tebrake

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“Our issue was not so much how are we going to measure [cannabis] going forward but how do we measure the back period, the illegal period, so that when we provide a measure of GDP post-legalization we have a nice consistent time series.”

Host Mike Moffatt sat down James Tebrake, Director General of the Macroeconomics Accounts Branch at Statistics Canada. He and his team have been tasked with collecting data on cannabis consumption, output, and production before and after legalization on October 17 and understanding the affect this will have on the country’s GDP.

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Wonk with Mike Episode 20: A Friend, a Job, and a Home, with Jodi Butts

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“We really need to think about the means of attachment of our social safety net. Should it really by tied to traditional employment? I think we’re going to see more and more that we need to get away from that model.”

Jodi Butts, former Chief Executive of Rise Asset Development and current Canada Goose board member, joins host Mike Moffatt to discuss the value of investing in mental health supports in the workplace, peer support networks, and getting past the traditional archetypes of entrepreneurship.

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Wonk with Mike Episode 19: USMCA, with Maryscott Greenwood

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“Canada hung tough and as the prime minister mentioned earlier today, Canada I think is the only country in the G7 that has a free trade agreement now with everybody in the G7.”

On this special edition of Wonk with Mike, host Mike Moffatt gets reaction from Maryscott Greenwood, CEO of the Canadian American Business Council and a front-line trade expert, on the new Canada, United States, and Mexico trade deal, known as USMCA.

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Wonk with Mike Episode 18: Immigrants and the Quebec Election, with Leslie Cheung

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“It creates a pecking order. If Muslims are first on the list of not Quebecois or not Quebecois enough than who’s next on the list?”

Host Mike Moffatt is joined by “recovering academic” Leslie Cheung whose research on second generation immigrant identity in Quebec – and sub-nationalism more broadly – provides a deeper understanding of the dynamics at play in the fall Quebec election.

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Wonk with Mike Episode 17: Stand Up and Run, with Jessica Post

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“A lot of what we’re having to do to win is express the hard work and commitment to skills-based and trade-based education that many of these candidates have.”

Host Mike Moffatt speaks to Jessica Post, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee at the Global Progress Summit in Montréal about regaining the support of rust belt voters and what it’s going to take to win back state legislatures.

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