Random Thoughts

With the Alberta government now committing to holding a referendum on equalization during Alberta's next municipal election cycle (fall of 2021) I thought it would be appropriate to consider just how much Alberta contributes to the rest of Canada and how Alberta would likely fare as an independent country. The Obvious Benefits It is common knowledge that Alberta (and more specifically Albertans) contribute more to confederation than any other province in Canada. However, I don't believe that most people fully understand how this occurs (it's not really 'equalization') and how much it is (I'll make this really clear later).  How Much? The easiest and cleanest way to determine 'how much' is to look at 'net federal fiscal transfers' which is basically how much money is taken out of Alberta via taxes and how much comes back via federal transfers to the province or federal programs in the province. When viewed this way the numbers are stag...

The Problem with Gardening Recently I was thinking about how the internet changed the way we find information and how it dramatically reduces the time it takes to learn almost anything. However, when it comes to gardening I'm often surprised at how difficult it is to find answers to my questions. For example if I was trying to find out something simple like what to plant in a shady part of my yard I might search something like 'shade shrubs calgary'. Now if I'm looking for information in other domains I'll typically see a wikipedia article near the top and I'll get fact-based and unbiased information. When I search gardening topics however I get company websites who are trying to sell me stuff, a page from the City of Calgary trying to encourage me to pick plants that don't need a lot of watering, a pinterest page that actually links back to one of those company pages and finally an article in the local paper. Obviously the Calgary Herald articl...

The Day After Now that the 2019 Alberta Election is complete I thought I'd take this chance to analyze the results and put them in a historical context. Against that historical backdrop, the result yesterday is exactly what you'd expect given the landscape today and probably gives us some idea of what's going to happen going forward. So to do that let's start 33 years ago in 1986. 1986 In the 1986 election there were 4 effective parties in Alberta: The PCs , NDP , Liberals and a right wing party called Representative . Representative wasn't able to capture much support though and the PCs won 51% of the vote, the NDP won 29%, and the Liberals managed 12%. This is a pretty typical election for Alberta. 1989 After the dismal showing in 1986 for the Representative party it effectively folded leaving the entire right side of the spectrum for the PC party. That said, Don Getty wasn't a particularly effective party leader (he would even lose his own seat...

The Election As yesterday’s election result was a bit of a surprise to me (and a lot of other people it seems ) I wanted to dig in to the results a little to try and explain exactly what we’re seeing. As I looked at the ElectoralCollege map what stood out to me was how Trump managed to flip states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and maybe Michigan from Democrat to Republican. With the exception of Ohio, George W. Bush didn’t win any of those states in 2000 or 2004 and they were all supposed to be a part of Hillary Clinton’sfirewall . So what changed and what does it have to do with trade? Trade As someone who has taken a lot of economics courses I’m a big proponent of trade. That said, I understand why people are often skeptical of its benefits. For better or worse, trade is almost always a net benefit to a country but the benefits are not shared evenly throughout the economy and it is usually really easy to see the places that were negatively impacted. To illustrate I’v...

Why? If you live in Alberta and you're lucky enough to still have a job you might think the current real estate market presents a buying opportunity. Because I work in finance I'm often asked about my opinion on when the best time to buy is and where I think prices are going. Obviously, real estate markets are hard to predict because there are many factors at play but if you understand how these factors impact price I think you'll have a much better chance at making the right decision. The Basics Like almost everything else in the world real estate prices are based on supply and demand and can be graphically shown using a chart like the one below. Basically, where the willingness to supply new houses meets the demand to purchase those houses you have an equilibrium. If you then draw two lines across and down from that intersection you will find the price where the market is balanced and the quantity where that market is balanced. This is the basic approach to de...

Introduction In a previous post  I asserted that because medical appointments were so frequently late the providers of those services were rude (or trying to maximize their own revenue) and that with better planning these appointments could be on-time way more often. Given the subject matter I should have anticipated a lot of resistance to these ideas and flushed out the statistics behind scheduling but I didn't. This post attempts to rectify that short-coming and will dig into the details of scheduling and why I believe the current methods of scheduling medical appointments is not optimal. In a Perfect World... Some of the criticism of my first approach was that "healthcare deals with people, not numbers", "each patient is different" and "there is no way to predict which patients will require more time". It seems I was being accused of thinking that medical appointments could be analyzed and suddenly they would all take exactly the same amount of...