Month: October 2013

Fort Hills tale of the tape

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This morning, Suncor held an investor conference call to discuss the decision announced late last night that it would proceed with the development of the Fort Hills mine – a joint venture with Total and Teck. Everything associate with this project is huge – it’s expected to produce 180,000 barrels per day and to cost … Read more

Carbon pricing is not a panacea

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Pretty well every economist you talk to will agree; if you want to reduce pollution, carbon or otherwise, the most cost-effective way to do so is with a price on the emissions of that which you seek to reduce. They’ll also tell you that, under some basic assumptions, the cost-effectiveness result holds whether you impose that price through a … Read more

Transparency and Credibility

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Tonight, I was a little surprised to read the following tweets from Marc Lee, Senior Economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), and Co-Director of the Climate Justice Project: “I’m appalled by your acceptance of Enbridge professorship. You’ve lost credibility.“ and “If I recall correctly you also own Enbridge stock. So a double … Read more

Common sense, sample selection, representative samples, and sample sizes

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As Statistics Canada continues to roll-out the results from the National Household survey, I seem to become involved in arguments at least once a week as to the importance of sample selection in survey data.  This week, my argument was with IPSOS CEO Darrell Bricker – someone who should know a lot about statistics.  In particular, Mr. Bricker should know that you can’t solve a sample selection problem with an increased sample size, and I actually think he does. I think the issue is that he’s thinking about practical polling issues with respect to sampling, not about statistical issues with respect to selected samples.  Statistics Canada differentiates between sampling error and non-sampling errors, and I think that’s where our key difference lies. Let me see if I can explain this, and hopefully Mr. Bricker will respond and let me know if I am on the right track.

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