insight & evidence
By Bernard F. Miller KC, ICD.D Nova Scotia recorded its best GDP growth on record in 2021 — by deliberately not focusing on GDP growth. Here is what that means for the way we measure, report, and govern economic success. In March 1968, Robert F. Kennedy stood before a crowd at the University of Kansas and delivered one of the most enduring critiques of economic measurement ever put to a...
By Bernard F. Miller KC, ICD.D Drucker saw it coming. Rajan gave us the framework. Now Musk and Trump have made the diagnosis impossible to ignore. What we are living through is not a political crisis. It is the price of a fifty-year war on community. In 1994, Peter Drucker published an essay in The Atlantic that reads today less like analysis and more like prophecy. The Age of Social...
A concept from a Harvard Business Review article transformed a stagnant professional services firm. The same logic — put the people who do the work first, and growth follows — may be exactly what Nova Scotia’s economic policy has been missing. By Bernard F. Miller KC, ICD.D | Contributing to A Better Place Sometime around 2009, I was managing partner of a law...
A Field Guide for Public Servants By Bernard F. Miller KC, ICD.D | Restorative Change Lab Section 36(1)(a) of the Constitution Act, 1982 commits Canadian governments to promoting equal opportunities for the well-being of Canadians. Courts cannot enforce it. But it is not for that reason constitutionally inert. This article argues that it is a genuine constitutional value and that achieving it...
by Peter Nicholson – Canadian Climate Institute: Opening Remarks at 2026 Board Planning Retreat – January 13, 2026 When thinking about the world in which the Canadian Climate Institute will be operating between now and the end of the decade we need to acknowledge, at the outset, that today climate change is not top of the public mind in Canada, or in the United States or in fact in much of the...
By Peter NicholsonA Presentation to the Nova Scotia Offshore Wind R&D Forum; Halifax; September 24, 2025 Good afternoon, and thanks to our organizers, Net-Zero Atlantic, for the opportunity to outline why I believe, passionately but logically, in the nation-building power of Atlantic offshore wind energy. In the two years since publication of a paper for the Public Policy Forum in which I...
Canada’s provincial electricity systems are impressive but to make the country an energy superpower, they must be linked together. By Peter Nicholson and Rick Smith for The Hill Times, July 2, 2025 Faced with unpredictable and disruptive American trade aggression, nation-building projects are urgently needed to strengthen Canada’s economy and turn crisis into opportunity. The federal government’s...
by Peter Nicholson This essay updates a previous update posted June 26, 2025, and a paper of the same title published by the Public Policy Forum in December 2024 ( ). EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Industrial Revolutionary makes the case that today’s unprecedented developments in artificial intelligence (AI) will drive a new era of global innovation and economic growth, comparable to the transformative shifts...
by Peter Nicholson – St. Francis Xavier University Convocation – May 4, 2025 Chancellor Mulroney, President Hakin, faculty, distinguished guests, proud families, and most of all, graduates—thank you for the honour of joining you on this never-to-be-forgotten milestone day. Taking inspiration from the motto of St. FX—Quaecumque Sunt Vera: Whatsoever things are true—I will talk today...
by Peter Nicholson In terms of growth of GDP per capita, Canada’s Maritimes ranks at the bottom among US States and Canadian Provinces. But the story less often told is how much the Maritime Provinces have converged toward the all-Canada average over the long run. The chart below shows that PEI has gone from 46% of the Canadian average GDP per capita in 1960 to 75% in 2016, and likely higher...
insight & evidence