Ross McKitrick

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Professor of Economics, University of Guelph

Ross R. McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph and a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute. He is the author of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy published by the University of Toronto Press in 2010. He has been actively studying climate change, climate policy and environmental economics since the mid-1990s. He built and published one of the first national-scale Computable General Equilibrium models for analysing the effect of carbon taxes on the Canadian economy in the 1990s. His academic publications have appeared in many top journals including the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Journal of Geophysical Research, Climate Dynamics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, The Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Public Policy, Energy Economics, Journal of Forecasting, Climatic Change, Climate Change Economics and Environmental Economics and Policy Studies.

He has also written policy analyses for numerous Canadian and international think tanks. Professor McKitrick appears frequently in Canadian and international media and is a regular contributor to the Financial Post Comment page. In addition to his economics research his background in applied statistics has led him to collaborative work across a wide range of topics in the physical sciences including paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement and climate model evaluation.

Professor McKitrick has made many invited academic presentations around the world, and has testified before the US Congress and committees of the Canadian House of Commons and Senate. Professor McKitrick is widely-cited in Canada and around the world as an expert on global warming and environmental policy issues. He has been interviewed by Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, the CBC, BBC, ITV, Fox News, Bloomberg, Global TV, CTV, and others. His research has been discussed in such places as Nature, Science, The Economist, the MIT Technology Review, The National Post, The Globe and Mail and in a front page article in the The Wall Street Journal (Feb 14 2005).

Recent Research by Ross McKitrick

Reforming British Columbia’s Carbon Tax Plan

— Aug 9, 2024

Reforming British Columbia’s Carbon Tax Plan is the latest installment in the Institute’s series spotlighting potential policy reforms for British Columbia. It shows that BC’s current carbon tax has serious design flaws that unnecessarily harm the economy, and highlights ways the province could mitigate those negative economic impacts, while still achieving its goal.

Economic Impact and GHG Effects of the Federal Government's Emissions Reduction Plan through 2030

— Jul 18, 2024

Economic Impact and GHG Effects of Fed Govt's ERP thru 2030

The Economic Impact and GHG Effects of the Federal Government’s Emissions Reduction Plan through 2030 is a new study that finds Ottawa’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will impose significant costs on Canadians, while also failing to meet the government’s own emission-reduction target.

An Evaluation of Canada's Progress Towards Meeting 2026 and 2030 GHG Emission Reduction Targets

— Jun 21, 2024

An Evaluation of Canada’s Progress Towards Meeting the 2026 and 2030 GHG Emission Reduction Targets, by Senior Fellow Ross McKitrick, is part of the Institute’s series on federal policy reforms. It finds that the federal government is unlikely to meet its 2026 or 2030 GHG emission reduction targets because of rising living standards for Canadians and the recent surge in population growth through increased immigration.