Mark Carney's bizarre insistence on using British spellings - "When Canada last had a federal budget in April 2024, the text followed the typically idiosyncratic conventions of Canadian English. Some words, such as “colour,” followed a British spelling. While others, such as “analyze,” went with an American spelling. But the 492 pages of the 2025 budget have been diligently scoured to remove U.S.-style spelling. Harmonize has become “harmonise.” Specialize has become “specialise.” Organize has become “organise.” And the budget is very much an anomaly in this regard. Official House of Commons transcripts continue to employ the prior forms of “harmonize” and “organize,” among others. The official text of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms uses the spelling of “recognize” as opposed to the budget’s spelling of “recognise.” The more than 2,000 historical plaques and memorials maintained by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada also stick to a Canadian-style spelling style at odds with the Carney government... Carney’s insistence on British spellings was made clear to his staff in his first weeks in the Prime Minister’s Office. In a profile published shortly after the April general election, the National Post’s Christopher Nardi cited reports from Liberal insiders that Carney was demanding British spelling in all official correspondence. The new prime minister also demanded a dress code of “formal business attire.” As to why Carney is doing this, it fits in with a general “Europeanization” that the prime minister has been pursuing for Canada. Carney’s first foreign trips were to meet with European leaders, he’s attempted to move Canada within the orbit of the European Union and the 2025 budget even included a promise to “explore participation in Eurovision.” It also might be simple fact that Carney was Bank of England governor for seven years and, just like a North American backpacker who comes home with a British accent following their tour of the U.K., he’s stuck to English customs out of pure Anglophilia. (He also attended Oxford University in his 20s, has a British-born wife and obtained British citizenship.) Carney wears tailored Saville Row suits, and he wasn’t shy about his love of Britishness in his 2021 book Values. Here’s how he described Bank of England headquarters, “Everything I see evokes the history of the Bank and the permanence of its mission. The entrance hall echoes the style of British imperial capitals. Everything appears solid, safe, permanent.” Charles Boberg, a McGill University linguist who has spearheaded regular surveys of the unique quirks of Canadian English, surmised that the prime minister might be trying to de-Americanize official language as a form of protest against a hostile U.S. administration. But as Boberg wrote in an email to the National Post, “it has always seemed somewhat ironic to me that those concerned with Canada’s cultural independence from the U.S. choose to symbolize this by, effectively, emphasizing Canada’s cultural dependence on Britain instead.” He also noted that Carney has thus far steered clear of the more foreign-looking British spellings, such as “gaol, tyre, or waggon.” Canadian English spelling conventions have been famously described by the linguist T.K. Pratt as a “hobgoblin.” Canada’s founding prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, decreed at the outset that Canada would follow British conventions in its English. Nevertheless, the interim 150 years have yielded an organic and somewhat inconsistent mix of both British and U.S. terms. As Pratt wrote in a 1993 survey, “Canadian spellers might claim to be among the most broadminded people writing English today.” And despite popular belief, the trend is not always towards Canadian English becoming more Americanized. A 2010 Kwansei Gakuin University study of Canadian linguistic trends determined that Canadians have been found to actively abandon U.S. spellings. One hundred years ago, for instance, a majority of Canadians regularly used the U.S.-style spelling of “honor.” But surveyors determined that this had plummeted to almost nothing by the year 2000. Other terms, such as “jewelry,” were more malleable, going up or down depending on Canadians’ views of the United States at any particular time."
Canadians will soon pay more interest on national debt than federal funds for health care and child care combined - "Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first budget is leaving some Canadian economists concerned about the mounting national debt and ballooning annual interest payments eroding more and more of scarce federal resources. The “Canada Strong Budget 2025” projects that, by 2029, federal debt charges will consume one in every eight dollars of revenue Ottawa expects to bring in. The Liberals’ budget, released this week, not only swaps out reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio for the more modest goal of reducing the deficit-to-GDP ratio, but also projects annual interest payments on the debt to swell due to large deficits, starting with a $78.3 billion shortfall this year. In two years, interest payments on the national debt will exceed Ottawa’s annual deficit, with $66.2 billion to service the debt compared to a $63.5 billion deficit. “It’s essentially doubling down on what the Trudeau government strategy was, and in many cases, is actually accelerating spending, deficits, and debt compared to the Trudeau government’s fall economic statement,” Jake Fuss, Fraser Institute director of fiscal studies, told The Hub, adding that deficit spending over the next five years is almost double what the Trudeau government had planned last year. By 2029, the compounding federal debt is forecasted to cause interest payments to surpass Ottawa’s combined transfer payments to the provinces for health care and child care. That fiscal year, the federal government projects public debt charges will hit $76.1 billion, while the Canada Health Transfer ($65 billion) and Canada-wide early learning and child care ($8.5 billion) will cost taxpayers a combined $73.5 billion—or $2.6 billion less. The Carney government’s inaugural budget promises “generational investments” of about $280 billion over five years on new infrastructure, productivity and competitiveness, defence and security, and housing. But some economists believe these “investments” will merely result in costly failed programs similar to the governments of Justin Trudeau and Pierre Trudeau. “During Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s tenure, [the government] thought that they could judge things best. They brought in the National Energy Program. And they started supply management…going through the list of things, you often see these things blow up,” said Jack Mintz, a president’s fellow of the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary. Mintz believes Carney’s technocratic approach, where the federal government acts as an investment banker picking winners and losers for major investments, will more than likely exacerbate federal spending, debt, and interest. “You’re squeezing out other public expenditures. You’re also potentially squeezing out other private investment, because as the government requires more and more money from the international market, it starts bidding up interest rates in Canada,” Mintz said to The Hub. He added that as the government drives up the demand for borrowing—while also making Canada a riskier investment by making poor investments—interest rates can surge. All in all, the Carney government plans to rack up a cumulative deficit of $320 billion over five years, growing the net debt from $1.48 trillion to $1.80 trillion (2029-30) in four years. And on cue to the added borrowing load announced by the Carney Government, on Thursday one of the world’s three major credit rating agencies, Fitch Ratings, downgraded Canada’s credit score from triple-A to “AA+/Stable” due to “persistent fiscal expansion and a rising debt burden weaken[ing] its credit profile.” The top-three credit agency also warned Canada’s increased borrowing may “increase rating pressures in the medium term”—in other words, increase the interest rates on the growing federal debt. Although interest payments on the national debt are projected to only inch up from 1.8 percent of GDP this fiscal year, to 2.1 percent of GDP by 2029-30, Fuss says Canada may be headed for a dire situation in the not-too-distant future mirroring that of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when interest rates skyrocketed to a point where Canada’s interest payments on national debt hit 6.5 percent of GDP in 1990-91... Debt interest payments could be even higher if budget projections continue to underestimate actual federal spending. As C.D. Howe Institute president and CEO William Robson highlighted in The Hub earlier this week, the federal government’s spending estimates have been leaping more than $20 billion every year. In the budget, the Carney government touts Canada as having the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7 at 13.3 percent, compared to the next lowest country, Germany, at 48.7 percent. The G7 average debt-to-GDP ratio is 101.4 percent (excluding Canada)... economists believe that Canada’s net debt is highly misleading because it includes the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Quebec Pension Plan (QPP) as assets. “Net debt essentially looks at the total amount of debt, and then it subtracts out financial assets. But included in our financial assets in Canada are the CPP and the QPP, which are valued at about a combined $890 billion in mid-2025,” Fuss said. “And we can’t use those financial assets to actually offset total debt, because we would be compromising the benefits of current and future pensioners.” Other G7 countries, like the U.S., include pensions as both an asset and a liability, so they aren’t subtracted from net debt like Canada does with CPP and QPP. “A more accurate measure of Canada’s indebtedness is to look at…total liabilities or gross debt. And if we look at our total debt as a share of the economy, we actually rank fifth-highest among G7 countries at 113 percent of GDP,” Fuss explained. “That’s higher than the total debt burden in the U.K. It’s also higher than Germany, and we’re close behind France as well.”"
Clearly, the solution is to spend even more money. Meanwhile left wingers still say that debt is not high, ignoring that provincial debt is another kettle of fish
Marc Nixon on X - "CBC helped Carney win by selling his anti-America fairy tale. 🇺🇸 Now they’re awkwardly flipping the script suddenly “pro-America” because Canada can’t survive without our biggest customer. It’s not journalism. It’s paid propaganda. Defund CBC now."
John Smith on X - "So Canada via Mark Carney donate's 4.5 billion to Ukraine and Mark Carney's Corporation Brookfield is awarded a 4.2 Billion dollar rebuild contract in Ukraine. Nothing wrong going on here says Mark Carney!"
Sue-Ann Levy on X - "The Canadian $ is now at 71-cents — the lowest since 2003. That’s some economic prowess we’ve seen from Mr. Elbows Up. That’s why people won’t be going to the U.S. this winter not because his trained seals and the Boomers who voted for him say so."
Mark Carney is plunging Canada further into an Islamist-Leftist dystopia - "Canadian leadership and the culture that emanates from it has been dismal for years. Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor and the new prime minister of Canada, is perfectly on message – if what you want is a country soused in basket-case virtue-signalling economics, woke hypocrisy and cringeworthy, dangerous kowtowing to Islamist-Leftist pressure. Like Britain and much of the Western world, Canada suffers from flagrantly self-harming migration policies. The country finds itself pummelled by Justin Trudeau’s ruinous open-door policy. After the latter let in 1.2 million new residents in 2023, economists talked about Canada’s “population trap” in which the costs of providing infrastructure and capital that volume of newcomers could only obstruct economic growth. This number – 1.2 million – signified an amazingly irresponsible, though familiar, impulse for a Western leader, keener on selling his countryfolk down the river than letting any charges of “white privilege” stick. It is higher than the number of people living in most Canadian cities as well as eight of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories. As has been well documented, it has driven housing costs way up, and with Canada’s severe problems with Islamism, accepting high numbers of people from Afghanistan and Pakistan could well backfire. How many among this new influx are truly committed to the Western values of liberality and toleration? I doubt anyone in Canada knows, and those who want to will be afraid to ask. The damage caused by Trudeau’s rule could take generations to correct. In the meantime, there are spasms, such as the clampdowns on immigration that followed Trudeau’s policy, such as in Quebec... It is worth lingering on Trudeau a bit longer, as he has surely set the tone of contemporary Canada more than anyone, aggressively carving out all its new sensibilities in line with the culture war. He was the embodiment of post-pandemic political morality: inverted, superficial, slippery, performative. It’s no coincidence that Canada was the first Western nation to see pro-Hamas protesting: on October 8, 2023. Canadian Jewish kindergartens, synagogues and schools have been firebombed since October 7. As the brave Canadian Yasmin Mohammed, former wife of a 9/11 plotter, has said time and again: pro-Hamas sensibilities have become increasingly embedded over a number of years. The rot goes wide as well as deep. Much like his Commonwealth sister-in-arms, Jacinda Ardern, Trudeau was hugely committed to as many harmful net-zero policies as possible, which are still crippling Canada. There are also unresolved questions about Chinese interference in the elections of 2019 and 2021. In his dealings with Mexico Trudeau focused on gender and native rights, apparently uninterested in that little question of trade. This is perhaps not a surprise given his 2014 comment that the Canadian budget “will balance itself”, and his equally telling 2021 remark to reporters, “you’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy”. He forced Canada to participate in constant collective self-flagellation over the past treatment of indigenous people, then raised eyebrows for ditching speaking engagements on the country’s first Truth and Reconciliation Day in order to go surfing in British Columbia with his family. But Mr Family is no longer: having divorced his wife, the mother of his two children, he is now popstar Katy Perry’s boyfriend. Katy Perry can have him. As many have said, it’s a mess. And now Canada has Carney, the so-called rockstar banker, whose tenure at the Bank of England was mired in poor decisions and low growth; something that became obvious as soon as the dust settled on the novelty of his good looks and foreignness. Carney offers a parade of the same awful ideas as Trudeau, reinforcing Canada’s reputation as a woke dystopia. He’s one of the world’s keenest pushers of the Environmental, Social and Governance movement (ESG) – ruinous for businesses and based in shoddy, counter-productive greenist ideology. He spouts empty terms like “innovation economy”. He was the first to recognise a Palestinian state, possibly the most immoral idea to come out of a Western country in the 21st century, and fell over himself to declare Canada would abide by the International Court of Justice arrest warrant for Bibi Netanyahu. Carney, like his predecessor, speaks out of two sides of his mouth. In rewarding Hamas with a Palestinian state, Carney all but gave the thumbs up to the hate-filled anti-Israel protests on Canadian streets and the terror attacks that emerged from that movement. And then he has the temerity, a week later on the anniversary of October 7, to drone in an official statement that “Canada condemns anti-Semitism in all its forms”. It’s dismal. Carney has inherited a Canada of grotesque “liberal” laws, from the handing out of hard drugs to addicts in British Columbia, to legalised euthanasia. He has inherited a country confused and burnt out by the crippling costs of a poorly thought out, Merkel-style migration tsunami. But he is not the man to do anything about this, even if he could. He’s too busy currently cosying up to China."
Steven Chase on X - "Prime Minister Mark Carney announces he expects to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in South Korea this week."
Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 on X - "This has been his plan all along. He's friends with Xi Jinping from his Brookfield days. He's never called Xi a "tyrant". He reserves words like that for democratically-elected allies like Donald Trump. He's deliberately scuppering Canada-U.S. talks to pivot towards China."
terry l. on X - "I’m almost wondering if Carney is deliberately sabotaging relations with America so he can achieve major trade deals with China, a country that Brookfield has billions invested in. Why hasn’t our Conflict of Interest Commissioner red flagged his holdings in Brookfield? I know why"
Mark Carney says Canada will thrive in a new global system because govt still has money to spend, diversity is our strength, and we're committed to sustainability. : r/CanadianConservative - "Does Mark Carney understand where taxes come from and what drives this revenue?"
"I think he hopes you dont"
For rampant investment, rule of law beats cabinet rule - "So we now have the list of the first five “nation-building” projects the federal government wants to fast-track to fruition. We’ve been down this road before, except that in 1980-81, when the government of Pierre Trudeau and his finance minister Marc Lalonde were pushing mega-projects as a way of dealing with recession, you only needed to be investing $100 million to qualify... Read the parliamentary debates of the day and there’s a certain sad familiarity to it all: “Mr. Harvie Andre (Calgary Centre): “Madam Speaker, this project is not only vital to self-sufficiency, it is absolutely vital to Canada’s economic development … (D)elay has already cost Canada untold billions of dollars and untold thousands of jobs … In the interests of the billions of dollars that are being lost … will the Minister not commit to the House his assurance that this project will get underway as soon as possible so that another year is not lost while people walk the unemployment lines?” That was February 1982. The main difference between then and now is that the Liberal government of the day was actually on board with expanding Alberta’s oilsands. I don’t have anything in particular against the first five projects the Carney government has singled out for regulatory fast-tracking by the new Major Projects Office of Canada. Building a new bureaucracy to help investors through all the old bureaucracy is not the greatest strategy, but two mines, a port, an LNG terminal and a new nuclear power plant at least stand a chance of making money, which should be the test of an investment. No doubt their backers will pitch hard-to-calculate non-monetary spillover benefits but the goal here is to build a prosperous economy: If investments can’t make a monetary return, that means they aren’t sustainable without subsidies or other favours, and subsidies and favours are rickety foundations for long-term wealth creation. (The planned 60 per cent expansion of the Port of Montreal may be an exception to the “profits wanted” rule since it’s a hub for the export of stolen vehicles, a trade that, while lucrative for somebody, is not really in the national interest.) The usual Ottawa bumf explaining the choice of the Fabulous Five was full of tired, unpromising language — ad-man heroic — about Canada standing at “a defining moment … a pivotal juncture … a moment to act with ambition, confidence and purpose,” and how we need to “think big” and “build critical nation-building projects at speeds not seen in generations.” Call me old-fashioned but I figure when you’re spending literally tens of billions of taxpayer dollars you probably shouldn’t rush. Fortunately, despite all its talk, the Carney government isn’t abnormally fleet. It’s 141 days now since the election and still no budget. Speaking of the Pierre Trudeau government, there was lots of ambitious, confident, purposeful visioning surrounding Montreal’s Mirabel Airport, a behemoth built an hour from downtown to help fulfill the vision of a Montreal that was supposed to keep growing at 1950s and 1960s rates, which, thanks to separatism, didn’t happen. Mirabel was a sinkhole for money for three decades until it was finally declared a failure and shut down, its huge but chronically empty passenger terminal demolished. Governments in this country are always unhealthily fixated on visionary big projects. But what a prosperous economy requires is, not big investment in a select number of projects, but lots of investment everywhere all the time. One clear advantage of diffuse, dispersed investment is precisely that it’s harder for politicians to control. The deciders have nothing to do with government but are focused on bottom lines and doing things with as few people as possible, efficiently, and on time. Private operators have a strong profit interest in getting things done at speeds Ottawa certainly hasn’t seen in generations, not dragging projects out so as to maximize the associated employment “gains,” which are actually costs, not benefits. It is good that the Carney government now agrees with what the opposition has been saying for 10 years — though more than a little galling to have the likes of Dominic LeBlanc explain thus how there’s too much regulation. This is the same Dominic LeBlanc who was Mr. Fix-It in the government that brought in much of the excessive regulation. But which would be best for investment in Canada: a system in which you petition cabinet to give you a free pass from regulation that remains in place for everyone else? (Call it rule of cabinet.) Or a system in which you comply with the same legislated, but substantially streamlined, requirements for getting a project done that everyone else has to comply with? (Call it rule of law.) It’s not a hard question. Rule of law works best. Rule of cabinet is what they do in banana republics, and, increasingly, Washington. What Ottawa needs to do at speeds we haven’t seen in generations is de-clutter the regulations it spend the past 10 years intentionally cluttering."
Terence Corcoran: PM Carney’s destructive economic creationism - "The Carney economic agenda is a long and emerging list of interventions in the belief that the state is the entrepreneurial controller of economic activity. If the state is there, it is not capitalism. Free market creative destruction is being replaced by statist destructive creationism. Federal intervention plans seem to expand almost daily. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly told the Financial Times of London last weekend that Ottawa has plans to ride a wave of “economic nationalism” and somehow cajole Canada’s $3-trillion pension system to invest more in Canada — a move Paul Beaudry, former deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, said was “very dangerous” and risked creating a “type of crony capitalism.” The Nov. 4 federal budget will also impose major “Buy Canadian” requirements on Ottawa and eventually all Canadian governments covering everything from products and services on up to infrastructure spending, grants, contributions, loans and other federal funding streams. Foreign companies would be required to “develop and build their products and services in Canada.” One of the obvious effects of such Trumpian state-capitalist policies would be to reduce competition by removing foreign firms and products from the economy. Adding to the destruction risk will be Carney’s dedication to the “existential” climate crisis and the need to reduce fossil fuel emissions — while at the same time increasing fossil fuel production, possibly including through new exports via the Keystone XL pipeline to the U.S. and the Northern Gateway pipeline to the West Coast. To erase the obvious contradiction — produce more oil while lowering CO2 emissions — Carney continues to push carbon capture and storage to clean up Canadian oil production... The total cost, and who will pay, for all this carbon and methane capture and reduction is unknown, although government subsidies and costs to oil industry and consumers will certainly run into the tens of billions. Industry Minister Joly also has new ideas, noting recently that government funding is imminent for Canada’s softwood lumber industry — Carney once promised $1.25 billion — to respond to Trump’s tariffs. Tens of billions here, tens of billions there, and then even more tens of billions elsewhere are all part of the Carney economic and fiscal plans. Spend $159 billion over five years on infrastructure , more billions on fixing the military, plus support for industries to expand their control over the Canadian economy and increase exports. A high-risk small modular nuclear power plant program is underway , cost now set at $21 billion but expected to rise in coming years. Ottawa is also getting into the housing business, and increasing major spending as part of a $55-billion apartment construction program and $16 billion for housing for “people who need it most.” I could go on, but space is limited. A question for aspiring Nobel economists: How much of this redistributed money, through spending or regulation, is likely to achieve the kind of growth and economic improvement that would come if the money were part of a corporate capitalist model that led to creative destruction and positive economic transformation?"
Environmentalists will continue to claim that government partly cushioning the impact of their strict regulation is a "subsidy" to fossil fuels
Because to left wingers, "qualifications" are more important than achievements or good ideas, they will continue to praise Carney as a genius economist even as he pushes policies the vast majority of economists say are daft
Elected as a Trump-fighter, Carney now boasting of close Trump ties - "Prime Minister Mark Carney boasted that he speaks “regularly” with U.S. President Donald Trump after facing down criticism in the House of Commons that his government had unnecessarily alienated the United States. “I speak regularly with the president,” said Carney in a French-language reply during question period on Monday, adding that “just over the weekend” he’d been on a call with Trump on the issue of “Ukraine, Russia and China.” Carney also called it a “success” that Canada has largely dodged U.S. tariffs as a result of most Canadian exports being exempt under the terms of the Canada-United States-Mexico agreement (CUSMA). “The real situation is this; we have the world’s best deal with the Americans,” said Carney. At another point, he said to applause from Liberal MPs that “U.S.-Canadian relations are good.” Carney was responding to attacks that had come, somewhat unexpectedly, from the benches of the separatist Bloc Quebecois. Leader Yves-François Blanchet accused Carney of damaging the Canadian economy by pushing away the U.S., and even suggested the prime minister should be spending more time in the U.S. capital. With Canada posting “very bad” economic figures, Blanchet called on Carney to “commit himself now to putting an end to tariffs and prioritizing a trade deal with the United States.” Blanchet is by no means a fan of the U.S. leader, and he represents a party whose animosity to Trump is nearly total... Blanchet’s principal attack on Carney was that he had displeased U.S. leadership to the detriment of the Canadian economy. He even appeared to make specific reference to a March 27 campaign speech by Carney in which he declared that close relations between Canada and the U.S. were at an end. “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperations is over,” Carney said at the time... Blanchet would again reference the alleged displeasure of Washington in criticizing the “rare” presence of Carney in the U.S. capital. He urged him to start “seriously frequenting the capital of our principal partner.” To this, Carney said that Trump is a “modern man” who owns a cell phone. “I speak regularly with him, and I send texts to him,” he said."
Too bad Liberal voters are unlikely to realise that they got played and will have some new cope
The 5 nation-building projects Mark Carney is fast-tracking - "Prime Minister Mark Carney says his government’s Major Projects Office is fast-tracking five nation-building projects that represent investments of more than $60 billion and create thousands of well-paying jobs by streamlining regulatory assessment and approvals and helping to structure financing."
Now imagine what they could do if they streamlined regulatory assessment and approvals for everything.
Canada’s Carney talked tough on Trump - now some say he's backing down - "Canadian commentator Robyn Urback wrote: "Maybe Prime Minister Mark Carney's elbows were getting tired." She said government's elbows up and down approach to negotiations so far could be characterised as a "chicken dance". Meanwhile, Blayne Haggart, a professor of political science at Brock University, argued in a recent opinion piece in The Globe and Mail newspaper that: "Nothing about Carney's US strategy, particularly his pursuit of a 'comprehensive' trade and security agreement, makes a lick of sense." Walking back on the DST has achieved "less than nothing", he said."
