Joel Kotkin: Carney's Canada will devolve into feudalism - "Carney’s election places power in the hands of the “ultimate Davos man,” a habitue and beneficiary of the elite financial and real estate. He is a reliable advocate for the kinds of strenuous climate, tax and regulatory policies undermining Canada’s middle class... despite the aspirations of Trumpian fascism, it has been Canada, and notably the Liberals, who allow the clerisy — the modern-day Church — and the bureaucracy, to limit free speech, a classic fascist tactic. But the essence of feudalism lies in the marginalization of the middle and working classes. Here, Canada is failing; its per capita income relative to the United States has been slipping for years, and is now at the lowest level on record. Nor is it living up to its oft-repeated egalitarian image. Rather, today, Canada is well on its way to feudalism, having its highest income inequality ever recorded, with the top 20 per cent of households holding more than two-thirds of all wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent holds only 2.8 per cent. At the bottom, notes the left-leaning Policy Options magazine, up to one-in-four Canadians suffer from “a poverty level standard of living.” Canada not only lacks corporate headquarters, but it is also hardly an entrepreneurial hotbed like the United States. Canadian small businesses, notes one recent analysis, are less productive than those in the U.S., one reason why few, particularly in manufacturing, become large. A paper by the Business Council of Alberta identifies trade, financing, institutional, regulatory, or taxation constraints. Overall poor productivity, particularly among high end workers, also contributes to Canada’s mediocre performance. Not surprisingly, job creation outside government employment has been meagre. Overall, as the bureaucracy has thrived under the Liberals, the people, in general have not. In 2002, Canada’s GDP per capita was about 80 per cent of the U.S.’s, but has dropped by 2022, to 72 per cent of that of its neighbour to the south. But perhaps nothing so reflects Canada’s feudal dilemma than housing... in terms of housing, where the Liberal party has long championed “urban containment,” a policy that seeks to limit suburban and exurban development while promoting dense urban growth. The result, notes a new study by demographer Wendell Cox, has been housing prices that, in terms of the relationship between median home prices and household income, are increasingly out of reach for the average Canadian. Immigration, key to Canada’s population surge, has contributed to this shortage... densification, the preferred growth option of the elites, does not help a housing shortage or reduce prices as Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia has shown. Indeed, now Vancouver is now producing less-than-half the housing units needed to meet demand, one reason for the high prices even in a weak economy. Condon, an eloquent advocate of densification, cites the “indisputable” evidence that “upzoning” increases the value of land (by increasing the development value). Concentrations of property and wealth are likely to worsen under the renewed Liberal regime. Planners and climate activists, as in California, a place which almost rivals Toronto and Vancouver in their progressive domination, will likely get even stronger with “net zero” devotee Carney in charge. Similarly, industries that tend to create high-wage jobs, notably in oil and gas, will find themselves constrained, leaving the big money to financial institutions and those firms who rely on protectionism to shield themselves from both Chinese and American competition. It may comfort the current ruling elites in Canada to bloviate over Trumpian idiocy, but none of this will slow the country’s growing shift to feudalism. Blaming Trump may deflect the suffering public from identifying the real culprits, the property and financial elites, and their political operatives like Carney, whose preferred policies threaten to stymie the progress of most Canadians."
EU exempting heavy industry from carbon tax as Canada doubles down - "The Liberal government is sticking with its plan not to table a budget until at least the fall, so the eggheads at the C.D. Howe Institute took the liberty of doing it for them. They tallied up the government’s various new spending promises, estimated what tax revenue is going to look like for the foreseeable future, and concluded that Ottawa is on track to rack up $300 billion in new debt over the next four years, an average of about $75 billion per year (or, about $5 in new debt per Canadian, per day). And that’s under the most optimistic scenario. More likely is that it hits $350 billion. This is way higher than any of the non-COVID spending charted under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Recall that it was only a few months ago that Trudeau was pressured into resigning in part due to shock that his government had allowed the deficit to swell to $62 billion. According to the C.D. Howe Institute, Canada is on a “troubling path.” “Adding $300 billion in federal debt while doing nothing to raise investment and productivity will make Canada more vulnerable, not less,” read the analysis."
Mark Carney betrays Canadian electorate on only thing that put him into office - "“We are facing the biggest crisis of our lifetimes. Donald Trump is trying to fundamentally change the world economy, the trading system, but really he’s trying to break us so the US can own us,” he said during the campaign. “We will fight back with counter tariffs and we will protect our workers.” Rather than fighting back against Mr Trump in their high-stakes game of chicken, the elbows came down pretty fast. “We are starting to get a sense of the character of the government and that it is a kind of chicken dance government,” is how Garnett Genuis, the Canadian Conservative Party’s shadow minister for employment, put it. “It is elbows up, elbows back down, elbows up, elbows back down.”"
Colby Cosh: Carney's surrender to Trump was inevitable - "One funny thing about the “elbows up!” slogan of the New Canadian Nationalism is that in real life it’s pretty hard to hit yourself with your own elbow. But in the actual policy sphere, most of what we might do to put our elbows up against the United States involves self-harm or, at a minimum, self-denial... the Department of Finance issued a terse circular announcing that the Digital Services Tax announced in 2021 would not, as originally planned, begin to be collected on Monday. The DST (R.I.P.) was designed to exclusively target Canadian revenues of American “web giants” that provide online services, advertising, or streaming content. As the Finance memo observes , it is being dropped at the last minute in the hope of restarting negotiations with the U.S. on an updated version of continental free trade. The idea of a DST was framed by the Trudeau government as a moral necessity of the 21st century: something had to be done about foreign vampires like Netflix and Google which had built businesses with millions of Canadian customers out of digital ether, but paid no tax in Canada. Everybody recognized, however, that much of the cost of the tax was bound to come out of the pockets of the customers rather than the vampires... Is this a craven surrender on the part of the post-Trudeau Liberals? Well, this is the problem with interpreting everything in brute terms of animalistic personal combat, isn’t it? The governments of the developed nations largely agree (perhaps against the interests of their own citizens) that there ought to be an international framework for digital-services taxation, and the OECD reached an agreement that nobody would run wild and introduce their own digital taxes until the issue could be sorted out collectively. From that neoliberal-nerd point of view, Canada went rogue when it announced a homebrewed DST — one that would have had a nasty retroactive effect, that was designed specifically only to collect from large American companies with recognizable names, and that didn’t address double-taxation issues. And let’s recall that Joe Biden was still president when this happened. It’s worth noting that this isn’t just a question of playing chess against Donald Trump. Canada was really forced to withdraw the DST by the terms of the Trump-designed One Big Beautiful Bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in May, and now before the Senate. The OBBB reflects the fact that there’s genuine bipartisan distaste in the U.S. toward the digital taxes hypothecated by Canada and already in effect in some other countries; it allows for tax-withholding countermeasures against countries that impose “unfair” taxes on U.S. digital companies , countermeasures whose size could easily have dwarfed the relatively meagre revenues from the DST. In other words, if the government hadn’t pulled the plug on the DST, we might have quickly found out how a one-armed man does in a battle of elbows."
All the left wingers who were previously cheering how important the tax was, for a level playing field, immediately pivoted to claiming that withdrawing it was smart because it was not important and just a bargaining chip
Chris Selley: Carney's bizarre fixation with calling us 'European' makes no sense - "Prime Minister Mark Carney said — not for the first time — that Canada is “the most European of non-European countries.” He said it in May, too , in France; and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly said it as well, in an interview with BBC. So it’s obviously a deliberate talking point. What’s weird about it is that Carney and Joly offer no explanation. They just say it as if it’s an established fact that all Canadians accept — which they obviously would not... Canada is certainly one of the countries outside Europe that’s most superficially reminiscent of Europe, along with New Zealand and Australia. But there really aren’t many such countries, and none of them are much like Europe at all. (That’s to the extent Europe, from Lisbon to Bucharest to Helsinki or Moscow — to say nothing of the small towns and rural areas in between — can be considered one thing.) It has been fascinating to watch people on social media earnestly appreciate Carney’s remark. Many point to our gun-control laws, our universal health care and our robust social-safety net. But that’s not how we’re “like Europe”; that’s how we’re not like the United States. Europe in general has stronger gun control than we do. Many European countries have more robust social safety nets. And they all have universal health care, as do all developed nations other than the U.S. — in many cases more universal, efficient and effective than in Canada. Indeed, I suspect what most people heard when Carney said “most European” was yet another variation on “not American.” “Not American” is the bedrock so much Canadian nationalism, and never more so (in my lifetime at least) than during the age of President Donald Trump. Dismal as it can be, there is nothing unnatural about it. Mice are always going to resent their elephant neighbours. But mice often find ways of co-operating with their elephant neighbours. For all their historic troubles, Irish and British citizens are free to live, work, study and receive full government services in both countries — independently of the European Union... New Zealand and Australia have a similar agreement (though a much friendlier history, of course). And the European Union is the ultimate example. Minnows like Malta and Cyprus swim freely with sharks like Germany and France, and many more minnows at least theoretically aspire to jump in the pool: Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Washington is a uniquely tricky partner. But the fact is, Canada is far more like the U.S. than it is like anywhere else. We mostly eat the same fast food. We mostly watch the same television (Quebec being an exception). Our downtowns and suburbs look mostly like their downtowns and suburbs. Our infrastructure deficits are both enormous. Many Europeans, while discerning differences between Canada and the U.S., simply refer to the two together as “America.” Canada co-operates with the U.S. on issues of mutual importance far more than most Canadian politicians want to highlight. But good luck suggesting any agreement between the two countries on free movement of labour or residency, or access to health care. We can barely manage that within Canada . And as Trump has demonstrated, Canada doesn’t even really believe in free trade between nations: Even as Ottawa pounds its collective chest in the name of free markets, the first bill passed by Parliament in this session protected supply management in the dairy and poultry industries. It was a bit like passing a law protecting gravity. Supply management needs no further protection. Canadians pay well over the odds for generally crummy butter and cheese — and a very limited selection of both — and no party with a seat in the House of Commons is willing to do anything about it. The aforementioned bill passed in the House with unanimous consent. That is distinctly un-European, of course. Restrictions still exist within the European single market, but that was the original idea behind the EU. There’s a free market in airlines: No one bats an eyelash at flying an Irish carrier between Spain and the U.K., or a Spanish carrier between Croatia and France. There’s a free market in telecommunications, which is part of why using a cell phone in Europe costs next to nothing. Some EU countries even allow foreign ownership of media companies. There’s a free market in professional athletes, even: European teams don’t “draft” players and then “own their rights.” They go out there with their chequebooks and see what they can buy. And yes, there is free trade in dairy. There is no sign of Carney’s government moving in such a direction — not even rhetorically, never mind substantially. And that’s what makes his “most European” comment so confusing. He has self-identified , in the past, as both Irish and European. Questions of patriotism aside, on the trade front, that perspective could be beneficial to Canada — even to Canadians who deplore the idea of becoming “more European.” (Many Canadians’ forebears did abandon Europe on principle, after all.) But actions need to match words, and vice versa. Right now, Carney’s do not."
Anthony Koch: At G7, Carney has his elbows way down for Trump - "The last federal election was not an honest conversation about Canada’s place in the world. It was a performance — slick, poll-tested, and ultimately hollow. Mark Carney presented himself as a principled adversary to Donald Trump, a steward of Canadian sovereignty who would stand up to a dangerous and unpredictable United States. And now, just months into his premiership, he insists “the G7 is nothing without U.S. leadership,” his government has resisted retaliating against American tariffs, and has even expressed desire to join Trump’s Golden Dome missile defence program. Let’s dispense with the polite fiction: Carney never meant what he said. The campaign rhetoric wasn’t just exaggerated, it was fabricated. There was no principled foreign policy vision, no doctrine of Canadian independence. It was anti-American cosplay, staged for a segment of the electorate that wanted to feel morally superior to our southern neighbours without having to actually think seriously about Canada’s strategic position in the world. And here’s the truly galling part: voters didn’t mind. Not really. Carney’s flip-flop hasn’t cost him much because many of the people who cheered his fiery condemnations of Trump didn’t actually care if he followed through. For a certain kind of upper-middle-class Canadian Liberal, politics isn’t about outcomes, it’s about vibes. It’s about feeling right, looking progressive, and imagining yourself on the right side of history while outsourcing all your material security to American economic and military power. These are the same voters who nodded along when Carney spoke about “de-risking” our relationship with the United States, who applauded when he warned of creeping authoritarianism from Washington. And now they nod along just as enthusiastically when he floats ideas for joint continental defence initiatives, shared strategic supply chains, and deeper financial integration. They are not engaged citizens. They are consumers of political affect — buying whatever narrative makes them feel smart and virtuous in the moment. But the consequences of this self-indulgent politics are real. By campaigning on a lie, Carney squandered the opportunity for a serious, grown-up conversation about our geopolitical future... we got a campaign that pretended Canada could forge a proud, independent foreign policy by sneering at a country we rely on for our trade, our defence, and much of our cultural gravity. And now we’re being quietly ushered into a new phase of integration, not with clarity or consent, but with a shrug and a press release. Carney is at fault for misrepresenting himself. But we should also hold accountable the class of voters, pundits, and strategists who enabled it — who preferred the aesthetics of defiance to the responsibilities of leadership, and who now applaud the very subservience they claimed to abhor. If there is a lesson in all this, it is not that politicians lie. That much is eternal. The lesson is that in modern Canadian politics, the truth isn’t just optional, it’s often irrelevant. Carney’s entire foreign policy posture during the campaign was a mirage, and the people who bought it seem perfectly content with the bait-and-switch, so long as it flatters their self-image. The next election will come. And it, too, will be full of noble-sounding promises and performative outrage. But voters would do well to ask themselves: do I want to be told the truth? Or am I just here to be comforted by the sound of my own values echoing back at me? Because when the consequences finally come knocking, it won’t be enough to blame the man who sold the lie. We’ll have to reckon with the country that wanted to believe it."
Spending Promises May Compound Canada’s Fiscal Challenges - "Canada’s incoming Liberal government has promised considerable fiscal loosening that would exacerbate already expanding fiscal deficits, Fitch Ratings says. Canada’s credit strengths offer significant headroom to weather a fiscal or economic shock, but increased structural deficits would pressure its credit profile... Canada has experienced rapid and steep fiscal deterioration, driven by a sharply weaker economic outlook and increased government spending during this electoral cycle... In the two decades prior to the pandemic, GG deficits averaged 0.4% of GDP. Excluding the three outlier years, the average GG balance was a small surplus 0.3% of GDP. Implementing the Liberal platform would increase GG deficits to 3.1% in FY25 and 3.2% in FY26. If the Liberal program is implemented, higher deficits are likely to increase GG gross debt (GGGD, which includes federal, provincial and local debt) to above 90% of GDP, although the platform commits to a reduction in debt-to-GDP over the budget horizon. Economic weakness and prior fiscal loosening have already shifted our prior baseline forecast upward from 82% to just under 90% for 2025, nearly double the ‘AA’ median of 50.6%"
This didn't stop left wingers claiming that debt wasn't a problem
Meme - "Remember when Liberals said that Mark Carney's connection to Europe would help us take on the United States? Now Carney is mad because the UK extended a second state visit offer to Trump despite Carney saying he was "quite clear about the issues around sovereignty." THIS GUY IS TOTAL FRAUD! SOURCE: CBC News, May 14, 2025"
Meme - "IMAGINE VOTING FOR THE SECOND PLANE
NINE YEARS OF TRUDEAU *World Trade Center building on fire*
CARNEY *second plane*"
Restored John A. statue could be beginning of end for history purge - "Tuesday’s speech from the throne, read by King Charles III, is actually one of the few ways to divine what the Carney government intends to do, since the prime minister has dispensed with the usual indicators such as a budget or specific mandate letters. It may also be notable for what it didn’t contain...
Any mention whatsoever of oil and gas. Or pipelines, for that matter. All it does is repeat a Liberal campaign pledge to make Canada the “world’s leading energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy.”
It was only six months ago that the Liberal party was polling at historic lows due in large part to the refusal of then prime minister Justin Trudeau to resign. As was frequently noted at the time, the Liberals could have easily swapped out their unpopular leader much earlier if only they’d bothered to sign on to the Reform Act, a piece of legislation that gives the caucus enhanced powers to trigger a leadership review. With the start of a new Parliament, the Liberals had a fresh opportunity to subscribe to the terms of the Reform Act and avoid any future debacles with leaders who refuse to leave. They decided “no.”"
Liberals finally manage a serious throne speech: Ivison - "With the limited amount of daylight allowed to alight on the magic of the monarchy, it is hard to tell, but the King and Queen Camilla appeared genuinely pleased to be in Ottawa. Charles was certainly more engaged than his late father, who on the 1969 inauguration of an annex to Vancouver City Hall, once said: “I declare this thing open — whatever it is”... It promised a “fundamentally different approach to governing,” focusing on seven priorities: a new economic and security relationship with the U.S.; removing barriers to interprovincial trade; bringing down costs for Canadians; making housing more affordable; protecting Canadian sovereignty by strengthening the armed forces; reducing immigration levels to “sustainable” levels; and spending less on government operations. It is instructive to compare this throne speech to its predecessor from 2021, when the Trudeau government’s focus was on government-mandated vaccines, fighting climate change by capping oil and gas emissions, increasing the carbon tax, mandating the sale of electric-vehicles and strengthening gun control. “Equity, justice and diversity are the means and ends of living together. Fighting systemic racism, sexism, discrimination, misconduct and abuse, including in our core institutions will remain a priority,” the 2021 speech said. “This is the moment to fight for a more secure, just and equitable world.” It was an agenda that helps explain many of the divisions that have split the country. Carney’s concerns are more explicitly on the sustainability of social programs that have been undermined by weak productivity and stretched government finances. His mandate letter suggested that the government remains committed to Indigenous reconciliation, fighting climate change and celebrating diversity. But the focus is almost exclusively economic. One concern remains the weight of expectation being placed on ministers who have mixed (or worse) track records."
Jesse Kline: Mark Carney fast tracks the road to serfdom - "While he promised to work “with the provinces, the territories and Indigenous peoples to identify and expedite nation-building projects,” the catch is that they will have to be deemed to be “in the national interest” by the Liberal brain trust, along with provincial and Aboriginal leaders who represent a host of often competing interests throughout this geographically and culturally diverse country. To be in the “national interest,” Carney said that prospective projects will have to “strengthen the Canadian economy, strengthen our autonomy, our resilience, our security, providing undeniable benefits to Canada, have a high likelihood of successful execution, be a high priority for Indigenous leaders and … drive Canada’s clean growth potential.” Which pretty much gives politicians license to reject any project for any reason at all... it’s hard to imagine too many businesses risking their time, energy and capital when they know their investment could be flushed down the drain if the mandarins in the Canadian politburo think it doesn’t meet Carney’s criteria of being “in the national interest,” having sufficient “Indigenous participation, advancing clean energy” and providing “material benefits to Canadians.” These may be slightly different priorities than those contained within the Trudeau government’s Impact Assessment Act , which impedes major infrastructure projects by placing onerous requirements on developers, but they are vague and broad enough that they could be used to kibosh just about anything... Indigenous participation should be limited to the bands that have legal title over the affected areas, not those that claim them as their “unceded,” “ancestral” or “traditional” lands. Regulations should ensure that the natural environment isn’t being polluted and that reasonable measures are being taken to limit greenhouse gas emissions, but the extent of Carney’s commitment to pipelines was to say that there are “opportunities” for “ an oil pipeline” (singular), but within “the broader context of national interest, the interest is in … decarbonized barrels” (whatever that means). And saying that a project has a “high likelihood” of success should simply mean that a company thinks it’s economically viable without a government backstop, as the last thing we need is for our heavily indebted federal government to step in to buy another pipeline. Requiring new infrastructure to be “strategic” and in the “national interest” should be reserved for public works projects built with taxpayer funds. Unfortunately, Carney is conflating private and public infrastructure, ensuring that governments will continue to centrally plan our economy, rather than unleashing the full potential of the free market. And as we know from experience, when decisions such as these are made based on politics, rather than economics, everyone tries to get a piece of the pie. Immediately following the first ministers’ meeting, Quebec Premier François Legault attempted to dampen expectations over an east-west pipeline, with his office saying that, “Quebec would have to benefit if such a project were to move forward.” B.C. Premier David Eby has also been noncommittal about the prospects of another pipeline to the West Coast in recent weeks. These two provinces have long stood in the way of getting Alberta bitumen to tidewater, and if Carney can’t convince them to get past their banana republic mindset, it will likely limit future pipelines to the Port of Churchill or the Far North, which present their own set of challenges. Meanwhile, the war drums of Indigenous opposition are already being heard. Late last week, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak insisted that “free, prior and informed consent” be given by First Nations before infrastructure projects can go ahead, while threatening “conflict and protracted litigation” if it’s not. And on Monday, the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations complained that it wasn’t given sufficient representation at the first ministers’ meeting, while demanding that the federal government repeal the natural resources transfer acts of 1930, which gave Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba control of their resources, as the Constitution intended. If there’s one thing practically everyone seems to agree on it’s that the status quo is unsustainable and Canada needs to take steps to improve its economy. But at the moment, Carney seems to be falling into the classic Canadian trap, in which idealism stands in the way of progress and attempts to satisfy competing interests ensure that nothing of significance ever gets built... Unless Carney is able to narrowly define the national interest as anything that’s good for the Canadian economy — a rising tide, after all, lifts all boats — and uses his bully pulpit to prevent other levels of government from standing in the way of what needs to be done, very little is likely to change."