PQ would block high-speed rail link from Quebec City to Toronto, wants federal money instead - "A Parti Québécois government would block Ottawa’s high-speed rail ambitions, PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said Tuesday, calling on the federal government to instead hand the province billions of dollars to spend on its infrastructure needs. The PQ “has fought waste for years”... “I can’t justify to Quebecers that their money would be invested in a colossal project that, according to studies, would have little impact on road traffic and strongly risks becoming an enormous financial fiasco.”... “We don’t have the luxury, nor the interest, in potentially paying $200 billion for a train for which the primary objective is a desire for ‘nation building’ and reinforcement of Canadian unity by the federal Liberal government,” the PQ leader wrote on X. St-Pierre Plamondon’s $200-billion figure is sourced from a Bloc Québécois estimate, which is far higher than the $60 billion to $90 billion Alto says it needs to build the project. The Bloc and the federal Conservatives also oppose Alto. Working from the $200-billion estimate, the PQ argues Ottawa should cancel the project and fork over $40 billion to Quebec, which it says could go toward schools, hospitals, roads and public transit... “The priority has to be fixing what we already have,” Arseneau said, calling on governments to “stop cutting ribbons” for new projects and instead invest in existing infrastructure."
Left wingers are forever complaining about investment, wanting to blow the money on endless social programs instead, for which no amount of spending will ever be enough (since they think all social problems can be solved by spending more money, and social problems will never all be solved).
Left wingers tell us that public transit always reduces traffic, so this must be wrong
Quebec would withdraw from high-speed rail project if PQ forms next government, party leader says - ""The real problem with transit is not that Quebecers can't efficiently commute to Toronto, but that they're unable to effectively commute within their own city," the party leader wrote in French on X... St-Pierre Plamondon said he's concerned the project could cost far more than that, pointing to a Bloc Québécois estimate of $200 billion for the project. If that ends up being accurate, Quebec could end up paying $40 billion — roughly the province's contribution to federal revenues, the party said."
The $90B high-speed-rail money pit is collapsing in on itself: Selley | National Post - " “We don’t have the luxury, or the interest, in potentially paying $200 billion for a train for which the primary objective is a desire for ‘nation building’ and reinforcement of Canadian unity by the federal Liberal government,” PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon wrote on social media this week, citing a cost estimate from the Bloc. (The official, utterly unserious estimate — based on per-kilometre building costs in Europe, which are far lower than in North America — is $60 to $90 billion.) Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon went so far this week as to say, “there is no Alto project without Quebec,” which was somewhat odd since the government also insists it’s a purely federal project, a “project of national interest” no less, requiring no money from the province (except in taxes, of course). If provinces have a veto over projects of national interest, it doesn’t augur particularly well for Ottawa’s new pipeline deal with Alberta... To be fair to the flummoxed, the PQ and Bloc used to be on board. Since then, however, the Alto high-speed rail consortium put a remarkably preliminary “plan” out for public consultation. It included a map of potential routes that included vast swathes of central Ontario and Quebec’s North Shore. In so doing they essentially invited landowners to fear the worst — not least in Mirabel, north of Montreal, where landowners haven’t even slightly gotten over the land expropriations necessary to build the ill-fated airport of the same name in the 1970s. Opposing farmers is usually bad politics. I doubt your average farmer dislikes the project because it might build “Canadian unity,” though. That was a typically petulant, silly Plamondon flourish: I don’t wish to be part of this country, therefore I oppose any project that might strengthen it!... Canada’s “infrastructure gap” is legendary. If we had $90 billion plus massive overruns to spend on infrastructure — we don’t, but if we did — it would very obviously be more logical to spend it on building, upgrading and maintaining local and regional transit. There are alternatives to high-speed rail, for those who need to get between Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City. The alternatives for those who don’t want to waste hours of productivity per week stuck in traffic remain too few and often uncompelling. It takes an hour and 40 minutes to get from Barrie, Ont. to Toronto’s Union Station on the GO train. That’s 85 kilometres, as the crow flies. Abysmal. Meanwhile, outside cities, the alternatives for those who don’t want to waste productivity stuck behind 15 trucks on a two-lane section of the Trans-Canada Highway are often none. To which high-speed rail supporters will wail, “we can do both!” And it’s true, in theory. But no in practice. And we always have to prioritize. Why would we put high-speed rail at the front of the queue, when our existing infrastructure deficit is so large and universally acknowledged?"
ALTNO — Residents Opposing the ALTO High Speed Rail | Facebook - "The Ontario NDP want to get the PM involved to stop the expansion of Billy Bishop Airport. I wonder what their thoughts are on ALTO? I'm guessing not much since most of the disruption is outside of the GTA and the GRA seem to be the only thing the two opposition parties will speak out about."
LezDOit on X - "Also the same people that demand this project are losing their shit over the Billy Bishop airport expansion. Don't expropriation my land but fuck everyone else along the rail line"
Alto project: Quebec, Ontario farmers protest high-speed rail - "Quebec and Ontario farmers met up on the Alexandra bridge linking their two provinces before marching to Parliament Hill Wednesday, as they joined forces against a high-speed train. Their goal is to derail the federal government’s Alto project, which would serve as a quick link in the Toronto-Quebec City corridor. They say their opposition movement is growing, with farmers fearing they will lose their land and part of their livelihood. “I am the seventh generation working on my family farm and the train is not good for the next generations,” Anthony Lalonde, a 17-year-old from St-Placide, Que., told CTV News. “It can destroy agriculture.”... In Mirabel, Que., many fear history is repeating itself and opposition is particularly fierce. In 1969, more than 97,000 acres of farmland were expropriated in the region to make way for an airport terminal inaugurated by then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau that never took off. A large section of the land was never used, and after several years of a bitter legal battle, several plots were returned to owners who had been forced to sell family farms. About 230 protestors from Mirabel boarded buses to Ottawa to show their opposition. Among them Sylvain Ethier, who says a rail line along the proposed route could section off portions of his land and the city of Mirabel. “I was nine years old when I started to hear the word expropriation,” said Ethier. “Now more than 50 years later, we don’t want to live through all this again. The government destroyed homes and family farms, we don’t want to re-live that history.” He now drives the tractor his father took to protest expropriation to make way for the airport more than five decades ago, to protest expropriation to make way for a high-speed train. Alto has started to survey land along the proposed path to determine the best route, and Ethier says he received an envelope with information that he barely read and put aside. “If they come to my door, they will stay outside,” he said. “It’s an insult for me to have to think about expropriation again after all we have been through.” Mirabel municipal councillor Robert Charron says the federal government has set up rules that he says exclude fair negotiations for farmers. While Ottawa has billed the project as boosting Canadian unity, he says farmers are uniting against Alto. “The image that the government is giving to the farmers is that we are like ancient people that are against being modern,” he said. “We’re not against having a better transport system. But not the way they’re doing it.” He also says Ottawa must be mindful that in its quest to go full steam ahead with the project, it could inflame tensions in Mirabel, where farmers remember the pain of expropriations."
Grassroots protests are only good if they push the left wing agenda (like blocking the Spadina Expressway in Toronto)
Rachel Gilmore on X - "The Shopify CEO is an all time loser, up there with Elon. Just a mortifying wealth glutton. You can’t “make” this much money. You can only steal the fruits of others’ labour. The fact that billionaires exist — while Canadians can’t afford groceries — is a societal failure"
Jonathan Kay on X - "“Wealth glutton” is the term used by a certain kind of downwardly mobile Canadian ex-journalist to describe what normal people call “successful “"
Richard Klagsbrun on X - "Evidently, local socialist imbeciles and antisemites have it in for Shopify because it was created by Jews who support Israel."
Venture capital investment in Canadian growth-stage firms fell to near zero in latest quarter, report says - The Globe and Mail - "New venture capital investment for growth-stage companies in Canada fell to near zero in the first quarter of 2026, according to a report from the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association... the report showed a total of $936-million in venture capital for all stages invested over 104 deals during the quarter. That was the smallest deal count for a quarter since 2017."
How ignorant. Don't they know that Mark Carney is a genius and hugely successful in unleashing Canada's potential
Meme - "Unbelievable new RBC report: Between 2015-2024, more than $1 trillion in investment exited Canada, making it the largest capital exodus in Canadian history. This is the record of the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney."
"The Growth Project. Jordan Brennan and Farhad Panahov. RBC Capital Gains: How Canada can unlock the $1.8 trillion it needs for growth. Canada is emerging from an unprecedented capital recession. The renewed interest comes after a decade of weak business investment, stalling productivity, and stagnating living standards. Between 2015 and 2024, more than $1 trillion of investment exited Canada-the largest capital exodus in Canadian history. For every dollar of inward FDI, two dollars exited."
Clearly investment is low because it's all going into housing even with the fall in house prices so the solution is to end the financialisation of housing
John Barlow on X - "Wow. An RBC report shows that under the Liberals more than $1 trillion dollars in investments fled Canada between 2015-2024. The largest capital exodus in Canadian history. To put this perspective, Canadian companies attract only 3% of global capital in the agri-food sector, compared to 33% for the US. Industrial carbon taxes, food packaging taxes, clean fuels regulations, fertilizer reduction plans, mandatory food labelling policies are all driving away investments in agriculture. This is what 10 years of Liberal mismanagement looks like."
Meme - Michael A. Arouet: "This chart is simply insane. Isn't it funny that the vast majority of Canadians seriously blame the US for Canada's lost decade with no growth since 2015? Folks, your choices, your consequences. Don't blame others for your bad judgment."
"BAD POLICIES. DIRE CONSEQUENCES. While the U.S. invested and grew, Canada fell behind. INVESTMENT IN INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY AND EQUIPMENT (VOLUMES)
Strong policies attract investment. Bad policies drive it away."
The Food Professor on X - "Rob Carrick, a columnist for the Globe and Mail, supports the idea of opening government-owned grocery stores on the premise that “we’ve tried everything else and it didn’t work.” Well, have we? Interprovincial trade barriers are still there. Supply management is still there. The industrial carbon tax is still there. Our poor logistics are still there. Retail price distortions are still there. The overwhelming red tape is still there. Tried everything? Not quite."
SJ on X - "My wife and I returned from the States this past Saturday after spending six months there getting away from the cold and snow. We went to Coscto on Monday and were shocked on the prices of goods in Canada compared to the States. I'm talking about food items that people need to use/consume in order to live. Throw in alcohol and it's insane how much we as Canadians pay. The only items that seem to be around the same price are chips/chocolate. Prior to coming back to Canada, I bought some diesel oil for my truck. The cost at Walmart in the US, $24 USD, which equals $32.62 Canadian. The cost at Canadian Tire for the EXACT same oil and quantity, $65. While I understand that overhead/labour/etc costs in Canada are higher, there is no way that double the cost can be justified. The problem is that so many "elbows up" Canadians have never left Canada or travelled so they think that Canada is such a great country, when in reality it is severely lacking in so many ways. BTW the US is a great place to visit. Friendly people and never once did we feel unsafe. Don't let the Liberals and legacy media tell you otherwise."
You're only allowed to try things that push the left wing agenda
We're still told that the Globe and Mail is "centre-right"
B.C. court being asked to throw out approval of $12B gas pipeline | Vancouver Sun - "A Gitxsan hereditary chief and environmental groups are challenging a 2025 B.C. decision that kept a long-delayed 750-kilometre natural gas pipeline alive. After a five-year extension to an environmental approval certificate was granted in 2019, the northern B.C. pipeline had to be “substantially started” — meaning moving beyond planning into actual development, such as land clearing — by November 2024. The province announced in June 2025 the pipeline had met that threshold. If the Nisga’a Nation-backed $12-billion pipeline project had lost its environmental certificate, it would have had to undertake a completely new environmental review. That would have been a major obstacle for the $10-billion Ksi Lisims LNG project, a floating liquefied natural gas facility the pipeline is to supply. The proposed LNG project located in a remote area north of Prince Rupert will super cool gas delivered from northeastern B.C. for transport on ships to Asian markets. It was added to Canada’s major projects fast-track list last November. Two weeks have been set aside for hearings in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver, which started Monday, for the challenges to the “substantially started” status. Separate Gitxsan and environmental group challenges are being heard at the same time... Recently, the B.C. government announced the Ksi Lisims LNG project would be a major customer of a new $6-billion B.C. Hydro transmission line. The province is promising to deliver electricity equivalent to half the output of B.C. Hydro’s Site C dam to the proposed LNG project by 2030. The transmission line project is also on Canada’s fast-track project list, created to accelerate economic growth and lessen dependence on the U.S. after it imposed trade tariffs in spring 2025."
Clearly, no one wanting to build a pipeline because of regulatory uncertainty and mounds of red tape shows that the government should do nothing to encourage one, because the Free Market has spoken!
Martin Pelletier on X - "TD report on CANADA's BRAIN DRAIN is really interesting.
Canada is quietly losing its top talent to the United States in what economists call a silent brain drain. While Canada does a strong job educating highly skilled workers in STEM, engineering, and entrepreneurship, it struggles to keep them due to higher taxes that kick in at much lower income levels, limited opportunities to scale companies, weaker commercialization of ideas, and much better pay and growth potential south of the border.
-> Talent leaves mainly through temporary US work visas rather than permanent moves
-> Outflows are heavily concentrated among the highest skilled, especially in tech and advanced degrees
-> Onward migration is worst among immigrants and top university graduates
-> Canada has a missing middle of medium sized firms, relying instead on many tiny businesses and a few large ones
-> Personal tax rates often exceed 50 percent in major provinces and apply at much lower thresholds than in the US
-> Complex corporate tax rules push entrepreneurs toward tax planning instead of growth
All of this weakens productivity, innovation, and domestic returns on education, making Canada a feeder system for the US economy REPORT: https://economics.td.com/ca-silent-brai"
Think chicken prices are high now? Just wait until this summer - "Canadians are paying record prices for chicken while importing massive quantities of foreign poultry, mostly from the United States... Over the past year, Canada imported roughly 200 to 215 million kilograms of chicken overall, enough for approximately 1.3 to 1.4 billion meals. About 60% came from the United States. Most Canadians likely have no idea how often they may already be consuming imported chicken in nuggets, deli meats, frozen meals, restaurant sandwiches, soups, and prepared foods. Under supply management, Canadians were promised something very different: stable supply, mostly domestic production, and predictable prices. Instead, Canada now faces one of the tightest chicken markets in decades. Industry sources indicate Canada’s chicken sector has underproduced relative to allocation targets in 12 of the last 14 production periods dating back to March 2024 — something many insiders say has never happened in the modern history of supply management. Meanwhile, retailers increasingly rely on chicken to offset high beef prices, intensifying demand pressures throughout the system. The contrast with the United States is striking. American wholesale boneless skinless chicken breast prices recently fell to roughly US$1 per pound. In Canada, comparable wholesale prices have reportedly climbed near $13/kg. The price spread has become so extreme that importers are now bringing chicken into Canada over the 249% tariff wall and still making money doing so. That should alarm policymakers. Historically, importing over the tariff wall only occurred during extraordinary shortages. The fact that it is happening again, barely a year after the same phenomenon emerged in 2025, suggests something deeper is wrong structurally. The most revealing part of the current market is not the official quota imports themselves, but the explosion in supplementary permits. CARI data shows “Chicken to Compete” permits are up more than 876% year-to-date. These permits are intended to serve as a pressure valve when domestic supply cannot adequately meet market demand... What makes the situation more frustrating is that the policy tools to address this problem already exist. Canada has mechanisms allowing supplemental imports during shortage-driven pricing events. Competition Bureau Canada, the Farm Products Council of Canada, and Global Affairs Canada all possess some authority to intervene or facilitate temporary relief measures. Yet there appears to be little political appetite to acknowledge publicly that a supply shortage exists. Meanwhile, consumers continue paying more. None of this is an argument against Canadian poultry farmers. Many are highly efficient producers operating within a framework designed by policymakers decades ago. But the framework itself increasingly appears incapable of adapting quickly to population growth, shifting protein demand, international trade realities, and changing consumer purchasing behaviour. Chicken has become Canada’s affordability protein. As beef prices remain elevated, middle-class consumers naturally trade down toward poultry. But when the system cannot respond flexibly enough to rising demand, shortages emerge, imports surge, and prices escalate simultaneously. That is precisely what Canadians are witnessing today. If Canada intends to maintain supply management, then policymakers and industry leaders must be willing to confront uncomfortable realities honestly and transparently. Denial is not a production strategy. Otherwise, Canada risks drifting toward the worst possible outcome: some of the highest chicken prices in the developed world combined with growing dependence on foreign supply. That is not food sovereignty. That is policy failure."
Time to rage against US tariffs because they're unfair and attacking Canada, while defending Canadian tariffs because so few people want bad and unhealthy US food that it needs to be made expensive to stop people buying it. Clearly, tariffs need to be raised to protect Canadians and supply management needs to be expanded to grow the agricultural sector to improve the market, since we are told that supply management protects food producers from volatility!
Child-care money shouldn’t be funding the revolution | Financial Post - "How do hundreds of thousands of tax dollars, including for anti-racism and child-care inclusion training, end up in the hands of a radical anti-Israel, anti-capitalist activist group in Prince Edward Island? These are the sorts of unhappy questions that arise when trying to follow the tens of billions of additional dollars governments have poured into child care since the federal government’s national child-care program launched in 2021... while the provincial government said it cannot afford the $1.4 million for staff funding, its child-care spending plans for the past year included a combined $1.25 million for administration (such as IT costs) and diversity and inclusion programs. This is what happens when the government takes over a sector: more money for bureaucrats and pet projects and less for actually providing services. The P.E.I. government’s plan says its inclusion strategy included consultations with various organizations, including one called BIPOC USHR (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour United for Strength, Home, Relationship), which the provincial government has funded and partnered with prolifically in recent years. In the past, for example, the government paid BIPOC USHR to deliver a series of anti-racism workshops to child-care workers and Department of Education and Lifelong Learning staff. The benefits of such anti-racism training are dubious, especially when you consider the list of “educational resources” on BIPOC USHR’s website, including such titles as “Information on the Hamas Charter,” “Zionism is white supremacy,” and “Kwame Ture on Zionism and Imperialism.” I learn from Wikipedia that Kwame Ture once said in a speech, “I have never admired a white man, but the greatest of them, to my mind, was Hitler.” But Kwame Ture apparently considered other white men great, too, because the “educational resource” on the BIPOC USHR website is a video clip which begins with him referring to “that great man, V.I. Lenin.” (Vladimir Lenin’s middle name was Ilyich). Meanwhile, the “Information on the Hamas Charter” resource is an Instagram video in which a lady says she does not excuse Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, then goes on to excuse it by insisting Hamas is not antisemitic and does not hate Jews, but is simply fighting Zionism. A video about how Hamas is not antisemitic is not education. It is stupidity. Also according to its website, “BIPOC USHR recognizes intertwined systems of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy that actively work to undermine the overall well-being and achievements of BIPOC communities.” More nonsense. Economic evidence — notably the pioneering work of Gary Becker, which won him the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics — has shown capitalism and free markets reduce racism, not increase it. So prolifically has the P.E.I. government funded BIPOC USHR that the 2022 and 2025 provincial budget addresses both highlighted government funding for it. It has received money not just for child-care anti-racism training, but also hundreds of thousands in handouts from P.E.I. taxpayers for climate change projects, diversity and inclusion programs, and on at least four separate occasions, anti-racism initiatives. When BIPOC USHR isn’t taking money from the provincial government, it is taking it from the federal government. Since 2022, Ottawa has given it at least six grants totalling $306,829, most recently a $90,000 handout last year for — of course! — anti-racism programs. Whether these taxpayer dollars were used to teach people that capitalism is racist or that Hamas isn’t is worth looking into. Returning to the issue of child-care spending, the P.E.I. government’s spending plans included, in addition to this diversity and inclusion spending of dubious value, administration costs for communication and promotional materials, research studies, nine administrative staff, travel costs, materials and technology expenses. But, evidently, not enough money for child-care support staff. Such is the messy world of government spending, made much messier by the dramatic expansion of government control over child care since 2021. Unfortunately, whether it’s for child care, anti-racism programs, or anything else, the track record of governments seems always to be one of sending taxpayers’ money to all the wrong places."
This is why left wingers want a huge state - so they can divert money to push the left wing agenda. But if you question public spending, you're a bad and cruel person who wants to starve the state so it'll collapse
James E. Thorne on X - "For the record. In Canada, It Matters How the Economy Dies. The Canadian economy is dead. It just didn’t die with a crash big enough to satisfy the models. No Lehman moment, no Covid‑style cliff, just two negative quarters of GDP, years of falling output per person, negative productivity, and a private sector slowly strangled by rates and regulation while the establishment insists the patient is “resting.” On the facts, this isn’t ambiguous. Real GDP has contracted for two consecutive quarters on an annualized basis. Labour productivity has been flat or negative since 2021. Real GDP per capita is below its pre‑pandemic level. Ontario has logged its worst non‑pandemic quarterly job losses since the mid‑1970s. The only consistent growth is in government payrolls and compliance, not in private enterprise and investment. If that isn’t recessionary, the word is meaningless. And yes Macklem threatens rate hikes through all of this insanity. Yet Canada’s official guardians insist nothing fundamental has broken. The C.D. Howe recession‑dating committee says the downturn is not “pronounced, persistent, and pervasive” enough. The central bank warns against overreacting to “technical” weakness. Bay Street talks about “soft landings” and “resilience.” In some quarters, the answer to this slow‑motion collapse is not relief, but further rate hikes. Ignore the body on the table, we are told, the vital signs aren’t quite bad enough yet to fill out the certificate. Their rulebook was built for heart attacks, not cancers. It excels at spotting sudden collapses in aggregate GDP and jobs. It barely registers slow organ failure: a few tenths off real GDP per capita each year, productivity edging down, ugly quarters for private‑sector employment and capex offset by public hiring. None of that triggers the old alarms until the damage is permanent. Meanwhile, Canada has been busy throwing away the advantages that once justified its prosperity. Energy and resource projects are stalled or strangled. Business investment per worker trails peers. A country rich in capital, talent, and geography behaves as if it can live forever off inherited endowments while making it harder to build anything new. That is not “resilience.” It is delusion. Canada’s economic establishment needs to wake up. Two negative quarters of GDP, negative productivity, falling GDP per person, historic job losses in the core province, a suffocated private sector and calls for more tightening on top, are not signs of an economy “cooling toward trend.” They are signs of an economy that has already crossed the line from stagnation into decay. The Canadian economy is dead in the way that matters: as an engine of rising living standards and a place where private capital is rewarded for building the future. It just didn’t die loudly enough for the old definitions. The real question now is not what we call it, but how long our institutions will keep pretending the corpse is “resilient.”"
