Via Rail subsidiary paid Quebec marketing firm $330K as it pivoted to high-speed rail - "A federal Crown corporation paid more than $330,000 to an outside marketing firm to rebrand a planned passenger rail project between Toronto and Quebec City and boost its popularity. Documents obtained by The Canadian Press detail how the corporation, concerned about “widespread disinterest” in a high-frequency rail corridor announced in 2021, decided to change its name and pivot to high-speed rail instead... With the firm’s help, the corporation came up with a new logo and a new name – Alto – more than a year ago. The rebranding was apparently so sensitive that the Crown corporation also chose a code name for Alto. Multiple documents, obtained using access-to-information law, refer to the new name as “Tracks.”... “The concept of ‘high frequency’ faces strong opposition. There’s widespread disinterest and dissatisfaction associated with the term, hindering any meaningful discussions and support. This resistance has become particularly challenging to navigate as the term ‘high frequency’ is directly embedded in the (corporation’s) name,” reads an undated briefing note written in late 2023 or early 2024. It goes on to say that discussions of higher speed “are met with openness,” which would lead to “greater project support and acceptance.” It adds that the VIA HFR name should be changed early in the process, while the public’s awareness of the project is “relatively low.”... Ryan Katz-Rosene, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa who studies high-speed rail, said it’s “concerning” to see the Crown corporation focus on “how to maximize the marketing appeal” of the project instead of “trying to address very specific challenges in the transport sector.” He said a big problem the high-frequency plan sought to fix was the fact that VIA Rail currently has to schedule passenger trains around freight trains sharing the same tracks. Building new, dedicated tracks would have removed a major obstacle to improved service, he said – regardless of speed. But a high-speed rail line could cost double the price of the high-frequency option, Katz-Rosene said, and is therefore less likely to get built... An internal presentation from August 2024 cites public opinion research showing that people preferred a higher-speed rail line, despite the added cost. “We must continue to shift away from the high frequency narrative to keep the public and stakeholders engaged,” it reads. According to the documents, the corporation in September 2023 asked the three groups qualified to bid on building the project to “propose a second option without speed limitations.” Katz-Rosene said it’s not surprising that people would choose high speed over high frequency. But a high-speed rail project will face substantial political challenges, he said, including the fact that Western Canada may balk at the idea of paying billions of dollars to build a rail corridor for Quebec and Ontario. “I don’t think anyone has a really good handle on how much this is actually going to cost,” he said, adding that the “sticker shock” could eventually kill the project. “You just know it’s going to be a hot political issue.”"
Opinion: High-speed rail project just an expensive fairy tale - "The government claims the project will create up to 51,000 jobs during its construction and boost Canadian GDP by up to $35 billion annually. The project will only become profitable after $53 billion in subsidies and 44 years of operation, according to research from McGill University . That $53 billion is close to how much Ottawa takes from taxpayers through the GST in a year. That’s a money pit, not an investment. And those jobs come with a massive price tag. Each of the 51,000 jobs costs about $1.7 million and many of them won’t be around after construction ends. A $35-billion annual increase in GDP amounts to about a two per cent GDP increase in Ontario and Quebec. That’s about those provinces’ projected combined GDP growth this year. That means the government is saying that this train would essentially double the GDP growth of Ontario and Quebec this year if it was completed. From seven stops... Only one out of three people surveyed in the area said they would take the train more than once per year. That’s not enough riders to justify the cost. And then there’s the land issue. High-speed trains need straight tracks. That means the government is going to cut roads in half and take land from people who don’t want to sell. “If people are reluctant, there is of course some recourse with the expropriation process that could happen,” said Martin Imbleau, CEO of Alto, the crown corporation in charge of the project. “A train that runs at 320 km/h cannot have curves. It has to be very, very straight, so of course we’ll need to buy a significant portion of land, and compensation will be a big issue.” And other similar projects are known for coming in severely over budget and behind schedule. The California High Speed Rail project was projected to cost $46 billion in 2008. Now almost two decades later the cost has ballooned to $174 billion and not a single piece of track has been laid. The United Kingdom’s high-speed rail line called HS2 was projected to cost $59 billion in 2011. The latest numbers show the budget is more than $148 billion. And it won’t open for almost another 10 years. The same story has played out here at home. The Ontario government announced it would build a light rail line across Toronto, the Ontario Line, for $10.9 billion. But costs ballooned to $27.2 billion before a single track was laid. Expecting the federal government to buck the trend and build the Alto line within budget is laughable. The federal government has a bad track record when it comes to managing projects. It wasted $60 million on a broken ArriveCan app that was supposed to cost $80,000. Now it wants to manage a $90-billion rail project? It’s a project that taxpayers can’t afford. The federal government is borrowing about $78 billion this year. The federal debt will reach $1.35 trillion by the end of the 2025-2026 fiscal year. Debt interest payments are costing taxpayers $55.6 billion this year. That’s more than the government collects through the GST."
Canada is losing its entrepreneurs—and barely anyone is talking about it - "Self-employment now accounts for just 12.8 percent of total employment, the lowest share in 45 years. The absolute number of self-employed Canadians sits at roughly 2.7 million, essentially unchanged from 17 years ago despite substantial population growth. When measured against the total population, the share of Canadians working for themselves has steadily contracted. These figures mask an even sharper reality. Self-employment includes everyone from ambitious founders building scalable firms to professionals working solo gigs. What matters for economic dynamism is the former: businesses with employees, growth ambitions, and the capacity to challenge incumbents. On this measure, the collapse is striking. The number of self-employed Canadians with paid employees per thousand working-age adults fell 57 percent between 2000 and 2022, dropping from 3.0 to just 1.3. Business entry rates tell the same story. In 2023, new firm creation sat at 12.3 percent of all active businesses, well below the 15.2 percent recorded 16 years earlier and a fraction of the nearly 25 percent Canada achieved in the early 1980s. Exits have also declined, pointing to an economy where creative destruction isn’t happening at robust rates. Venture capital investment, often a leading indicator of entrepreneurial ambition, has also cratered. As a share of GDP, it dropped from nearly 0.5 percent in 2021 to 0.2 percent in 2024—a decline of more than half in just three years. Canadian venture funds are struggling to raise capital, and what little they deploy is pooling into a handful of large bets rather than spreading across a broad base of early-stage companies. A recent report from the National Angel Capital Organization quantifies the cost. Canada’s three largest startup ecosystems—Toronto-Waterloo, Vancouver, and Montreal—collectively lost $66 billion in ecosystem value between 2019 and 2024, translating to an estimated 133,000 fewer high-quality startup jobs. While Canadian ecosystems grew at roughly 2 percent annually during this period, leading global peers posted growth rates between 9 and 17 percent. The report identifies an annual funding gap of at least $141 million at the seed and pre-seed stages, with seed rounds in Canada’s major tech hubs running 40 percent smaller than comparable U.S. ecosystems. The exodus to the U.S. compounds the problem. In 2024, for the first time, more Canadian-educated founders who raised significant capital started their companies in the U.S. than in Canada, according to research from Leaders Fund. Only one-third of startups founded by Canadians that raised more than $1 million last year were actually based in Canada, down from two-thirds between 2015 and 2019. Nearly half now operate from the U.S.—double the share from five years ago. Late last month, Y Combinator—a prestigious startup accelerator—struck a nerve in tech circles when it briefly removed Canada from its list of acceptable incorporation jurisdictions. The reversal came within days, but the message had already landed: even Canada’s most promising entrepreneurs are being pulled south by stronger ecosystems, lighter regulatory burdens, and deeper pools of growth capital. The international comparison is sobering. In 2015, OECD data shows Canada created roughly 191,000 new businesses. By 2024, the figure was essentially unchanged at 190,399, despite significant population growth. Over the same period, the U.S. saw business entries rise 34 percent, the United Kingdom 40 percent, and France 86 percent. On a per-capita basis, Canada now generates fewer new businesses than it did a decade ago and trails most of its peers. Without new employer-firm formation, innovation stalls, productivity stagnates, and established players entrench their positions. Canada has many advantages: world-class universities, strong institutions, and access to talent. But advantages don’t automatically translate into outcomes. Estonia, Ireland, Singapore, and Israel all built dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystems through deliberate policy choices: regulatory reform, competitive tax structures, and environments where risk-taking is rewarded rather than punished. Expediting major resource projects matters. But so does generating competitive new firms that challenge incumbents and drive productivity growth. The causes of Canada’s entrepreneurial decline are varied and the solutions complex, but the first step is to recognize we have a problem."
Time to "tax the 'rich'", increase capital gains taxes and introduce more regulations to push the left wing agenda
Michael A. Arouet on X - "Canada and Germany followed similar left path. Choices have consequences, in this case it’s stagnation and impoverishment compared to everyone else. Why do they keep doing it to themselves? Do they enjoy becoming poor?"
paleoneoliberal on X - "Canada's decline is probably the most striking in the West. Not so long ago, Canada used to be a somewhat smarter and more peaceful version of the US, and its economy didn't lag far behind. However, as the woke left took power, the economy experienced a lost decade, housing prices skyrocketed, non-Western immigration exploded, and personal freedoms collapsed. Canada should be a warning, not a model to emulate."
NO WAY!!! It finally happened. The "Holy Grail" of butter just landed at my local Costco and people are already clearing the shelves. : r/CostcoCanada - "Hopefully the US successfully compels Canada to drop supply management as past of CUSMA reviews. It’s absolutely ridiculous that the Canadian consumer is denied choice to inflate the pockets of a small number of primarily Quebec-based dairy farmers. And before someone chimes in with the “but we can’t allow that swill US milk”, no one is forcing you to buy it. Let Canadians have freedom of choice. Here come the downvotes from LPC shills."
Most people in the thread are raving about foreign butter and complaining about local butter but of course to spite the US we must ban all foreign butter. This comment got down voted a lot. Canadians are so insecure
Majority of Canadians believe economy is on the wrong track: poll
Clearly, this has nothing to do with left wing economic policies, Trump is to blame for over a decade of no GDP per capita growth and In Carney We Trust
Vincent Geloso: How taxes and regulations keep people in poverty - "This isn’t the first time we have been faced with something like this. When Ralph Klein became premier of Alberta in the 1990s, he too was faced with a difficult economic and fiscal situation. The road he took to tackle those issues was one involving deregulation, tax cuts, and a reduction in government spending. The outcomes—including the improvement of economic mobility for all Albertans—present a path forward for a future federal government looking to turn things around at the national level. While Alberta is perceived as a low-tax, low-regulation jurisdiction today, in comparison to other Canadian provinces, that wasn’t always the case. When Klein took office in 1992, economic freedom indices placed the province at the higher end, but very much within the pack of Canadian provinces and average American states. At the time, Alberta was running a $2.6-billion deficit. That’s quite significant given that the province’s expenditures were $16.4 billion back then. The provincial government was essentially borrowing one out of every six dollars it spent. Klein’s vision was quite clear from the beginning. He argued that the provincial government had a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Over the next five years, his government would reduce inflation-adjusted spending per person by 32 percent. Simultaneously, it would lighten the regulatory burden imposed on businesses operating in Alberta, most notably in the energy industry. It would also work to get government “out of the business of business,” as Klein liked to say, by removing a number of government monopolies. Following these changes, economic freedom indicators shot up in Alberta, separating it from the pack of Canadian provinces and the average American state. Through empirical analysis, economists have been able to look at the effect these changes had on the poorest Albertans. Essentially, a dataset was created representing what would have happened if those reforms hadn’t taken place, using a combination of other provinces that did not undergo similar changes. We can then compare this counterfactual, business-as-usual scenario with what actually took place. This isolates the effect of the new policies. What we find is that getting government out of the way and reducing its influence over Albertans’ lives was of significant help to the poorest in the province. By 2005, Albertans who were among the lowest 10 percent of income earners could expect their incomes to grow 73 percentage points faster, over the next five years, than they would have without the reform. Of those, about 12 percent more saw their after-tax income at least double over the same period, compared to the business-as-usual scenario. As their incomes grew faster, their chances of reaching another income bracket, as opposed to remaining in the same situation, also increased significantly. On average, those who were in the lowest 10 percent of income earners could expect to jump 8 percentiles further up the income ladder over five years than they would have without the reforms. Essentially, they were less likely to remain among the lowest-paid 10 percent of Albertans than they would have been without the Klein reforms. Some might find this counter-intuitive—after all, isn’t government intervention regularly presented as a way to help those who have the least? But the reason is quite simple. When the Klein government lowered the province’s regulatory burden and reduced its spending, it also allowed a whole slew of new opportunities to emerge. Where a business idea was once impossible, either because a government monopoly made it illegal or the regulatory burden made it uneconomical, it was allowed to flourish once the legislative barriers were removed. And where government spending once required a higher tax burden, making some investments less profitable, those same investments became more appealing once those taxes were lowered. In both cases, there were more opportunities for Albertans, including those at the very bottom of the income ladder. More opportunities mean more ways for everyone to climb up that ladder. While the rest of the country should certainly take note of how Alberta was able to increase income mobility in the 1990s, so should Albertans today, as the province has unfortunately reverted to being within the pack of Canadian provinces and average U.S. states in terms of economic freedom."
This is why left wingers hate Alberta so much
AACE National Launches National Awareness Week to Advocate for Urgent Childcare Reform - "National Awareness Week comes at a critical time, as childcare operators across the country face dire financial strains under the current system. The CWELCC program, while well-intentioned, has placed undue burdens on Canada’s mixed-market childcare providers, many of whom are now at risk of closure due to inadequate funding, excessive bureaucratic burden, and unreasonable policy directives. AACE National believes that reinstating provincial jurisdiction and empowering provincial governments to design childcare solutions tailored to their populations will lead to more sustainable and effective outcomes. “The federal government is putting ideology and policy before children, excluding and discriminating against the very women-led entrepreneurs who have been relied upon to serve the majority of Canada’s families for the past several decades,” Churcher added. “By forcing an inflexible, one-size-fits-all public centralized system, they are ignoring the voices of parents, educators, and operators—the real stakeholders in childcare."... “The one-size-fits-all funding approach imposed by CWELCC has left rural centres like mine completely out of the equation,” says Anya Kerr, another director of centres in both Alberta and Ontario. “From the current revenue-replacement model to the new cost-based funding model, the unique needs and expenses of centres in remote areas cannot be met. We’ve already had to make cuts to our quality programs, services for families, and nutrition costs, which goes against our founding philosophy. With the proposed changes, we will have to lay off staff who are needed to support inclusion of special needs children and make further cuts to our programs, all of which parents have offered to pay for through donations. This completely defeats the purpose of the CWELCC system, with affordability being canceled out by parents asking to cover these ineligible expenses. If none of the key goals of the system are being met, it is a failure for all Canadian families.” “Finding space in daycare has become increasingly difficult; a sentiment echoed by many of my colleagues,” remarks a parent of a child at Stepping Stone Early Learning Academy in Ontario who attended AACE National’s Canada-wide online meeting of 1,200 parents on October 17. “It appears we’ve shifted from one extreme to another. My concern is that, in attempting to address affordability, the daycares themselves may be facing undue strain. The last thing any of us would want is for the quality of care to be compromised, whether through reduced resources, inadequate equipment, or insufficient compensation for staff. It’s imperative that, in making childcare accessible, we ensure the sustainability of the daycare sector so that the well-being of the children and the livelihoods of the employees are not jeopardized.”"
CTV News on X - "#BREAKING: Canada Post reports loss of $1.57 billion in 2025"
Jason YYC on X - "ITS. NOT. A. BUSINESS ITS A SERVICE!!!!!!"
lntuitl0n 🇨🇦 on X - "I fear that Canada post *is* a business - it’s a Crown Corporation that, by law, does not receive regular federal funding and is mandated to be financially self-sustaining. It’s not a mistake to report that it’s operating at a loss"
The Council of Canadians | Facebook - "Canada Post isn't ending door to door delivery to save money. They are cancelling a public service so that a billionaire-backed private company can take over the very lucrative door to door delivery business—which is in higher demand than ever before. To make Canada Post solvent and improve a vital public service, the federal government only has to do one thing: pass legislation to force delivery companies to apply minimal labour standards, environmental regulations, and service standards. But instead, door to door delivery is being handed over to a private company with Liberal ties… that Canada Post helped create! The following helps explain why Mark Carney declared Canada Post "not viable.""
Left wing logic: since Canada Post cannot compete, instead of reforming it so that it can compete, we should cripple competitors instead. Not to mention the usual conspiracy theory about letting "billionaires" profit. But then, these people don't know the difference between door-to-door parcel and door-to-door letter mail delivery, so it's no surprise they don't understand anything else. Unsurprisingly, neither the Facebook post nor the linked article mention the 2025 Kaplan Commission, the 2024 Report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates or the 2016 Canada Post Review Task Force, which all had similar conclusions about Canada Post's financial sustainability
The comments were hilarious. Apparently seniors will die if they don't get their mail at their house instead of a community mailbox (weird how they don't starve to death since apparently they're unable to leave the house). And Canada Post lost $1.57 billion in 2025 because of "13 lifetime appointed VPs thanks to Harper" (the CEO earns $500-600k a year, so even if all 13 earned as much as him, firing all 13 of them and not replacing them would save at most $8 million a year). And that Canada Post should not be a business because it's a service like the military, so the taxpayer needs to subsidise them indefinitely for an indefinite sum of money because unions are good and people should be paid "liveable wages"
Canadians ignore slow economic growth at their peril - " I recently attended a screening by the Montreal Economic Institute of the film “L’Illusion tranquille” — or “The Quiet Illusion,” word-play on the “Quiet Revolution,” the usual term for the transformation of Quebec’s governance in the 1960s. What’s the illusion? Though Quebec views itself as not just distinct but also a model for others to emulate, the reality is its average income lags that of most other states and provinces. Some model! A particularly striking statistic cited in the documentary is Quebec’s ranking near the bottom of GDP per capita among the 60 states and provinces of North America. This is reflected in UQAM Professor Pierre Fortin’s calculation that GDP per capita in neighbouring New York state — $87,000 in 2018 — was almost twice as high as Quebec’s $48,000. (Both numbers are in U.S. dollars at “purchasing power parity.”) When the film’s audience was asked for its post-screening reaction, one comment was that it seemed overly pessimistic. On the contrary, the documentary arguably does not capture the speed at which the U.S. has been pulling away from Canada over the past couple of years in the race to develop and deploy innovative new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence... Canada’s shrinking stature on the international stage was epitomized by recent comments by Bloomberg Surveillance’s co-hosts Jonathan Ferro and Lisa Abramowitz. Their recent interview with Invesco’s Matt Brill (about 90 minutes into the program) focused on Alphabet’s raising funds on European and Canadian markets after tapping the U.S. market three times earlier this year in its apparently insatiable need to fund its investments. Ferro laughingly derided Alphabet’s raising $8.5 billion in the Canadian market as the corporate equivalent of looking for nickels and dimes “under the couch cushions.” Ridicule of Canada’s trivial role in the financial world must be particularly galling for Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, which specializes in corporate deals. The contrast between the United States and Canada couldn’t be more striking. South of the border, technology firms are spending every dollar they can raise. Here firms remain reluctant to invest even with soaring prices for commodities such as minerals and oil. Given the widening gap in investment trends between the two countries, the difference in per capita incomes will only continue to grow. The resulting incentive for our most talented young people to move to the U.S. threatens our future prosperity and sovereignty. In the words of Evsey Domar, author of a seminal 1946 paper on economic growth, “When an aggressive part of the world is strong and quite successfully committed to rapid growth, the other can disregard this objective only if it is tired of its own existence as a society.”"
