Marc Nixon on X - "The Liberals keep bragging about 88,000 jobs. Here's the part they don't want you looking at. Statistics Canada hired roughly 32,000 temporary census workers. Public sector employment jumped. Infrastructure spending funded by taxpayers boosted construction hiring. FIFA-related activity boosted temporary employment. Temporary jobs increased nearly 3x faster than permanent jobs. In other words, the headline says "88,000 jobs." The fine print says "temporary, taxpayer-funded, and seasonal." There's nothing wrong with temporary work. But when temporary jobs become the main engine of growth, that's not an economic boom. That's economic life support."
Four in 10 Canadian manufacturers shifting production to U.S.: survey | National Post - "A third (32 per cent) of respondents reported “higher margins when producing and selling within the U.S. than when exporting from Canada” and slightly more still (35 per cent) attested to “stronger margins on international sales from the U.S.” Outside of the tariffs, other reasons firms are choosing to migrate south are lower operating costs in some states, a more favourable tax environment and easier supply chains if their customers are already in the U.S. Asked what would make them stay, the owners, corporate executives and decision makers of 275 companies polled said certainty around free trade, continued tariff relief, lower corporate taxes, cheaper energy, better access to skilled workers and lower housing costs for workers."
Time to blame the US for left wing policies destroying the Canadian economy
Melissa Lantsman on X - "This should dominate the news: Hiking the industrial carbon tax 19% while Ontario auto shrinks is like raising rent on a building the tenants have already vacated. No EU deal. 5 quarters of falling investment. 40% of manufacturing firms eyeing a move to the US. Ford's plant hasn't shipped a vehicle in 2 years. GM & Stellantis keep cutting. Slow. Quiet. Inevitable. And preventable. Still no deal. No news. No update."
Ottawa signals big spending to lead to growth, but also deficits | National Post - "The federal government plans to pay for its recent big-ticket spending through a combination of economic growth, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said Monday, but signalled that there are plans to take on more debt. Prior to officially kicking off the government’s pre-budget consultations this year, Champagne told reporters in Ottawa that the government is “investing” in the Canadian economy to ensure various new spending items can be justified. He also repeated his argument from recent months that Canada has the strongest fiscal position in the G7, implying that increased deficit spending is affordable... Economists have remained skeptical that the government’s long-term investments will produce short-term gains, and that high-cost projects will be paid for through any means other than increased borrowing. Champagne also cited the benefits of removing interprovincial free trade barriers and strategic defence procurement that improve innovation as ways to boost growth. “We’ll do that in a very smart way.” Though the federal government has already removed the bulk of Ottawa’s barriers to interprovincial trade, the heavy lifting remains with the provinces and territories to remove their barriers, most of whom have been reluctant for decades to do so. And while analysts agree that defence procurement can be done in a way to maximize benefit to the country that is making a major purchase, they say there is little chance of recouping close to the entire expenditure in the short term. Don Drummond, formerly TD Bank’s chief economist and before that a high-ranking official at the Department of Finance, has said that the government seems to be resting its projections on optimistic forecasts for economic growth and labour productivity. With a range of threats on the horizon, such as rising American tariffs, Drummond said Canada could be making itself vulnerable, as was the case from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, when governments continued to assume that stronger growth was just around the corner... While Ottawa has been amassing large piles of debt for more than half a century, it’s taken the habit to new levels over the last few years. The federal government has now accumulated $1.27 trillion in total debt, almost half of which has been added over the last five years. Those figures do not include much of the government’s planned or announced spending for a wide range of expensive projects, including the announcement Monday of a builder for a new fleet of submarines, which are estimate to cost $80 billion. That added to the list of other big-ticket items that Ottawa has already promised... Although Champagne didn’t mention it Monday, the government has also tried to trim spending, although it will not be nearly enough to pay for the new bills. Last year’s budget proposed cutting the federal bureaucracy by about 40,000 jobs through attrition and targeted pink slips. But that only goes part of the way to undoing the dramatic 42 per cent increase of about 110,000 in public service employees between 2015 and 2025."
Regulatory Accumulation, Business Dynamism and Economic Growth in Canada - "Despite their good intent, regulations and their accumulation over time impose real costs to businesses and may have a negative impact on economic growth and competitiveness. Accurately measuring these costs and benefits is important for understanding if regulations are achieving their desired results. This paper uses a new, modelled, measure of regulatory burden developed by KPMG and Transport Canada to inform about the possible overall impact of the changing number of regulations faced by firms on Canadian economic activity. Measuring regulatory burden is complex, and there is not a consensus on the best approach. The novel Transport Canada – KPMG measure is based on counting the number of regulatory provisions in Federal legislation and is one of several aggregate measures of regulatory burden available. It shows that regulatory requirements in Canada rose 2.1% per year from 2006 to 2021. A measure from the US based Mercatus Center that is not as broadly defined showed an increase in the number of provisions rising 1.1% per year over the same period while the OECD measure of product market regulation (PMR) that tracks the stringency, rather than the number, of regulations declined. Using the newly developed Transport Canada – KPMG measure, regression estimates show that regulatory accumulation from 2006 to 2021 is associated with a decline in gross domestic product (GDP) growth by 1.7 percentage points and reduced employment growth by 1.3 percentage points in the business sector. A smaller decline on labour productivity of 0.4 percentage points was also estimated. The business sector investment growth was lowered by an estimated 9.0% (with the effect being bigger for small firms than for large firms) for the period 2006 to 2021 and that regulatory accumulation is associated with lower business entry and exit rates. Understanding economy wide costs and benefits from regulations is challenging. The results of the study provide a first indication for Canada of the estimated impacts of the changing number of regulations over time on businesses. While the results of the study point to potentially important costs for the economy, it is not meant to reflect a full economic assessment of the benefits of regulations nor economic impacts associated with not introducing regulations."
Time for more regulation to boost the economy!
Just how much trouble is Canada's economy in?
Left wingers still insist it's doing great, but dismissing the BBC won't be as easy as dissing non-left wing news sources
James E. Thorne on X - "Canada: Crying Over Spilt Milk in a Self‑Inflicted Stagnation
Canada’s elite have spent a quarter‑century turning a rich, opportunity‑dense economy into a slow‑growth, over‑levered cul‑de‑sac, and they still insist nothing is structurally wrong. There is no sense crying over spilt milk about past mistakes when the architects of this stagnation are still in charge and still in denial. Canada did not just drift into secular stagnation; it embraced a kind of virtue socialism and an industrial policy anchored on climate change targets rather than productive capacity, competitiveness, or growth. An economy built on world‑class natural resources, strategic geography, and human capital has been deliberately downgraded into a housing‑addicted, low‑productivity balance sheet recession risk, and the people who did it still show up on panels calling this “resilience.” For years, Canada’s comparative advantages in energy, resources, and industrial capacity were something to apologize for, regulate to death, or tax into oblivion, while policy and capital chased the illusion that you could mortgage and virtue‑signal your way to prosperity. The result is a country flirting with a liquidity trap, where even lower rates may barely move a real economy suffocated by over‑priced assets, under‑built productive capital, and households too damaged to borrow again. The real scandal is not that Canada faces secular stagnation; it is that the elite engineered it, denied it, wrapped it in climate rhetoric, and now blame external shocks while the data scream that this is a made‑in‑Canada crisis. To be clear, Canada’s problems are not the result of President Trump! If Canada’s elite will not finally admit that decades of attacking its own strengths, worshipping its own bubbles, and treating industrial policy as a morality play have left the country one downturn away from a full balance sheet recession, then they are not guardians of the national interest, they are custodians of decline, and at this point, there really is no sense crying over spilt milk, only over the refusal to fix the mess they made."
Of course, left wingers are very upset that Carney isn't destroying the country as fast as Trudeau was and are still blaming Trump
T.D. Leaker on X - "(The 🍓🍓🍓🤣 at the end)… Karen earns $995 today. Before she sees a penny, roughly $533 disappears in marginal federal and provincial income tax. She fills her tank. Another $15.75 in fuel taxes and HST. She buys a pack of cigarettes. About $10 goes to taxes. A $20 bottle of wine to take the edge off? Another $3+ in taxes and levies. Dinner? $3.90 in HST. Every single month she quietly pays HST on her phone, internet and streaming services. She pays $6,000 a year in property tax just to continue living in a home she already bought with after-tax income. Part of every insurance premium is insurance premium tax. Hidden in almost everything she buys are corporate taxes, commercial property taxes, development charges, licensing fees and tariffs that businesses simply pass along in the price. She books a vacation. Airport Improvement Fees. Security charges. More taxes. She invests what’s left. If it grows, she pays capital gains tax. If it pays dividends, she pays dividend tax. Then one day Karen dies. Her family discovers there isn’t technically a “death tax” in Canada—but her estate is treated as though she sold almost everything the moment she died. Capital gains become taxable, final income tax is due, and in Ontario her estate pays probate fees before her family receives what’s left. Karen’s money was taxed when she earned it, taxed while she spent it, taxed while she invested it, taxed while she owned things, and taxed one final time when she died. But don’t worry. Karen refuses to buy American strawberries because she’s bravely protesting the tariffs the U.S. charges on their imports. After paying roughly $687 in taxes and government fees on a $995 workday, she’s finally taking a stand against someone else’s tax policy. 🇨🇦💪"
Adams on X - "JUST IN🚨: SpaceX is now worth more than Canada."
Gad Saad on X - "There you go. The United States is built on a limitless ethos of entrepreneurship, innovation, and excellence. Canada is built on feminized and "empathetic" parasitic taxation fuelled by envy and resentment toward those who produce."
How the Liberals’ multibillion-dollar tech plan created ‘chaos’ instead of growth - The Globe and Mail - "Canada has been the worst performing advanced economy in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development since 1976. Governments of all partisan stripes have tried and failed to reverse the trend. If nothing changes, the OECD projects, our economic growth per capita will continue to stagnate for decades to come... the federal government invited 40 industry groups to weigh in on its latest big-ticket plan to support Canadian innovation. It was a $1-billion agency announced in the spring budget that would stimulate businesses to spend more on research and development and deliver innovation-led growth. During five roundtable meetings around the end of August, officials with the Innovation, Science and Economic Development department (ISED) asked participants how they thought the proposed Canadian Innovation and Investment Agency (CIIA) could most effectively help businesses increase R&D spending and overcome challenges to growth. Each invitee got about three minutes to speak. Many left unimpressed, according to representatives of six attending organizations who spoke to The Globe and Mail afterward. Several believed ISED had already settled on what the CIIA should look like. To them, the agency didn’t sound any more potentially effective in delivering economic impact than initiatives that had come before... The consensus among many participants was that, after seven years in power and committing billions to supercluster programs and other initiatives including strategies for sectors such as artificial intelligence (AI), Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government had little to show for its efforts to unleash the economic potential of Canadian ingenuity. The new $1-billion agency wouldn’t change that, they felt. “I wasn’t overwhelmed at all by what they were saying,” says attendee Michele Lajeunesse, senior vice-president, government relations and policy with the Information Technology Association of Canada, known as Technation. “I’m not sure why we need yet another agency when money is already being spent in ways that could be better spent. How is this going to differ in terms of its effectiveness? Others haven’t been so effective.” Eye-rolls now greet mentions of the word “innovation” by Ottawa, after years of politicians throwing it around as a buzzword... There are so many innovation programs and agencies that “with everything that’s been announced, it’s impossible to come up with a word other than ‘chaos,’” said Robert Asselin, who was budget director for then Liberal finance minister Bill Morneau, and is now senior vice-president of policy with the Business Council of Canada. “The problem has been mainly a lack of clear objectives” by a government “unclear what kinds of problems they are trying to solve. The government still thinks in terms of programs as opposed to outcomes. It should be outcomes first, then programs and structures to support these outcomes.” Innovation programs, critics say, have been overly politically driven with an attempt to cover too many regions and sectors, and designed by bureaucrats with outdated or underdeveloped notions of how to create economic growth in a knowledge economy. “Canadian policy makers have spent the past three decades confusing innovation with invention, a science-and-technology strategy with an innovation strategy, intellectual property generation with IP protection, free trade agreements with asset protection agreements, privatization with digitization, and supply chains with value chains,” former BlackBerry co-chief executive Jim Balsillie wrote last year. Observers say one of the best ways to foster economic growth would be to help homegrown companies develop into giants like Shopify Inc. That was a key message in 2019 from outside advisers, including Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke himself, tasked by the government to provide advice on economic growth. But Liberal actions on innovation have been diffuse and rarely singularly focused on turning upstarts into economic anchors... If the government is falling short on innovation, it’s part of a larger problem: Canada has been a chronic laggard on key economic measures. Our economic output per capita has been the worst among advanced nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development since the 1970s, a trend the OECD forecasts will continue until 2060. Business spending on R&D, productivity growth and labour utilization are in the bottom quarter of advanced nations. According to the World Bank, Canada’s share of global exports has fallen from more than 4 per cent in the early 1990s to 2.38 per cent in 2020. Canada ranks sixth among G7 nations and 15th overall in the World Intellectual Property Organization’s 2022 global innovation index; we used to make the top 10. And Canada ranks 24th overall in knowledge and technology outputs – a measure of the amount of patents generated here. As intangible assets have increasingly driven wealth creation globally, we remain net importers of other nations’ IP. These are the weaknesses robust innovation policies should help to address, as they have in other countries such as the Netherlands, Israel and South Korea. But those policies haven’t made much of a dent here... Even Mr. Morneau says in his new memoir that the government “didn’t do nearly enough to stimulate economic growth” needed to pay for social programs. “Productivity improvement is the most important issue on our agenda, and we are not focused on it.” He singled out “our poor performance when it comes to innovation; we depend too often on others to lead the way.”... a 2018 Globe report revealed that Canadian universities, governments and phone companies were helping Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. develop cutting-edge 5G mobile technologies, even though the company was viewed by Canada’s intelligence allies as a corporate arm of its home country and suspected of aiding its cyberespionage capabilities. The Canadian government still permits universities and professors to work with Huawei to develop IP that is routinely transferred out of the country."
From 2023
Union Station Disaster : r/TorontoTransit - "I am honestly so disappointed and furious about the state of downtown Toronto right now. We are at the beginning of a literal once in a lifetime global event, and the city decided this was the perfect time to turn the most important entrance, of the most important transit hub, in the most important city into an active and chaotic construction zone. It feels completely unsafe, incredibly stressful, and entirely dysfunctional. I cannot wrap my head around how nobody at any level of decision-making understood the massive global publicity of this event. To leave our main gateway looking like a chaotic, half-finished maze right as the world arrives is a total failure of planning. What's even more shameful is that the mainstream media is completely downplaying this. They report on transit delays as 'scheduling updates' instead of calling it what it is: an absolute embarrassment that reflects horribly on Toronto and Canada as a whole. If the general public truly realized how badly this was botched and how much it damages our reputation, the backlash would be severe enough that everyone involved in these decisions would be out of a job... I don't mean the Union Station essential construction work related to transit. Scotiabank Arena construction didn't seem like something that can't wait for another month. They just started that couple of weeks ago."
"As a private corporation, why would Scotiabank Arena want to negatively impact it's earnings bottom line by altering it's build/construction schedules to accomodate any or every large public event that goes on in downtown Toronto?"
"Yeah that’s what the city is supposed to be there for to keep those fucking cockroaches in line."
"because they're human beings? and human beings should care about things like, oh, idk, whether they're causing pain and suffering to other human beings?"
"This is coordinating with MLS in action. Basketball and hockey are on downtime and now’s the time as they only have concerts going through the facilities."
Left wingers just hate private corporations
Union Station Disaster : r/TorontoTransit - "Let's distinguish the hyperbole from reality. People are unhappy when there is inadequate service delivery, and people are unhappy when maintenance and enhancements are undertaken to correct inadequate service delivery. No win scenario. Work at Union Station is a decades long project to account for continually increasing demand. In the grand scheme of things, the World Cup events are little more of a blip on this radar than Blue Jays games or large venue concerts along with all the other events that go on all summer long in the city. One can hardly expect construction work across the city to cease for the duration of these events and then restart smoothly."
"Please stop with this same old comeback. The, we have to do the construction sometime, argument has been going on for decades in Toronto. In my area, Keele and Finch, there has been 35 years of major project construction. The sewer pipes, the subway extension and the LRT back to back to back. The sewer pipes are being re assessed, the subway extension is closed every weekend for signal building and now signal removal ! And the finch LRT is a complete joke. All excuses to sell construction tenders and contracts at the highest prices with the least amount of return and horrible planning and build quality. But Rogers builds a concert stadium, no local resident wanted, in a week it seemed like. Why? Private commerce. Let’s please stop the response if we need to have construction now for the future. It’s a money grab. We should have tore down the gardener expressway 30 years ago and build a new solution but we haven’t. It’s all about corruption."
Carney government’s changes to pesticide rules will put safety at risk - "Prime Minister Mark Carney is quietly bringing-in sweeping reforms to the pesticides law, making it more difficult for the government to ensure that the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat is safe from dangerous toxins. Buried in two omnibus financial bills are provisions that overhaul the Pest Control Products Act. They change the health minister’s mandate to include economic considerations — not just risks to human health and the environment; they grant cabinet the power to overrule a minister who refuses to approve a pesticide or who determines that a pesticide currently in use is too dangerous for the environment, and they prevent that minister from launching a review on the harmful effects of that pesticide for up to six years. The proposed changes also eliminate legislated reviews of pesticides, raise the bar to launch formal re-evaluations, increasing the possibility that a product could be on the market for decades without any re-evaluation of its health and environmental risks. “The changes that are being proposed basically will rewrite the entire purpose of the legislation from one that’s supposed to be precautionary, and public health and environmental-protection forward to one that tries to trim its sails to the developments going on in the United States,” said Jason MacLean, a researcher at the University of Chicago Law School and a witness in pesticide litigation. “There’ll be no scientific precaution required now, because the minister can just come to a discretionary decision,” he said."
Clearly safety is the only possible consideration for any regulation, so speed limits should be set to 1kmph
Mark Collins on X - "The new Northern Shield Pipeline proposed by @fordnation and @ABDanielleSmith is already, as predicted, getting hit with FN opposition. Specifically, the one in Sarnia who have stated multiple times their goal os to deatroy Sarnia's economy and shut down every single plant in the area. There will never be enough money to blackmail them with. They will eternally hold projects hostage for increasingly large sums of cash. Time to start playing hardball with the FN."
The lengths you must go to because BC is troublesome. Of course they'll sadly still benefit indirectly if this succeeds despite their negative contributions
Heather Exner-Pirot on X - "Why are we talking about the need for Northern Shield pipeline? Michigan's governor and an allied environmental coalition has been trying to shut down Enbridge's Line 5 for years, which enters Ontario from a US/southern route."
RMC86 on X - "Richard Masson, former CEO of the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, explains why the Smith-Ford Northern Shield pipeline is DOA.
1⃣ Industry CEOs are giving this zero attention. It won't make it out of the feasibility stage due to the enormous cost, risks & approval process.
2⃣ If the catalyst is the threat to Line 5, which goes through the 🇺🇸, shipping oil by rail to Sarnia is much more feasible.
3⃣ A branch to a part-time, ice-bound port in Hudson’s Bay isn’t possible. Pipeline oil must flow without interruption & can’t be shut off in the winter.
🛢 I’m glad that oil pipelines are in the national conversation but let’s be realistic. We’re making the best out of a Liberal regulatory, taxation & approval environment that repels business capital."
Nana0000 on X - "Exactly right. Former Alberta Petroleum Marketing CEO calling the Northern Shield pipeline DOA because of insane costs, regulatory hell, and technical realities (ice-bound port that can’t run year-round) is the cold truth we’ve been living in the patch. Liberal regulatory, taxation, and approval environment repels capital. Same story with the west coast MOU — southern compromises, carbon/CCUS burdens, and TMX-style overruns waiting to happen. I’m 67, grew up and worked the oil patch with my dad. We used to dream of building a future here. My grandkids face unaffordable housing, skyrocketing food, and squeezed basics. Industries collapsing: oil strangled, manufacturing fleeing to the U.S., farming in crisis, forestry shutdowns. This isn’t “national conversation” — it’s decades of ideology crushing viability and futures. We’re making the best of a bad environment that repels investment and opportunity. Grandkids deserve better than this slow-motion disaster. #OilPatchReality #CanadaAtCrossroads"
