We had a good run:
Justin Trudeau’s election in 2015 briefly made him a global hero to progressives before images of blackface, accusations of scandal, and a failure to deliver results dulled his allure. The boast that “the world needs more Canada” reached peak popularity with our 150th anniversary in 2017, although for many outside Canada it really meant “the world wants less Trump.” With Trump gone, Canada becomes easy to ignore.
Canada’s public sector is clearly underperforming these days. Our vaunted health-care system is inoculating Canadians slower than some Third World countries. The insolvency of Laurentian University highlights a vulnerability in the funding model developed by many universities, which rely heavily on high fees for foreign students who are now staying home because of the pandemic. The Canadian Pension Model turned out to be based on unrealistic assumptions about rates of return as interest rates plunged.
Even more worrisome is that Canada is good at starting companies but not at nurturing them to global stature. Global leadership in key industries has disappeared. Canada claims just one of the Financial Times’ 100 leading global firms: Shopify. Smaller countries like Denmark, Sweden, Spain, and South Korea all have at least two companies on this list.
Nor have we been able to build on our strengths in banking, energy, or technology. Attempts to capitalize on our reputation by creating an institute for banking stability in Toronto came to nothing. Canada’s major contribution to global finance today is to serve “as an ATM and safe deposit box for money laundering” from China, according to Jonathan Manthorpe’s The Claws of the Panda. Our assumed technological prowess in everything from artificial intelligence to aerospace has not produced a successor on a global scale to Nortel or Blackberry. Canada’s superpower status in energy is undermined, as Tristan Hopper noted, by an inability to build pipelines or new hydro dams.
In sum, Canada has the same problem as many of our children: high self-esteem without high levels of achievement. We feel very good about ourselves — but for no apparent reason.
We produce people just like Justin: arrogant, under-achieving, petty, reactionary, fond of flattery but weak on criticism and unable to even build on existing foundations.
It's a microcosm of the post-modern West, really.
We rejected the values that made us moral and hard-working, electing instead to adopt social and practical ease.
It hasn't panned out so well.
On the week of Nov . 6, Nova Scotians were paying a maximum price of 90.9¢ per litre for regular unleaded gas at self-service pumps.
Three months later, with the price of gas jumping by a little more than 4 cents since last week, the same product costs 124.7¢ per litre.
That’s a 37 per cent increase and a substantial hit to the province’s residents.
In the other provinces in the region the story is much the same.
On the week of Nov . 6, New Brunswickers were paying a maximum of 95.1¢ per litre for regular unleaded gas at self-service pumps.
Now, they’re paying 121.6 ¢ per litre, or a 28 per cent increase.
And that is why you are over-taxed.
If anything, Miss Michetti should apologise for pluralising a noun with an apostrophe and an S:
Unforgiveable.
It's always the quiet ones:
An Ontario school board is creating a database of forbidden books for removal from school libraries. No word yet on how they will be disposed of/incinerated pic.twitter.com/YrrBvBsSz8
— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) February 25, 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment