Yep:
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland yesterday was summoned by the Commons finance committee for questioning on the cost of living. The committee voted unanimously to conduct lengthy hearings on inflation and rising house prices one MP likened to a big balloon: “Our economy has become a gigantic inflated balloon.”
I would suggest that the biggest impediment to living well in Canada is the entirety of the House of Commons.
Get rid of the House of Commons and watch the cost of living decrease.
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Housing prices across Canada are set to keep rising throughout 2022, a new report suggests, with not even the prospect of higher interest rates expected to slow the trend.
Royal LePage’s latest House Price Survey found the average price for a home in Canada increased 17.1 per cent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2021, hitting $779,000. In a majority of housing markets, prices increased by three per cent or more compared to the third quarter of last year, a trend the real estate firm says is not typical for a fourth quarter.
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Canadian housing prices are unaffordable, at least in part, because successive governments have failed to address the fact that Canada is one of the world’s foremost tax and secrecy havens, minus the palm trees.
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Canadians homeowners could be forced to buy climate change insurance, says a federal report to Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair. “We welcome and support the core findings,” Blair said yesterday in a statement: “There’s important work to be done.”
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With that in mind, the reality is that Canadians are getting poorer.
That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.
“In 2012, Canada’s per capita GDP was $52,669 USD.
In 2020, Canada’s per capita GDP was $43,241 USD.”
Some will say this is all due to covid, yet that is not the case:
In that same 2012-2020 timeframe, US per capita GDP has gone from $51,602 USD to $63,543 USD.
Indeed, one of the most interesting comparisons between economic growth in Canada and the US during the Trump Administration is that the US managed to outpace Canada in both GDP growth percentage and per capita growth.
According to Statista, the US economy grew 11.76% in that time frame, while Canada’s grew 7.59%.
Notably however, Canada’s immigration rate was far higher than that in the US as a percentage of population. This means Canada’s growth was largely due simply to a higher population, while growth in the US demonstrated actual productivity increases.
A way to think about this is to imagine that Canada let in 35 million people in a single year.
Our GDP would certainly surge, but the country would be completely overwhelmed, our social systems would fall apart, there would be severe shortages everywhere, and the average person would be far poorer and worse off.
Sure, we would have a higher total GDP due to a higher population, but the per capita GDP would collapse.
What does all of this have to do with competition?
Well, if a country doesn’t have a competitive attitude, and if people increasingly expect the government to do everything for them, then economic ‘growth’ can only be generated through deceptive means.
Inflation and population growth can make an economy look bigger, but it’s not the same as actual productivity growth.
(Sidebar: has anyone brought up the failure to create a business-friendly economy, an economy that trains much-needed doctors and one that lets in foreign-trained nurses as a backdoor to increase voters blocks in Ontario? Because they should.)
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