It's Just An Economy

It settles itself just as a budget balances itself.

It's like a well-oiled machine run by the finest engineers in the land.

 

Anyway:

Newly released documents show the Finance Department last year warned that the pace of price increases could gain speed, even as the Liberal government and central bank maintained that inflationary pressures were temporary.

In a briefing note to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland from the spring, officials outlined “the case for runaway inflation” as part of a larger review of consumer prices.

While the majority of pressures at the time were the result of comparing prices to lows seen one year earlier during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the briefing note says inflation readings could go up or there were “plausible upside risks to the inflation outlook over the medium-term.”

The note was written after Statistics Canada reported the annual rate of inflation hit 3.6% in May 2021. The rate has risen even higher since.

The document is one of many on inflation that the Finance Department created last year, and obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

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Bank of Canada managers yesterday denied running a press enemies’ list though staff openly discussed it in a recorded Zoom call. Bank Governor Tiff Macklem’s director of communications Paul Badertscher in an email denied blacklisting Blacklock’s despite telling a deputy governor in an audio tape: “I do not want to be in a situation where we are allowing Blacklock’s to be asking us. So, yes, that’s where we’re at.”

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It was In the late summer of 2019 when I broke the story of then-Liberal MP Adam Vaughan sniffing out the idea of taxing the capital gains earned when you sell your home.

He vehemently denied it, of course, although he finally had to admit the idea came from a blue-skying of possible new policies. ...

Early last week, the Conservatives called on the Trudeau Liberals to stop funding home tax studies and reject a proposal before cabinet to tax the capital gains on homes.

The government had funded a study by the group “Generation Squeeze” to look into housing policy in Canada.

In the study, it makes the policy proposal of taxing homes worth over $1 million, which is virtually every house in Vancouver and Toronto, and many in Ottawa.

It will be the tax grab of all tax grabs.

”This proposed new tax will push the dream of homeownership even further away from Canadians and take more than $5 billion from homeowners, forcing them to pay tens of thousands of dollars when they sell,” warned the Conservatives.

“This is devastating news for Canadian homeowners in skyrocketing real estate markets like in Victoria, Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, Toronto, and Oakville where the average home price is over $1 million.

“The simple fact,” said the Conservatives, “is that this new tax would affect over 20% of homeowners in British Columbia alone and more than one in ten homeowners in Ontario.