Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week resignation that all is hopeless ...

 

But don't take my word for it:

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Carney plans to add $225 billion to the federal debt over the next four years, according to his recently released platform.

Trudeau planned on adding $131 billion to the debt over the same time, according to the most recent Fall Economic Statement.

Think about that: Carney plans to rack up nearly $100 billion more debt than Trudeau did.

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Natural resources are an important economic theme in Canadian economic history, and their development is a key source of the nation’s wealth. Whether wheat and barley, timber and pulp, mineral products, or oil and gas, the export of these resources—the export of resource staples— has been instrumental in generating employment and value-added industries as well as helping drive the development of national transportation infrastructure.

Indeed, Canada is generally acknowledged to have what trade economists refer to as a comparative advantage in natural resource products.

It stands to reason, therefore, that given the important role of energy and Canada’s position as a storehouse of energy reserves, the future of this important sector is a key question. Despite the environmental transition underway in energy production towards renewables and away from fossil fuels, oil and gas will remain important sources of energy. The repeal of the consumer carbon tax and the promises to now streamline the building of new energy infrastructure and resource projects by Prime Minister Mark Carney seem to be recognition of this reality.

At the same time, it is widely known that the case has been made by Prime Minister Mark Carney in his previous incarnations that there should be a managed phase out of oil and gas and that 80 percent of current fossil fuel energy reserves—including half of gas and one third of oil—should not be developed.

A key question in the face of these evolving positions is what exactly the value of our natural resources is and what we might be giving up if they are not developed. According to Natural Resources Canada, Canada has the third-largest proven oil reserve in the world, most of which is locked away in the oil sands.

Indeed, “Total Canadian proven oil reserves are estimated at 171.0 billion barrels, of which 166.3 billion barrels are found in Alberta’s oil sands and an additional 4.7 billion barrels in conventional, offshore, and tight oil formations. Canada accounts for 10 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves.”

Ahead of Canada are Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, which together account for 34 percent of proven oil reserves. And in the case of natural gas, Canada is estimated to have 1,368 trillion cubic feet of natural gas—an amount equal to 200 years of supply at current annual demand.

In other words, Canada is indeed an energy superpower.

These numbers on reserves are estimates and somewhat dated, and can be revised substantially. Statistics Canada maintains estimates of the present value of selected natural resource reserves, and they are quite eye-opening.

For example, established crude oil and natural gas reserves as of 2023 were estimated to have a present value of 230,791 million dollars. Our recoverable bituminous coal reserves were valued at 200,141 million dollars, while established crude bitumen reserves (oil sands) were at 670,532 million dollars. The total present value of these three established resources is therefore about 1.1 trillion dollars.

Keep in mind that this number may indeed be larger, as new technology often extends our ability to access resources and therefore larger proven reserves. Market prices driven by demand and supply are also a factor, resulting in changes in values over time.

However, this estimate of the value of these three established and recoverable energy reserves alone represents over one-third of Canada’s current GDP. Keeping 80 percent of these reserves in the ground is locking away a significant amount of potential income and wealth. Streamlining their development, on the other hand, could generate a substantial boost to Canada’s economic growth.


Consider the lost years, the very things that idiot voters (mostly selfish elderly people who think that they can weather the storm in Florida - WRONG!) should have remembered instead of voting for unaccomplished rage monsters longing for the days of Lenin and Trudeau the Elder:

In the year the Liberals took office, 604 people were murdered across Canada. This was already a slight uptick from the year before, when murder rates hit a low not seen since the mid-1960s.

But even when accounting for population growth, there are way more murders happening now than in 2015. The homicide rate in that year was 1.71 murders per 100,000 people. As of 2023, the most recent year for which Statistics Canada has released data, it was 1.94.

Put another way, if Canada had stuck to the homicide rates of 2015, we’d have had 94 fewer murders in 2023, 216 fewer murders in 2022, and about 150 fewer murders in 2021. ...

At the time, the average house in Canada cost about $430,000. Adjusting to 2025 dollars, that’s $557,000.

As of February, the benchmark price was $713,700. Over the last decade of Liberal governance, the average Canadian house has risen in price by about $16,000 per year. In other words, for every single day since the Liberals were elected in 2015, the average home has gotten $43 more unaffordable every 24 hours. ...

In 2015, it wasn’t a semi-regular occurrence for patients to die in the waiting rooms of Canadian hospitals. By 2023, a single hospital in Montreal yielded two such incidents over the course of a single weekend.

The Fraser Institute has been compiling reports of health-care wait times since the 1990s. The situation wasn’t great in 2015, but now it’s catastrophic.

In 2015, the median wait time for surgery was 18.3 weeks. By 2024, it was 30 weeks. ...

The result is thousands more Canadians dying due to an inability to obtain timely treatment. In 2015, Ontario counted 2,281 people who died while on a waiting list for medically necessary procedure. By 2023-24, that had risen to a total of 15,474. ...

For much of Canada’s history, the average Canadian worker earned about the same as the average U.S. worker. Canada started to fall behind in the 1980s, and the trend accelerated over the last 10 years.

The usually cited metric for worker productivity is per capita GDP — each Canadian’s average share of the total economy.

In 2015, Canadian per capita GDP was the equivalent of US$43,594.20, according to the World Bank. This represented 76.4 per cent of American per capita GDP at the time.

Over the last 10 years, Canadian per capita GDP has stayed almost completely stagnant: It was the equivalent of US$44,468.70 as of 2023.

The Americans, however, have all gotten richer. The average Canadian’s share of GDP now represents just 67.5 per cent of the U.S. equivalent, as of 2023 numbers.

In 2023, University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe calculated that if the Canadian economy had simply kept pace with the U.S., we’d all be earning an extra $5,500 per year.

Statistics Canada has found much the same. In a May 2024 report, the agency reported that if the Canadian economy had stuck to 2015 trends, the average Canadian would be $4,200 richer per year. That’s enough money to cancel out basically every Liberal subsidy, bursary and benefit of the last decade. ...

The Liberals took charge of a country with total sovereign debt of $612.3 billion. Adjusting to 2025 dollars, that’s about $800 billion.

As of the end of 2024, it’s now $1.4 trillion. In real dollars, that’s an extra $600 billion in sovereign debt. Put another way, that’s an extra $15,000 owing for every man, woman and child in Canada.

For every single day of Liberal governance since 2015, that works out to an average of $4.10 in new debt for every citizen. So, if you’re part of a family of five, your household’s share of the Liberal debt accumulation has worked out to $20.50 per day, every day, since 2015.

The eye-watering budget deficits incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic have played a part, but the Liberals have dramatically swelled government spending everywhere all at once.

As one example, the federal public service employed 257,034 people in 2015. By 2024, that was up to 367,772 — an increase of about 43 per cent.

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When Carney grovels to Trump on Tuesday, those who voted for him can see the true mettle of the man:

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For the children, Carney!

 

 

In other news, we don't have to trade with China:

Some of Beijing’s top critics in Parliament were re-elected this week, but a Conservative candidate said by authorities to be targeted by a Chinese regime operation lost his bid to sit in the House of Commons.

There is no evidence so far that Joe Tay fell short because of the Chinese regime’s efforts, but in the lead-up to the vote, election security officials had warned he was the victim of a transnational repression operation.

Tay was running in the Don Valley North riding of Toronto, which was the location of Chinese interference in the 2019 Liberal nomination contest, according to government intelligence.

Tay lost to Liberal candidate Maggie Chi, a Toronto public servant, by nearly 5,000 votes.

Tay has been an outspoken advocate for freedom and democracy in Hong Kong, and the region’s authorities placed a bounty on his head in December 2024 set at around $185,000. The repression operation directed at him, revealed by the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force, was said to have leveraged this aspect on Chinese social media.

SITE officials said users who searched for information on Tay on Chinese social media would only get results related to the bounty and arrest warrant for him.

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Institutional resistance to Trump’s tariffs is just the latest example of how free trade fundamentalism has corrupted politics in the United States for many decades. When Biden opened the borders to allow entry to hordes of unskilled workers, many from nations and cultures that may prove to be utterly incompatible with our own, this same crowd stood on the sidelines and applauded. Apparently, they think “borders” are obsolete. Making common cause with malevolent leftists that want to destroy everything we believe in and everything that’s made our nation great, for the most part, free trade fundamentalists are also the people who apparently think the very idea of borders, language, and culture defining a nation is “tribal” and obsolete. We must allow “free movement of people,” and, no big deal, we’ll just fix the welfare state later.

Like their communist nemesis that adroitly uses them as dupes, free trade fundamentalists don’t see nations; they see economic units. We are all interchangeable parts. For the communists, it’s the workers international. For the free trade crowd, it’s a world of “free agents” where the “non-aggression principle” governs smooth social functioning based on mutual transactions between peaceful parties. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could base free trade policies on something so out of touch with reality, but if you reject the non-aggression principle as not applicable in the real world, logic would have you also reject free trade in favor of reciprocal trade.

Reciprocal trade means that if, through regulations, restrictions on investment, exclusion from judicial recourse, tariffs, subsidies, and currency manipulation, a nation is erecting barriers to imports, then in response you must erect reciprocal barriers until a mutually beneficial understanding is reached. Otherwise, your nation hemorrhages jobs, eviscerates its vital industries, sells off its assets, and eventually becomes a hollowed-out, powerless shell, ripe for final conquest.

Without reciprocity, the ideal of “free trade” is not just trite. It’s a death sentence for its adherents if other powerful nations nonetheless use aggressive tactics in their trade policies. And that would be China. So maybe the anti-tariff coalition of corporate libertarians, corporate conservatives, neo-liberals, neo-conservatives, Never Trumpers, Democrats, globalists, and the entire media industrial complex should ask themselves some tough questions.

How do we intend to deal with the fascist regime that has enslaved the Chinese people and is bent on enslaving the entire world? While they sell us cheap flat screens and antibiotics, shall we continue to allow them to run psyops on the American people, steal our technology, infiltrate our institutions, and use their trade surplus dollars to buy strategic real estate in America and every piece of American technology they can’t steal?

Facing this reality is tough. What if the Chinese military, for years, has been infiltrating strategic choke points around the world with trained agents? For example, what if the Canal Zone in Panama is crawling with Chinese “civilian contractors,” ready to blow up the locks the day we resupply Taiwan to help them resist an invasion? Free trade and the non-aggression principle aren’t bad ideas, but when it comes to geopolitics, they have no utility, either.

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China's navy conducted a patrol in the South China Sea on Tuesday, saying that the Philippines has been creating "disturbances," as the Filipino and U.S. air forces conducted their own joint mission above the disputed waterway.

China, which claims almost the entirety of the South China Sea, has been involved in an increasingly tense stand-off with the Philippines in the waters there, as both seek to assert their sovereignty claims.

More than 14,000 Filipino and U.S. soldiers are participating in joint exercises, which run from April 21 through May 9 for a "full battle test" in the face of shared regional security concerns. China has said the drills are provocative.

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China uttered its expectations. It's up to Carney to give China the edge it really needs right now.

China is, after all, his boss:

China’s ambassador says Beijing is offering to form a partnership with Canada to push back against American “bullying,” suggesting the two countries could rally other nations to stop Washington from undermining global rules.

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Beijing’s in panic mode as tariffs threaten over-leveraged Chinese banks and massively over-built Chinese factories.

China’s already drowning in debt. If the trade war keeps going they’ll have to start pawning the family jewels. pic.twitter.com/okPOgXYj5z


 

Oh, you don't say:

A new survey finds “an important minority of Canadians” channel strong negative sentiment towards Israel into negative views of Jews.

Israel Independence Day begins the evening of April 30, marking the Jewish state’s 77th birthday, amid a tide of antisemitism in Canada and elsewhere.

“While people certainly have the right to criticize the government of Israel, it’s a serious problem when it descends into antisemitism,” said Jack Jedwab, the president and CEO of the Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute, in an email.

Two surveys by Leger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies examine Canadians’ views on Israel, Judaism, and Jews, and explore the connections between opinions of Israel and attitudes toward Judaism and Jews. They also investigate the impact of Holocaust awareness on shaping these attitudes.

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Crime data analysis suggest a spike in church fires coincided with First Nations claims of hidden graves at Indian Residential Schools, an Ottawa think tank said yesterday. “Few Canadians understood the full scope and scale of these attacks,” said a report by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute: ‘This must have an explanation.’

 

 


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