Monday, May 05, 2025

Your Pointless and Destructive Government and You

Enjoy the decline:

 

It’s highly likely Prime Minister Mark Carney will resurrect the federal Online Harms Act Bill C-63 — a terrifying piece of legislation that will drive Canada toward the U.K.’s dystopia, where thousands have been arrested for “offensive” speech violations, primarily on social media.

The bill did not pass in the House of Commons. It was introduced on Feb. 26, 2024, and completed its first reading but stalled at the second reading stage. It died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued on Jan. 6, 2025. It will resurface.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith should act now to protect Albertans.

Critics of Bill C-63, including civil liberties groups, legal experts, and political figures, have raised significant concerns about the act’s potential to damage freedom of expression and other liberties, particularly through its Criminal Code and Canadian Human Rights Act amendments.

**

About 4 million Canadians were living below the poverty line in 2023, as the number continued to rise for three consecutive years, according to recent data released by Statistics Canada.

 The Canadian Income Survey 2023 published on May 1 measured income among various Canadian households for that year, including single parents and seniors.

 It found that about 10.2 percent of Canadians lived below the poverty line in 2023. That rate was 9.9 in 2022, and 10.3 percent in 2019, as first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter.

** 

In a report published last month, the Fraser Institute’s Tegan Hill and Nathaniel Li point out that, until a decade ago, Alberta offered the lowest combined federal and provincial/state personal income tax rate on the North American continent. “Paired with no provincial sales tax, the ‘Alberta Tax Advantage’ made the province an incredibly attractive place to start a business, work, and invest,” they write.

But Albertans’ taxes went up in 2015. At 48 per cent, Alberta now has the tenth-highest top personal income tax (PIT) rate in Canada and the U.S. While lower than every other province but Saskatchewan, this is higher than peer energy-producing U.S. states that compete for workers and investors. Worse, Alberta imposed its top rate at a relatively low anything over $355,845 (CAD) in 2024. “By comparison, the top rate in competing U.S. jurisdictions applies at $834,688 (CAD).” Among Canada’s provinces, only Newfoundland and Labrador imposes its top combined rate at a higher threshold — $1,103,478 (CAD) — than any state.

Among U.S. states, California’s combined top personal income tax rate is the highest — though lower than that of every province but Alberta and Saskatchewan. Hawaii is tied with Alberta. Notably, Alaska, Texas, and Wyoming, among energy-rich jurisdictions, don’t tax personal income at all.

It’s not just the top marginal rate paid by the wealthiest that stings so sharply.

“An Albertan with $50,000 in annual taxable income, for instance, faces a combined marginal tax rate of 25.00 per cent, while the combined rate in select U.S. jurisdictions ranges from 12.00 to 16.90 per cent, a gap of between 8.10 to 13.00 percentage points,” write Hill and Li. “The gap becomes smaller, but continues to exist at $75,000 and $100,000, ranging between 3.38 and 8.50 percentage points.”

And, while Saskatchewan has the lowest combined top personal income tax rate in Canada, it taxes lower incomes a bit more heavily than Alberta.

**

Carney’s pledge to eliminate all interprovincial trade barriers by July 1 was encouraging — but whether this includes long-standing obstacles in the agri-food sector remains to be seen. Supply-managed sectors, particularly dairy, remain heavily protected by a tangle of provincially administered quotas that limit flexibility, stifle innovation, and restrict national productivity.

Consider dairy. Quebec produces nearly 40% of Canada’s milk, despite accounting for just over 20% of the population. This regional imbalance undermines one of supply management’s original promises: Preserving dairy farms across the country. In reality, the number of dairy farms continues to decline, with roughly 90% now concentrated in just a few provinces — mirroring patterns in the U.S., where there is no federal supply management system.

On our current path, Canada is projected to lose nearly half of its remaining dairy farms by 2030 — even with supply management in place. Consolidation is accelerating, and it disproportionately benefits Quebec and Ontario at the expense of smaller producers in the Prairies and Atlantic Canada.

 

 

How the Liberals rewarded Jag and his minions in the NDP:

Liberals have no interest in reviving a vote pact with New Democrats, says Prime Minister Mark Carney. MPs were expected to “do what we need to do as a country,” he told reporters: “We received the highest number of votes in Canadian history.”

So long and thanks for all the fish. 

 

Also:

“Ten years of Liberals, the same thing over and over, we’re not getting anywhere and it’s going to get worse,” Faqiryar said. “They’re going to implement different systems to control us more and more. Less affordable housing. Bringing in people who shouldn’t be in the country. Liberal, for me now, is anti-Canada,” he said, adding he gets his information from Elon Musk’s social platform X rather than mainstream news outlets.
Faqiryar says he’s so disappointed he’s thinking of moving to Saudi Arabia for better work opportunities and lower taxes.

 

 

What's all this I hear about national unity? Is it very "post-national" of them? A country with "no core values" and now no reason to stay united?:

Katheryn Speck said she used to be a Canadian nationalist, travelled the world with a maple leaf on her backpack and once lived in Quebec so she could become fluently bilingual. ...

(Sidebar: part of the problem right. Stop believing in these silly, empty platitudes and myths about Canada and take it for what is now -  a broken country that cannot identify itself nor change political or social course because reasons.)

Earlier this week, Premier Danielle Smith’s government proposed legislation that would lower the bar for holding a referendum. While Smith told reporters she won’t presuppose what questions Albertans might bring to a ballot, the move would make it easier for citizens to call for a vote to secede from Canada.

 The federal Liberals’ election win Monday has also prompted some people in the province to demand an exit.

 Speck said the National Energy Policy of the 1980s eroded her Canadian pride. Now a decade of Liberal policies that she said have blocked pipelines and stymied the province’s energy industry have her thinking there’s no fix under Confederation.

**

The youth were not the only group the Liberals failed to win over. In Western Canada, Trump’s threat to make Canada the 51st state provoked little concern, and Alberta and Saskatchewan remained Conservative strongholds. In fact, voters in these provinces were far less fearful of Trump than they were of Carney’s green agenda.

The Trudeau government – in power since 2015 – had already done its best to alienate the Canadian West with its unpopular federal Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act 2018, more commonly referred to as the carbon tax. As the biggest oil-producing provinces in the country, Alberta and Saskatchewan were most affected by this. Although Carney scrapped the carbon tax ahead of the election, he has shown every indication that he intends to continue with every other aspect of Trudeau’s Net Zero agenda. After all, in 2021, Carney said he believed that half of the world’s oil reserves need to stay in the ground.

Ploughing on with Net Zero is only likely to worsen tensions between the Western provinces – Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Manitoba – and what is called ‘middle Canada’ – Ontario and Quebec. A similar divide emerged in the 1970s, when the slogan ‘let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark’ was heard across the energy-producing prairies.

** 

The Canadian Liberal economy was an impeccable model of Globalist failure. It was a high-taxation and high-welfare economy. It believed in a large and expensively maintained State interfering in everything. It embraced open borders and adding millions of low-skilled or welfare-receiving immigrants. It pretended that this was economically and culturally advantageous, when it is actually a recipe for reduced social cohesion, increased crime, failing overburdened infrastructure, and economic stagnation while weighted down with an imported populace who don’t contribute much of benefit. It continued with these policies regardless of the cost, while also rabidly denouncing any contradiction of these policies as racism, xenophobia and bigotry.

Canada is a vast country with abundant natural resources. It could have propped up all its welfare spending and State bureaucracy by properly developing its natural resource abundance. Instead, the Liberal Party attacked all the industries that could provide this advantage. Suffused with a radical ‘Green’ agenda, it spent years taxing and punishing those Canadian provinces reliant on traditional energy sources and aligned with heavy industry, mining, oil and gas companies upon whom those regions depended for high employment, decent pay, and well-funded infrastructure and development. The Liberals tried to destroy these beneficial industries, and places such as Alberta where jobs, mortgages and lives were on the line knew it. Four days before the election, the Calgary Herald was warning that a Carney victory would increase Albertan support for independence.

**

 


 

The US already has a good number of resources and is more than happy to sell said resources or acquire them if the price is right.

Saying anything else is a load of fear-mongering only an emotionally retarded person would believe:

“America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country”, declared Mark Carney in his victory speech, after Canada’s general election this week delivered his Liberal Party a plurality of seats in parliament. “These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us”, Carney continued, promising that Trump’s oft-repeated plans to absorb Canada as America’s 51st state are “never, ever going to happen”.
Trump’s apparent designs on Canada, which appeared to begin with a social media post calling Carney’s predecessor Justin Trudeau “governor Trudeau”, weighed heavily on the country’s election. The Conservatives still polled their best results since the 1980s, and Carney will have to lead a minority government, but the spectacle of a foreign leader looming so decisively over the elections of a major democracy is Ruritanian to the point of comedy.
Next week’s meeting between Carney and Trump at the White House could well be an awkward affair.
But Canadian statehood might not be such a great idea for our home and native land. Doubling the size of the country is not unknown in the annals of American history. Thomas Jefferson did it in one vast real estate deal in 1803, when he purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleonic France. That was before the rest of the American West came into US ownership via settlement, conquest, annexation, and purchase.
Absorbing Canada would double the amount of territory America would have to defend, however, while only increasing its population by about 12 per cent. Canada’s military contribution would be even smaller. According to the global firepower index, America has almost 20 times the number of active duty servicemen that Canada deploys and spends about 22 times more on its military budget. Canada, long a beneficiary of America’s leading role in both Nato and North American continental defence, ranks roughly on par with Argentina and Algeria.
With extended Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic coastlines, and vastly extended proximity to Russian and Chinese forays in those regions, a supersized America would have to stretch its existing resources to stand on guard with relatively little help from its new citizens.
It would also face the financial burden of having to care for them. Canada’s economy is in the doldrums of a long-term economic slump, with cost of living, housing affordability, and opportunities for financial advancement fading for younger Canadians. Election polling suggested that their glowing hearts cared far more about improving their lives and prospects than electing another Liberal government with little to recommend it beyond a jingoistic promise to stand up to Trump.
Since 2010, Canadian growth has languished at European levels, averaging at about 1.6 per cent annually, compared to over 2 per cent for the United States, with nothing even close to US levels of high-tech innovation. Canada’s unemployment rate sits stubbornly at 6.7 per cent, compared to 4.2 per cent for Americans. The mercy mission of taking over Canada’s flagging economy would mean a disproportionately higher number of welfare payments going out to our new fellow citizens, with likely more to come as Canada’s expensive social services are harmonised with American policies and priorities.

 

Also - Trump is right.

Even if he was serious, why waste the time and/or lives of good Marines against a lazy and disarmed population when tariffs will do?:

 

 

What a good lapdog:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is seeking Prime Minister Mark Carney’s support for his idea to build a tunnel under Highway 401. ...

In today’s letter, the premier says he would like the federal government to prioritize the Ring of Fire, nuclear energy generation, GO passenger train service, a new James Bay deep-sea port and a driver and transit tunnel expressway under Highway 401.

Opposition critics have ridiculed the tunnel idea as being a “fantasy,” saying it would cost tens of billions of dollars and not truly address gridlock.

The Ford government is seeking proposals for a feasibility study for the tunnel, but the premier has pledged to get it built no matter what.

 

A long and expensive project that will eventually be abandoned.

That's Ontario for you.

 

Also:

 

 And - Carney will always be China's good and faithful servant:

Many Chinese exports bound for the U.S. have been rerouted to Canada to skirt tariffs as the trade war continues to escalate between the U.S. and many of its international partners, Truenorth wire reports.

This means that, just like Europe which is facing a deflationary tsunami as Chinese dumping is unleashed on its now largest trading partner, Canadian consumers will soon have an abundance of discount goods as warehouse storage reaches its capacity.

As much as 50% of consignments from China were diverted to Canada in mid-April as many industries look to stockpile their inventory north of the border instead of in the US. 

Third-party sellers for companies such as Amazon and Walmart have also begun to hoard goods in Canada so that their items may be held in a country where they won’t face any immediate payment of duties.

 


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