Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Your Morally and Politically Corrupt Government and You

Canadians elect the worst sorts of people.

They simply will not be told:

Something that has long seemed unattainable for successive Canadian governments—meeting NATO’s current defence spending guideline—will be reached this fiscal year, Prime Minister Mark Carney says.

Increasing the pay for soldiers and repairing existing Canadian Armed Forces equipment are some of the measures being planned to reach the target.

Carney announced on June 9 that Canada will spend 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defence this year, beating his initial campaign pledge to meet the target by 2030. This is also seven years earlier than his predecessor, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, had initially planned.

 

Now, about that:

The global economy is headed for a downturn, and North America will be hardest hit, the world’s economic watchdog warned today.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said Tuesday that barriers to trade, tighter financial conditions, weaker business and consumer confidence and heightened policy uncertainty will sap global growth in 2025.

Slashing its forecast for the second time this year, the organization now sees global gross domestic product slowing from 3.3 per cent in 2024 to 2.9 per cent this year and in 2026, assuming that U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff rates are sustained despite legal challenges. ...

After starting the year on “robust” footing, Canada’s outlook has deteriorated. The OECD expects growth to drop in the second quarter as exports to the United States fall sharply and household consumption and business investment are hit by trade disruptions and uncertainty. The housing market is expected to remain broadly flat in the first half of the year. 

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  • Canadians have been getting poorer relative to residents of other countries in the OECD. From 2002 to 2014, Canadian income growth as measured by GDP per capita roughly kept pace with the rest of the OECD. From 2014 to 2022, however, Canada's position declined sharply, ranking third-lowest among 30 countries for average growth over the period.
  • Between 2012 and 2022, Canada lost ground compared to key allies and trading partners such as the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, with Canadian GDP per capita declining from 80.4% of the US level in 2012 to 72.3% in 2022.
  • Looking forward to 2060, Canada's projected average annual growth rate for GDP per capita (0.78%) is the lowest among 30 OECD countries.
  • Canada's GDP per capita (after adjusting by inflation), which exceeded the OECD average by US$3,141 in 2002 and was roughly equivalent to the OECD average in 2022, is projected to fall below the OECD average by US$8,617 in 2060.
  • The root cause of Canada's declining long-term growth in GDP per capita—recent and projected—is very low or negative growth in labour productivity reflecting weak investment in physical and human capital per worker.
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    When is this economic miracle going to occur? 

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    Forty days — not in the biblical sense of trial and transformation — but in the Kafka-esque sense of scripted announcements, symbolic gestures, and legislative landmines. Carney, Canada's investment banker turned political shepherd, has worked diligently to emulate his idol — Donald Trump, of all people — though lacking the charisma, disruption, or delivery.

    The results? Let us count the disappointments.

    Take, for instance, so-called Middle-Class Tax Relief. Here, Carney produced a 1% tax cut in the lowest income bracket, heralded by Ottawa as a miracle for the working Canadian.

    A miracle, it is not. At best, it delivers $70 a month in disposable income — just enough for a half tank of gas and a despairing shrug. If this is the Liberals' idea of prosperity, then we are not so much climbing out of economic malaise as being handed a longer spoon to stir it.

    Then there is the great Affordable Housing Initiative. The promise? To double the rate of residential construction and build half a million homes a year. Lofty, indeed.

    But also, shall we say, a bit on the aspirational side? Yes, they eliminated the GST on homes under $1 million — bravo — but neglected to explain how first-time buyers will conjure up the down payment. The latest estimates put that particular task at ten years of savings for the average young family. That is, if they avoid eating or living indoors in the meantime.

    As for actual houses built, the numbers are not just disappointing — they are scandalous. Ten years, $78 billion committed, and a generous interpretation puts the total output at around 42,000 homes.

    That’s one house per $1.8 million spent. One would hope these houses come with gold plumbing and concierge service. And let us not forget: this 500,000-home annual target still falls far short of what CMHC says is needed just to stabilize affordability. The math, much like the delivery, doesn’t add up.

    On trade diversification and infrastructure, Carney spoke of nation-building, of freeing Canada from over-reliance on the United States, and of removing interprovincial trade barriers.

    It all sounded Churchillian until you looked at the results. The premiers' conference was a policy soufflé — puffed up and hollow. Provinces are now striking deals without federal leadership. The conference yielded no policy changes on pipelines, no reform on trade barriers, and no progress on enabling projects that could unify the nation.

    What we did get was a post-conference drumbeat for even more veto points — be they provincial or indigenous — on development. It’s curious how in provinces where polling shows support for pipelines, the government insists there’s “no mandate.” Curious, too, how indigenous voices in Alberta that support resource development are so rarely included in the national narrative.

    And what has emerged from Carney’s legislative oven? Bills C-2 and C-3 were enthusiastically offered as steps toward stronger borders and fairer citizenship. Noble aspirations, both. But under the crust of principle lies the usual Liberal filling of control and sleight of hand.

    Bill C-2, for example, quietly grants law enforcement the ability to open your mail without a warrant. A casual erasure of centuries-old privacy protections — because, they say, we must fight fentanyl and organized crime. Apparently, liberty is now conditional on the latest crisis.

    Another provision outlaws cash transactions over $10,000. Ostensibly to target money laundering, but the stench of ulterior motive clings. You may recall when, under Trudeau and with Carney’s blessing, banks froze the accounts of protestors and their supporters. The backlash nearly sparked a run on the banks. This bill, one suspects, is not about crime — it’s about sealing the exits for lawful citizens in the next political emergency.

    (Sidebar: I am so glad that they are going to put this guy in charge of that bill.) 

    And then there’s Bill C-3. On its surface, it's a compassionate correction for “Lost Canadians.”

    In reality, it's a Trojan horse for chain migration. By permitting Canadians born abroad to pass citizenship to their children after just three years of presence in Canada, it opens the door to a sprawling expansion of eligibility — entirely sidestepping normal immigration processes.

    So much for population control, or, heaven forbid, housing policy coherence. But not to worry — apparently, you’ll own nothing and be happy.

    Just as revealing as what he’s done is what Mr. Carney has not done. In the face of Alberta’s growing constitutional alarm — summarized in Premier Smith’s Nine Terrible Policies — Carney has offered neither dialogue nor repeal. In this, he mirrors his predecessor, Mr. Trudeau.

    But where Trudeau could be dismissed as an unserious man with serious responsibilities playing dress-up, Carney is a different breed. He is not the village idiot. He is the village actuary — cold, clinical, exacting. The danger is not in his foolishness but in his competence.

    And while he speaks softly of national unity, carbon markets and “shared prosperity,” his policies — indeed, his instincts — betray a command-and-control worldview that treats western enterprise and individual liberty as bugs to be debugged from the system.

    He may be selling a decarbonized Canada, but what he’s really peddling is a denationalized one. “One Canadian economy” is not a vision — it’s a warning. And it reads like the fine print in a Brookfield merger.

    **

    Another report, this time from Auditor General Karen Hogan, blames the federal government for repeatedly violating procurement policies by awarding dozens of contracts to the IT company that built the ArriveCan application.

    The auditor general found that 31 federal organizations issued 106 contracts worth approximately $92.7 million to GCStrategies from April 2015 to March 2024. About $64.5 million was ultimately paid out by the government according to the report.

    Over that period, the Canadian Border Services Agency gave four contracts worth $49.9 million to GC Strategies, while the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation gave one contract worth nearly $12,000.

    But Hogan also found that in 54 per cent of contracts examined, federal organizations had evidence to show that all services and deliverables were received and in 46 per cent of contracts examined, they had little to no evidence that deliverables were received.

    “Despite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments,” reads the report.

     

    Imagine that this happened in the private sector.

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    Because friends:

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    Try walking everywhere:

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    Oh, that's why illegal migrants aren't leaving. Because you didn't ask them to:

    Cabinet is relying on illegal immigrants to leave Canada on their own, Immigration Minister Lena Diab last night told the Commons. Diab would not comment on departmental figures indicating deportees who remain here number up to 500,000 or more: “Does she not understand if you don’t remove people who do not have a legal right to be here, that the system is meaningless?” 

     **

    But they're very good at trampling people with horses:

    The federal privacy watchdog says the RCMP lost a memory key containing personal information about victims, witnesses and informants, and later learned it was being offered for sale by criminals.
    A detailed report from the office of privacy commissioner Philippe Dufresne reveals the RCMP told the watchdog about the breach in March 2022, prompting a lengthy investigation.
    The probe found that the unencrypted USB storage device contained the personal information of 1,741 people, including witnesses, complainants, subjects of interest, informants, police officers and civilian employees.
    The privacy commissioner says an RCMP detachment learned from a confidential source three weeks after the loss that the data on the device was being offered for sale by members of the criminal community.

     


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