Elbows up, everybody!:
Canada’s Privy Council Office (PCO) has a behavioural science unit established under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that quietly shapes public policy and influences citizen compliance through psychological experiments and data modelling.
The Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU), which bases its framework on a UK government initiative and tools issued by the World Health Organization (WHO), has quietly pioneered its approach to behaviour change using psychology, economics and social sciences for years — but its role became most visible in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The IIU conducts behaviour-modifying trials and public “challenges” that test government communication strategies and incentives to encourage compliance with government objectives.
According to an IIU summary of its first two years on its website, the government spent more than $720 million on “outcomes-based funding programs” and ran at least 10 behavioural trials aimed at altering public response.
You can't hate the village idiot enough.
You just can't.
So if you think a 16-year-old is capable of making decisions affecting the fate of the country, and perhaps even the course of world history, fine. But then why wouldn’t they be old enough to buy a bottle of Scotch, or drive without restrictions, or marry someone several years older than them?
It’s because society has set the age of 18 (or 19 in some Canadian provinces) as the cutoff point for when people become adults capable of making their own decisions in the eyes of the law.
There’s no doubt that this is an arbitrary number. Perhaps it should be 14 given that, throughout much of history, people that young were given adult responsibilities. Or maybe it should be closer to 30, around the time when the human brain stops developing.
Regardless, we need to come up with some number to legally differentiate the age at which parents are no longer responsible for their children and young adults are responsible for their own actions.
(Sidebar: good luck with that.)
Yet given that England and Wales raised the age at which people can legally marry from 16 to 18 just two years ago, it seems odd that the country now wants to give new freedoms to people who just had other rights stripped away — not to mention the fact that the age at which people can legally run for office will remain at 18.
Only from a political perspective does this change make any sense.
YouGov polling in the 2024 election found that only eight per cent of 18-29-year-olds supported the Conservatives, while a plurality voted for Starmer’s Labour party. But support for the Tories increased steadily by age, peaking at 46 per cent (compared to 20 for Labour) among the over-70 crowd.
That pattern didn’t hold in the last Canadian election, when exit polls found that a plurality of young adults voted Conservative, while those over 55 tended to favour the Liberals. Yet historically, the left-right split based on age has generally held true in this country — and for good reason.
Some people are special:
It would be unthinkable for Parliament to renege on trade protection for dairy farmers, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet said yesterday. Blanchet blamed media for unfairly criticizing the quota system, calling it “a matter of policy.”
Yes, the expensive protecting Quebec policy:
Supply management (SM) is a complex set of government policies that restricts production, marketing, and trade of dairy and poultry in Canada. At its core, SM is a textbook cartel in which producers collude to fix production at the national level, and set prices charged to processors who make the consumer food products sold in restaurants and grocery stores. Such collusion is illegal in other industries — food and elsewhere — but is mandated in SM through government policies.
Some market outcomes of these policies are high and stable incomes for producers, high consumer prices for dairy and poultry products, and smaller farms. ...
First, the level of support provided to SM producers is much higher; the OECD estimates that SM policies in Canada account for approximately one-third of gross farm receipts for SM producers. This is multiples higher than support provided to field crop and other livestock producers. It is noteworthy, too, that recipients of this support are relatively high-income households; average household income for dairy and poultry farm families is more than double the average income of the Canadian households who pay for the support through higher food prices (approximately $245,000 for SM farm families compared to the Canadian average of $116,000).
Second, the source of funding for support to SM producers comes from an implicit tax on food, not from government transfers. This has important implications. Support to other agricultural producers is funded from government revenues, much of which is raised through a progressive tax system and does not significantly affect food prices.
On the other hand, SM’s implicit food tax has regressive distributional effects, imposing a heavier burden on low-income households who spend larger shares of their incomes on food; this implicit tax rate is five times higher for low-income households than for high-income households. Our research shows that support for SM is higher among people who support progressive redistribution policies, despite SM doing precisely the opposite through a regressive tax on consumers and by supporting the incomes of relatively high-income families.
The opacity of how cartelized production and import restrictions increase prices is a feature, not a bug, of the system. The effects of these policies are difficult to understand without formal training in economics. Also, these policy tools allow lobby groups to claim that the system isn’t subsidized ($5 billion in payments to SM interest groups in the wake of recent trade agreements notwithstanding), while at the same time, admitting that “consumers pay twice for most food, once through their taxes (whether they buy it or not), and again at the grocery counter,” with the exception of dairy, poultry and egg products.
The Soviets, too, had such a system.
Also - so slavery IS acceptable in Canada:
A group of Quebec business owners have launched a $300 million lawsuit against the federal government this month, arguing they’re facing bankruptcy if Ottawa goes ahead with its plan to reduce the number of foreign workers coming into Canada.
The heads of the 23 businesses, which make everything from steel products to winter jackets and airplane parts, say temporary foreign workers are essential to stay afloat.
With Ottawa is pushing to reduce the number of permits it issues, employers are upset.
“The federal government from 2021 to 2024 has said to those enterprises, ‘You can count on foreign workers as much as you like,’” said the lawyer representing the business owners, Frédéric Bérard. “And all of a sudden, they decided to flip the table and say, ‘Well, forget about that, we’re changing the rules.’”
He said the business owners want to cover their losses.
But what of adolescents who want summer employment?
Why hire outside the country when your friend's niece could use a job slinging ice cream?
And let's not forget the astronomical renting prices.
Perhaps we should let the youth vote.
After all, they know the party that is screwing them over.
And:
New rental construction remains slow despite a multi-billion dollar tax holiday for builders enacted two years ago, new CMHC data show. Then-Housing Minister Sean Fraser had predicted the tax break would “have a major impact.”
Oh, I would say that we got ripped off:
From 2021 to 2023, Canadians were told that prices jumped largely because of supply-chain bottlenecks, government spending on income supports and other pandemic-related issues.
If so, shouldn’t those temporary increases disappeared once the pandemic subsided and those glitches were repaired?
While inflation may have since been tamed, Statistics Canada’s monthly inflation figures show that the pandemic-era price hikes survived.
Are consumers getting ripped off by not seeing prices slide back again?
Under typical circumstances, we would have seen some inflation, likely within the Bank of Canada’s “normal” band of between one and three per cent a year, even without the pandemic. Instead, the Consumer Price Index saw the annual rate jolt to 3.4 per cent in 2021, soar to 6.8 per cent in 2022, and load another nearly four per cent onto prices in 2023. That additional inflation that was supposed to be because of the impacts of COVID-19.
Yet, more than five years after the deadly virus started to spread, and two years after the pandemic was declared over, we seem to still be paying for those price hikes. ...
Is there a chance that some of the pandemic spike in prices could still be eliminated if the world enjoys a period of relative peace, with no disruptive shocks?
Andolfatto, at the University of Miami, said prices could in theory still come down in some markets, but that would be a function of changes in supply and demand at that time, not anything to do with what occurred during the pandemic.
But that’s unlikely to happen in Canada in the near term, Andolfatto said, because governments haven’t taken steps to reduce the extra demand in the economy.
Knowing the brain-trusts in this country, this totalitarian dictate will be screwed up upon implementation and it will certainly cost too much:
Federal consultants have been hired at an undisclosed cost to centralize all public requests for federal documents into one digital ID system, says the Department of Social Development. The proposal is so complex it required “expertise we don’t have in-house,” said a department briefing note: “We are moving to next steps.”
The Canada-U.S. softwood lumber trade relationship has dealt with ups and downs, disputes and resolutions, for decades. Anxiety for Canadian exporters is reaching a fever pitch again as the U.S. threatens to more than double softwood lumber duties and add even steeper tariffs under a national security investigation.
Canadian foresters, mills, and governments that enjoy taxes, economic spinoffs and stumpage fees from Crown land will feel the pain if they lose too much access to the massive U.S. market. But larger producers have been preparing for just this kind of contingency and have cleverly hedged their bets, building capacity in the U.S., where they can sell as much as they want to Americans, tariff-free.
There is no way that Carney will reduce the size of government nor will he let a pipeline be built.
Remember that he is the architect of a "carbon-free" region, not merely its shadow:
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government says it’s launching a spending review. And Ottawa’s union bosses are playing Chicken Little, yelling that the sky will fall if the government finally saves money.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees called the potential savings “draconian rollbacks” and promised to “fight to defend against the devastating impacts that Mr. Carney’s cuts will have.”
The Public Service Alliance of Canada says government savings “will hurt everyone in Canada who depends on vital public services.”
If more government spending and bureaucrats meant better results, why is everything from potholes to hospital wait times still a problem? All taxpayers seem to get out of the bureaucrat hiring binge are higher taxes and a bigger debt bill.
The numbers behind the bulging bureaucracy are bonkers.
The federal bureaucracy cost taxpayers $40 billion in 2016. The bureaucracy now costs taxpayers about $70 billion. That’s more than a 70% increase.
Ask yourself: Are you seeing anywhere close to 70% better services from Ottawa’s bureaucracy?
Taxpayers are paying for 99,000 more bureaucrats today than 10 years ago. Taxpayers would save about $7 billion annually had the federal bureaucracy grown in line with population growth over the last decade.
Are you finding it any easier to reach CRA bureaucrats?
“We’re flooded with complaints,” the Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson said, as filings about the CRA spiked 45% from pre-COVID levels.
The government also rubber-stamped more than $1.5 billion in bonuses since 2015 and handed out more than one million pay raises over the last four years.
What have bureaucrats done to merit extra taxpayer cash?
The government posts data on department performance results for the last five years. In three of those years, departments couldn’t meet half of their targets. Their best year was 2023, when departments met 52% of their targets.
Instead of fearmongering, government union bosses should be honest with their members about a simple truth: The biggest threat to bureaucrats’ paycheques is interest on the debt.
**
Given that the Canadian economy relies so heavily on its resource sector for economic growth, Trudeau’s actions helped lead to the kind of anemic economic growth that Canada has experienced over the past 10 years. It’s what many refer to as the “lost decade.”
However, to ensure the lost decade doesn’t continue, and that the private sector does in fact come forward with a new pipeline proposal, there are a number of federal policies on the books that need to be repealed. As Smith said several weeks ago, “until we address the… terrible policies that have damaged investor confidence, we’re not going to get proponents coming forward with major projects.”
Two of those terrible policies are the tanker ban and the emissions cap, both of which the Carney government has said it intends to keep in place.
But a pipeline to B.C.’s north coast isn’t feasible if the tanker ban remains in place. The Trudeau-era cap on emissions for the oil and gas sector will have to go as well if Carney is serious about significantly expanding Canada’s oil and gas production.
Once again, Carney is putting the country’s energy future in a bind. On the one hand, he says an oil pipeline to the B.C. coast is likely to be labelled a project of national importance by his government. But on the other, he has empowered Eby with a veto and refuses to address the tanker ban and emissions cap policies that are, in Smith’s very own words, damaging investor confidence.
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