It's Just An Economy

It doesn't have to do well, right?:

Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday in his first Question Period appearance in a week sat silently as Conservative MPs recited stories of jobless workers. Carney repeatedly wished Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre a happy 47th birthday in an attempt to be lighthearted: “Will the Prime Minister stop being so flippant about the suffering he has caused?”

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Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne misled Canadians on the size of his near-record 2025 deficit, Budget Office figures disclosed yesterday. Analysts said there is now a 99 percent chance the finance department will miss ongoing targets: “What credibility do you think you have on any fiscal matter?”

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The Parliamentary watchdog crunched the numbers and warned that Canada’s deficit is set to double. The budgetary deficit nearly doubled (+98.3%) from 2024-25 to $72.0 billion in 2025-26. The PBO projects this will push the deficit-to-GDP from 1.2% to 2.2% over the same period. A sharp climb, but necessary due to fallout from the US-led trade war, right? Not exactly.

Revenue slipped 0.56% (-$2.9 billion) to $508.1 billion, notes the report. Higher commodity prices should have helped cushion revenues, but the benefit was overwhelmed by explosive spending growth. Expenses climbed 6.0% (+$32.1 billion) to $580.1 billion over the same period. The PBO attributes $68.4 billion in net new spending between now and 2031 to new measures.

“…as modest revenue growth is outpaced by growth in expenses — largely reflecting the introduction of new measures,” explains the PBO.

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PBO Annette Ryan, in her economic and fiscal update for June, estimates last year’s deficit will be $72 billion (2.2% of GDP) when the final numbers come in for the 2025-26 fiscal year (April 1 2025 to March 31 2026).

That’s double the $36.3 billion deficit (1.2% of GDP) the Liberals reported in 2024-2025 and $5.1 billion higher than the $66.9 billion deficit Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne projected on April 28, the PBO reports, “as modest revenue growth is outpaced by growth in expenses – largely reflecting the introduction of new measures.”

For the next five years, the PBO projects, federal deficits will average $4.6 billion higher annually than the government’s April projections, “reflecting lower revenues, particularly personal income tax, and higher program expenses, partially offset by lower public debt charges.”

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When Carney released his first budget in November 2025, he said he was going to spend $588 billion in 2026. Then he released the Spring Economic Update at the end of April and hiked spending to about $595 billion, which means Carney was already overbudget by more than $6 billion.

A little over one month later, Carney is another $6 billion over budget compared to his spring update, according to a report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

Carney’s campaign platform said “the federal government has been spending too much.”

Going over budget twice in one year is the opposite of fixing that problem. And that’s going over budget on a plan that projected Carney spending $21 billion more than former prime minister Justin Trudeau planned to spend in 2026.

Carney gave himself an open net and still managed to miss. Twice.

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To get this help, you need to qualify for the GST rebate, which means an income of $56,181 or less for a single person with no children or $66,841 or less for a couple with two children. Essentially, you need to be living at or just above the poverty line to receive this payment.

About 45% of recipients are either between the ages of 19-24 or over the age of 65, despite these age groups only amounting to just over 25% of the Canadian population.

This is great for those people but that is not where most Canadian families live. The PM is trying to make it sound like he’s helping average families with the cost of groceries.

“We are laser focused on affordability for Canadians, for Canadian families, providing them with a boost today and a bridge to that better tomorrow,” Carney said at a photo-op to mark the new payments.

Meanwhile, average families continue to face out-of-control food prices. The basket of groceries that cost you $100 five years ago now costs you $130.

The rise for some individual items, as detailed in the latest inflation report is staggering. Tomatoes up 20.9% compared to a year earlier while coffee is up 15.5%, beef is up 12.5%, carrots are up 10.5%, and pork is up 9.4%.

An average family in Brampton that is dealing with these rising costs won’t be getting this help because they make too much money. The median household income in Brampton is over $110,000, or more than $40,000 above the cut-off, but they are still dealing with higher grocery costs.

“We’re building Canada strong for all,” Carney said.

I wish this were the case, but it’s not.

Canada’s economy is in recession according to Stats Canada data. The PM can claim that it’s only a “technical” recession if he wants, but even he said when he was Governor of the Bank of England that a recession was two quarters of flat or negative growth.

Our unemployment rate fell in the numbers released on Friday, but it is still stubbornly high at 6.6%. Bankruptcies have increased by 10% in the latest report compared to a year ago.

Eric Kam, an economics professor at Toronto Metropolitan University dismissed the claim that Canada either isn’t in a recession or just a technical recession as fantasy and wordsmithing.

“I don’t want to hear anything more about technical recessions any more than I want to hear someone tell me they’re technically pregnant,” Kam told me in an interview. “The reality is the Canadian economy has been heading in the wrong direction for about eleven years.”

A healthy economy wouldn’t need a government program to help pay for groceries. People would do it themselves with jobs, higher wages and inflation that was manageable.

We don’t have that.

We have an economy that is sputtering, and a government with tired and failing ideas on how to fix that.

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A new 2026 poverty report card has been released by Food Banks Canada (FBC) showing a 24% food insecurity rate — the highest the country has seen in decades, says one expert.

The expert, none other than the Food Professor, or Sylvain Charlebois, who runs an agri-food lab at Dalhousie University, expressed the severity of this statistic on X — "Nearly one in four Canadians is struggling to put food on the table."

The number has steadily risen from 19% in 2023 to 24% in 2026.

These numbers are indicators something is awry — as Charlebois puts it, "Yet we're still debating whether we're in a recession."

For many households, that debate is already over."

Though many are feeling the pressure, surprisingly 39% of Canadians say they feel they are worse off than they were last year, a decrease from 43% in 2023, and 44% in 2024.

This however, seems to be more about perceived hardship and potentially an indication of what Canadians are used to, as the FBC states, affordability levels "remain high."

Of those spending more than 30% of their income on housing 42% of people said this was the case — up from 36% in 2023.

Canadians also had increased trouble getting access to healthcare this year with 24% claiming to have this issue — another jump from 19% in 2023.

The poverty rate stayed steady at its 2024 level of 11%, but another stark jump from its 2023 baseline of 7.4%.

When comparing provinces, Quebec had the lowest poverty rate in the country at 7%, with Nunavut with the highest rate 31.7%.

Most know the current unemployment rate in the country is 6.7% up from 5% in 2023.

Overall the lowest unemployment rate was in Saskatchewan at 5% and the highest was in Newfoundland and Labrador at 9.5%.

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Tax Freedom Day — the day Canadians stop working to pay their taxes and start earning money for themselves — arrives on Tuesday, June 9 this year, according to an annual survey by the Fraser Institute.

“If Canadians paid all their taxes up front, they would work the first 159 days of the year before bringing any money home for themselves and their families,” said Jake Fuss, the Fraser Institute’s director of fiscal studies, noting it arrives one day later this year than in 2025.

The calculation includes taxes imposed by federal, provincial and municipal governments, including income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, sin taxes, fuel taxes, carbon taxes, import duties and other taxes, levies and fees often hidden from the public or difficult to calculate.

The Fraser Institute says federal taxes account for 56.9% of the total tax bill, provincial taxes 37% and municipal taxes 6.2%.

It says an average Canadian family comprised of two or more people with an annual income of $166,790 will pay $72,539 in total taxes this year, or 43.5% of its income.

In this example, $25,352 of the total tax burden is the result of income taxes; $17,069 payroll and health taxes; $10,519 sales taxes; $4,939 property taxes; $7,819 profit taxes; $2,182 sin taxes; $1,137 fuel, vehicle and carbon taxes and $3,522 in other taxes.

Families and unattached individuals with an annual income of $123,757 will pay $52,220 in total taxes, or 42.2% of their income.

A family of four (two parents and two children) with an annual income of $202,885 will pay $85,315 in total taxes, or 42.1% of their income.

The Massacre No One Wants to Talk About Anymore

 

Why are we trading with such people?:

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio marked the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on Wednesday, saying Chinese censorship cannot erase the memory of the protesters killed when troops moved against demonstrators in Beijing on June 4, 1989.

While China continues to censor discussion of Tiananmen Square and suppress public commemorations, the anniversary remains a focal point for criticism of the country's human rights record and a recurring source of tension between Washington and Beijing.

Tens of thousands of students, workers and other demonstrators gathered in and around Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, calling for political reform, greater freedoms and action against corruption.

On June 4, 1989, the People's Liberation Army rolled into Tiananmen Square where, opening fire on crowds and running over those who seeking to block their advance.

Up to 1,000 civilians were killed, according to estimates by human rights groups and Western outlets based on hospital records, eyewitness accounts, diplomatic cables, and counts of known victims and missing persons. The Chinese government gives a much-lower figure of 200 to 300.

 

But not everyone has decidedly forgotten:

One aspect particular at risk is a detail less commonly associated with the massacre: the hope that blossomed in the days leading up to the killing of hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed protesters by the Chinese army as they demanded democratic reforms.

One collection encapsulating that sense is a set of photographs taken by Austrian sinologist Helmut Opletal who was posted to Beijing as a journalist in May 1989. His photographs show crowds of protesters holding up banners calling for freedom and democracy, many with smiles on their faces and thrusting peace signs into the air.

“One of the things that gets forgotten was that at the early phase of [the protests], there was this incredible kind of joyousness and sense of possibility,” says Wasserstrom.

But in recent years, censorship controls inside China have grown tighter, with state-sponsored amnesia intensifying under the rule of leader Xi Jinping, sparking renewed efforts abroad to document what happened on that night, when Beijing’s streets flowed with blood.

(Sidebar: censorship? Why does this sound familiar?) 

The cover of An Eyewitness Account of 1989 by a PLA Soldier, written by Cai Zheng, who was serving in the air force in Beijing at the time. On June 5th, near Tiananmen Square, he was arrested and severely beaten by martial law troops after he protested against the massacre.

The Opletal photographs are among the hundreds of items hosted by China Unofficial Archives (CUA), a grassroots project launched in 2023 as a US-registered non-profit that aims to protect “censored and suppressed Chinese history”.

Sharon, one of CUA’s Chinese editors, who uses a pseudonym to protect her identity because of threats from the Chinese government, says that “history cannot only be written by officials”.

“If you don’t have real information, it’s difficult for you to have independent thought,” she says.

The Tiananmen Square massacre remains one of the most sensitive topics in China. Virtually all mention of it scrubbed from physical and digital spaces within China’s borders. Those who participated in the protests or have tried to memorialise it have been harassed or imprisoned, sometimes for years at a time.

Just last week, a Chinese activist called Dong Guangping, who has previously attempted to commemorate the event, risked his life to sail more than 300km to South Korea in an attempt to flee China, where he has been imprisoned several times. He remains in custody in South Korea.

CUA hosts a range of material about the Tiananmen Square protests, from the diary of a soldier who protested against the massacre to a subversive documentary made by state-employed filmmakers.

“We don’t advocate,” says Ian Johnson, the founder of CUA. “We’re just trying to provide a resource in a neutral way.”

CUA is supported by grant funding and donations from readers. The website is blocked in China and can be visited only with the use VPN, a type of software that allows users to mask their IP address and jump over the censorship firewall. That makes it hard to track how many readers come from inside China, but Johnson says that around 80% of visitors navigate to the Chinese-language version of the website.

Any material that counters the Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) official historical narrative is likely to be a target for transnational repression. CUA’s website has received several hacking attempts and its Chinese staff have been harassed.

 

 (Sidebar: Chinese staff being harassed, huh?)

 

Surely by now, the Chinese communist government sees that it can do business with the West without censoring this bloodbath.

The collective conscience, too, has been erased.

 

Canadians Are Unaware of the Extent of Their Government's People-Killing Program

THIS is how Liberals can gain a foothold while in any other country they would fail:

The majority of Canadians are unaware that mental illness eligibility for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) is due to take effect in March 2027, a new poll has found.

The data compiled by the non-profit Angus Reid Institute comes from an online survey conducted between May 7 and 11, 2026, among a representative sample of 1,803 Canadian adults. It showed that 56 per cent of respondents did not know about the scheduled expansion of mental illness as a sole condition for MAID before completing the survey.

The survey also found that just 37 per cent of Canadians had been following the issue.

 

If not malice, then stupidity.

 

Canadians are supporting something they don't even understand.

Because reasons.

Flannery O'Connor was super-right: