Wednesday, September 02, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week happiness ...




Canada's economic performance has fallen further behind that of the U.S. over the past quarter century, with the gap in GDP per person more than doubling and the Americans pulling ahead on incomes, employment, investment and productivity.

That's according to a new study published by the Fraser Institute, which found that, in 1999, inflation-adjusted GDP per person in Canada was $48,076, while in the U.S. it was $58,842. By 2024, GDP per person had grown to $83,286 in the U.S. compared to just $59,529 in Canada — meaning the gap had widened from $10,766 to $23,757 over 25 years.

The study compared economic outcomes in the two countries by looking at measures including living standards, incomes, employment, investment, and productivity. In every category, Canada has fallen further behind over the first quarter of the century, it found.

For example, in 2010 (the earliest year of comparable data), inflation-adjusted median employment income was $6,126 higher in the U.S. than in Canada. By 2024, that gap had increased to $8,663.

"When comparing the economic performance of Canada relative to the U.S. since the beginning of the 21st century, it's abundantly clear that Canadian policymakers have failed to create an environment where we can prosper," said Jake Fuss, director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute, in a news release.

He added that the ability to transform raw materials and other inputs into demanded goods and services increased by more than double the amount (26.7 per cent versus 67.9 per cent) in the U.S. compared to Canada, "which explains much of our languishing living standards."

The Fraser Institute outlines three factors that explain the widening gap in economic performance between the two countries.

The first is a decline in private sector employment as a share of total employment in Canada. This decreased from 81.2 per cent to 78.5 per cent, meaning the government sector outgrew the private sector. The opposite occurred in the U.S., as private sector employment increased from 85.8 per cent of total employment to 86.5 per cent.

Meanwhile, labour productivity — a key driver of income growth — in the U.S. grew by 67.9 per cent between 1999 and 2025 compared to a 26.7 per cent increase in Canada during the same period.

Finally, business investment in Canada — which equips workers with the tools and technology they need to produce goods and services — dropped from nearly 90 cents per worker for every dollar invested in the U.S. to 54 cents between 2007 and 2024.

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The tariffs and counter-tariffs have hit some states and provinces harder than others.

In Canada, some provinces have been more exposed to US sectoral tariffs on steel, steel derivatives, aluminium, and autos and vehicle parts that don't comply with the current North American trade deal, known as the USMCA.

Ontario, the most populous province with a significant manufacturing sector, has been hardest hit by the auto and steel tariffs.

Several Ontario auto parts and assembly plants have announced layoffs and production cuts, and the province is estimated to have lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs since early 2025.

Metal exports from Quebec - which produces steel, copper and aluminium - fell 36% between February 2025 and 2026, and there was a 3.6% drop in employment in the sector, according to data released in July.

The Royal Bank of Canada estimates that Ontario and Quebec are the most impacted by US sectoral tariffs, while Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island are the least exposed.

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Now, according to Axios, Washington is discussing an ownership stake in more than a dozen producing Venezuelan oilfields containing an estimated 90 billion barrels of proven reserves.  Canada can’t say it was not warned this could happen in advance.

“Calling this deal huge would be an understatement,” one U.S. official told Axios. “It is massive.”

The agreement has not been finalized, and its precise ownership, operating and revenue arrangements remain under negotiation. Nevertheless, its potential scale should command the immediate attention of Prime Minister Mark Carney and every Canadian policymaker responsible for energy and economic development.

This is not simply another foreign oil project. Venezuela holds approximately 300 billion barrels of proven reserves, the largest reported total in the world. Much of that resource is heavy crude capable of competing directly with barrels from Canada’s oil sands.

If American capital, technology and political power are mobilized to restore Venezuelan production, Canada could eventually face much stronger competition inside the U.S. refining market upon which it remains heavily dependent.




HA!:

Joseph McLuckie can’t count the number of sleepless nights he has had ever since the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) determined about three months ago that his small business owes more than $180,000 in tariffs on a more-than-a-year-old shipment.

McLuckie is the managing director and owner of JPSM Golf, a small business based out of Pickering, Ont., that sells electric golf trolleys. These trolleys carry golfers’ bags throughout the course as they play.

JPSM Golf has been operational for the last 20 years, starting off in the basement of McLuckie’s home in Leaside before it moved to its 9,000-square-foot storefront.

Instead of celebrating his company’s 20th anniversary, McLuckie is agonizing whether he will be able to pay all six of his long-term employees should he have to pay the $182,883.95 the CBSA says he owes.

“You wake up in the middle of the night, you have a random thought, and it keeps you awake for a couple of hours, because I know if I had to pay this tomorrow, I’m out of cash,” McLuckie said in an interview with CTV News Toronto.

The shipment in question was delivered to JPSM Golf from China in April 2025. It was a 40-foot container filled with 330 Formula remote trolleys, a brand McLuckie’s company designed and developed on their own.

 

It's like it pays to produce stuff in Canada.





I found hospitals in Seoul, South Korea, to be sanitary and well-equipped. There was almost no waiting period when I went to an emergency room and even minor sprains or other problems got immediate attention. Despite my basic level of health insurance in Korea, I paid very little for an overnight stay in a private double room in the 2000s.

In the last 20 years, my wife and I have continued to travel to places like Korea, Singapore and Malaysia, and while we haven’t been in hospitals overnight, we’ve been able to get amazing and affordable care in Asia. 

Given the taxes we pay in Canada, I’m still having a hard time believing that the only hospital where I was forced to sleep in a hallway was in Saskatoon.

I’m grateful for the care I received from the doctors and nurses who took care of me, but I also felt sorry for them. Most of the team had been working for hours. I had seen many of the same faces for over 10 hours. They looked exhausted. It’s not a stretch to say they were being pushed to their limits in a broken health-care system.

Even after leaving the hospital, the delays have continued as I'm once again in a different kind of hallway: a long waiting list to get a basic test completed. Nurses and nurse practitioners have made calls and tried to get information on how long it will take for me to see a specialist, but the list seems to be the list. I still face a two to three month wait to get further testing done.

This is worse than hurry up and wait. It’s simply wait and pay high taxes that aren’t consistent with the level of care.

I'm appalled that the only place I was ever warehoused in a hospital hallway was in my own country and the city in which I grew up.




Because science:



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Tuesday, September 01, 2026

We Don't Have to Trade With China

But the Liberals are as greedy and as power-hungry as Xi: 

The biggest alarm bell I’m ringing with regard to Canada is the fact that Communist China is basically using Canada as a staging area to attack our markets through illegal transshipment into the U.S. of Chinese goods.

My major new report, titled The Great Transshipment Scam: Rise, Scope, and Costs, details this and what we are doing to stop the scam and shut down China’s Shadow Transshipment Network, of which Canada is a Tier 1 member.

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Dominic Barton, former managing director of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, yesterday was named chair of the federal agency Invest in Canada. The appointment came two years after investigators said McKinsey benefited from favouritism in winning $200 million worth of federal contracts: “I have no interest in making money.”

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China’s free-speech efforts are an oxymoron; a permanent one-party police state does not exactly encourage debate. The European Union, for its part, thinks of itself as a bulwark of individual liberty, but it behaves in ways that are “post-liberal.” Restrictions on speech deemed to be hateful or, in some cases, simply disrespectful of authorities, has occurred in both Germany and Italy. The EU has ignored popular votes when they favour right-wing populists or seek to limit Brussell’s power.

Today in Europe, free speech is just a mild irritant. More worrisome still are developments in the U.K., the place that brought free speech to this continent. Instead of the Magna Carta, we see a great country becoming ever more authoritarian.

Take this. By some accounts, police in England and Wales made 10,000 arrests in 2024 for “communications offences.” The arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow airport in 2025 was particularly chilling.

Canada seems to be moving in this same illiberal direction. To be sure, there are the promises of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantee the right of “free expression.” But the Charter also provided a breezeway for censorship by stating that speech is subject to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

This leaves power in the hands of the Prime Minister and Parliament to define “reasonable limits.” The growing Canadian thought police recently enacted the Combating Hate Act. And a bill that would impose strict new speech limits on social media companies is currently working its way through Parliament. As the American free-speech advocate Greg Lukianoff says, Canada’s speech is moving from free to “free … ish.”

This approach is also reflected in the ever more out of control Human Rights Tribunal. Former Chairman David Thomas claims the Tribunal has been almost completely taken over by notions of victimization popular on college campuses, including questioning any aspect of “trans rights,” a particular priority of the cultural left and the professional institutions they have captured. He compared the Tribunal to a “state funded extortion ring” that seeks to force those it attacks to make a deal in order to avoid greater financial and professional harm.

We can see where this is going by recalling the crackdown against the Covid era “Freedom Convoy,” with its pattern of arrests and defunding. Canada has long seemed a bastion of tolerance, sexual freedom and democracy, but how does that work when Prime Minister Mark Carney claims that Muslim values and those of his country, a product largely founded on European culture and Christianity, are the same. Perhaps the urbane PM is unaware of the lack of freedoms for women, gays or dissenters in virtually every Muslim country.

 

Speaking of the convoy:

Eighteen months after the bureaucratic controls began, came the decree making mRNA vaxxes compulsory. These novel injections were called vaccines, as if you were going to be jabbed with something akin to a measles or even a polio vaccine. They were not and are not at all like the earlier shots. They were touted as being 100% safe when no one could possibly know the medium- or long-term effects. In fact, later studies showed that myocarditis and thrombosis, among other malign effects, were associated with getting jabbed. We were told that all you needed was one — just like measles — but then you needed two, or three, or four…

What was going on here? And why were healthcare professionals, docs, and nurses objecting? For health bureaucrats and administrators and for the politicians who listened to them, it was absurd that front-line nurses and docs knew something about the vaxx risks they could observe daily in the responses of their patients. For their administrative superiors (but medical inferiors), the docs and nurses were just disobedient. Tamara was more accurate: by causing “so much suffering that didn’t need to happen,” the bureaucrats had “dehumanized us all.”

The effect of their supporters, however, was the opposite. For example, Tamara spoke with Neoline Villebrun, a clan mother and former chief from the Copper Dene First Nation in Yellowknife, who volunteered to organize drummers along the route to Ottawa, “and she was also going to pray for us.” The entire event was becoming more significant than any of the organizers initially realized, and certainly more than a conventional protest against a stupid and repressive government policy. “We were reuniting a people that had been torn apart. Here I was connecting with a Dene clan mother all the way out in the territories. Our message was reaching her, and she was reaching out to us. It made me understand what this was really about. This was about humanity, the opposite of dehumanization.”

Next, the government authorities and the politicians widened the net of those who had to be vaxxed to include cops, first responders, garbage collectors, priests, and (gasp!) university professors. As Tamara said, “every single guardrail that Canadians had counted on to hold government power in check had failed completely.” It started with the Charter and ended when common sense was replaced by bureaucratic fantasies that required complete submission and obedience. In Calgary, the grandiose intentions of the bureaucrats were exemplified by the arrest of a kid for shooting hoops in a park. By himself. Early in 2022, the federal health minister, Jean-Yves Duclos, mused about making vaxxes compulsory for everyone. Later, he said that no one will ever be “fully vaccinated” against COVID, which meant compulsory vaxxes for everyone, forever.

In March 2020, a week after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 event a global pandemic, Justin Trudeau declared the truckers to be national heroes. They were “working overtime to keep us safe and the country moving.” He publicly thanked them “for being there for us” and assured them “that all Canadians are grateful for your service.” He continued this praise for weeks and on Easter compared the truckers to the soldiers who fought at Vimy Ridge, defending “the values we hold dear.” Five months later, on Labour Day, the same story.

A little over a year later, however, the truckers were included among those needing to be vaxxed by January 15, 2022, like it or not — at least if they wanted to cross the border with the US. Among those who objected was Chris Barber, later Tamara’s co-defendant in litigation brought by the Government of Canada (which is still going on). The sociology of truckers, especially long-haul truckers delivering cukes from the Central Valley of California or avocados from Mexico, tends to attract proud, independent, and self-sufficient characters. Long days alone in the cab tend to provide ample time to think and to reinforce these personality traits. For many of them, it was simply insulting to be considered by politicians to be heroes one day and then to be compelled to submit to a jab about which many of them (and many other Canadians) had serious reservations.

The next development was the coalescing of several contingent networks of individuals who may have known one another or who may have heard of one another. Enabled by social media, they developed a proposal and then a plan to drive to Ottawa to protest the latest government overreach and to explain directly to government officials and politicians why those people were doing bad things. Tamara was initially uncertain about the entire enterprise but got involved anyway and came up with the name “Freedom Convoy.” As the convoy attracted more participants — at one point it was over a hundred kilometres long — and drew more attention to its message that the governments within Canada had massively exceeded their authority or, more directly, that government repression was based on force and fraud, as Machiavelli would say, Tamara became increasingly concerned about what the Government of Canada in particular would do next. And, in fact, as early as March 2020, while still praising the truckers, Justin Trudeau had contemplated eventually using the Emergencies Act to retain, he thought, control of the situation.

The story of the truckers’ presence in downtown Ottawa has already been beautifully and fairly told by Andrew Lawton (now an MP) and Donna Laframboise. Tamara’s more personal perspective added its own strength to the more general narrative of popular resistance to tyranny. Consider in this context how she was attacked by the mainstream media, starting with the truly repugnant Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Early in her book, Tamara made an obvious remark: if you are an indigenous leader fighting oil and gas development or maybe just dissing Alberta or criticizing settler colonialism, you will have reporters lionizing your struggle on the nightly news. “But you’ll be treated a lot differently if you’re a Mรฉtis grandma with the wrong politics.” That was Tamara’s position, so her otherwise sparkling collective identity was ignored. Accordingly, the Ottawa Citizen noted that Lich “claims Native heritage.” In fact, she is a card-carrying member of the Alberta Mรฉtis Nation. CBC reached a new low by saying that Russians were behind the convoy, much as Jody Thomas, Trudeau’s national security advisor and the Canadian Deep State incarnate, said that the kids in the bouncy castles along Wellington Street were being abused.

The truckers had to deal with genuine political opponents as well. Under pressure from the Government of Canada, for example, GoFundMe folded — unlike what happened when their services were used by Black Lives Matter, which engaged in real violence. It took Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, to threaten GoFundMe with a lawsuit in his state to stop them and hostile lawyers from trying to steal the truckers’ money. The convoy then moved their fundraising arm to a Christian organization. Likewise, Antifa was circulating around the Freedom Convoy, causing trouble that the mainstream media relished reporting. The Ottawa municipal cops “had no idea what they were doing,” for which the more professional Ontario Provincial Police apologized.

By the end of their stay, “we were tired. People wanted to go home. All we wanted was someone in power to meet with us and talk to us and hear us out.” It never happened. By mid-February, the truckers had decided to clear out, which was a gradual process, and head home. The timing was significant: “before Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, we had already struck a deal with the City of Ottawa to start clearing the trucks out.” The local cops, the city politicians, and the federal government all knew it. That was a signal to Trudeau to bring the hammer down. “Right after we had a deal to move the trucks. He didn’t want this to end peacefully. He wanted a fight.” In short, “Trudeau had blown everything up” in a spasm of aggression and vanity.

The story of her and Chris Barber’s trial and incarceration — exposure to “the faceless banality of state cruelty,” she called it — was appalling. Moiz Karimjee, a Liberal Party supporter, was the prosecutor. “Instead of Karimjee having to prove his case against me, my lawyers were forced to prove that I was innocent of the absurd claims that Karimjee kept making that had no basis in reality.” The judge who let Karimjee get away with all this abuse at her bail hearing, Julie Bourgeois, was another Liberal Party supporter, having carried the party’s banner in the 2011 election. At sentencing, Karimjee’s office went further still, demanding seven years for Tamara Lich and eight for Chris Barber on a mischief charge — near enough to the “dime” that Solzhenitsyn’s zeks drew in the GULAG. Even the trial judge, Heather Perkins-McVey, would have none of it, remarking that people convicted of robbery or aggravated assault rarely receive sentences in the range the Crown proposed.

 

To say that this protest scared the hell out of the Liberals would be an understatement. 

 

 

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Your Corrupt, Impotent, Deseprate and Wasteful Government and You

People voted for this.

I didn't but somebody else did: 

A former president of Dairy Farmers of Quรฉbec, Daniel Gobeil, last night claimed an upset Liberal win in Chicoutimi on unusually high turnout in a federal byelection, 41.5 percent. Liberals easily held two other safe seats to retain a narrow majority in the Commons: ‘We produce less milk than the state of Wisconsin and without supply management, dairy producers would see their farm gate price drop.

 

Protect the aging tart that is Quebec at all costs, even if you have to lie to the Americans about caring French.

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Taxpayers must wait until a fall budget update for details of costs to households and industry from retaliatory tariffs, Finance Minister Franรงois-Philippe Champagne said yesterday. Cabinet detailed a limited $7.5 billion aid package that business groups dismissed as cumbersome and ineffectual: “Is Canada still committed to a fiscal anchor?”

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Conservatives yesterday invoked Prime Minister Mark Carney’s misrepresentations over the Gordie Howe International Bridge in demanding he now disclose terms proposed by Canada to avert a continental trade war. Carney secretly agreed to toll concessions as “a good deal for Canada,” then denied the terms and called toll splitting proof of erratic behaviour by Americans: “Transparency is essential.”


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So you wanted to shake down the Americans for content you know can't be paid for with Canadian taxes.

Right:

A newly-registered Commons petition yesterday challenged Prime Minister Mark Carney to reinstate a $3.7 billion Google tax he suspended 14 months ago as “part of a bigger negotiation” with the United States. Collapse of trade talks cleared the way to revive the tax approved by Parliament, wrote petitioners: “This tax concession has yielded no lasting benefit.”

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Prime Minister Mark Carney says U.S. negotiators held an attitude during trade talks that would have made core Canadian industries — including the automotive sector — either become subsidiaries of their American counterparts or be "wiped out." 

 

I'll just leave this here: 

Forty-two percent of Canadian manufacturers have already moved or are planning to move some or all of their production to the United States, according to a new KPMG Canada survey that warns the shift is “enough to reshape capacity and redirect future investment” as the future of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) hangs in the balance.

The survey of 275 manufacturers, conducted May 11–29 through the Angus Reid Group’s business research panel, found 29 percent have already shifted production south and another 13 percent plan to. Among those considering relocation, 77 percent expect to move within two years.

While 80 percent report no plans to move their headquarters, 11 percent expect to relocate their head office to the U.S. within five years—a signal, KPMG says, of where companies expect to anchor leadership, capital, and long-term growth.

Notably, KPMG frames the migration as more than just a defensive reaction to tariffs. Companies are also repositioning for growth—expanding closer to customers, supply chains, and higher-margin opportunities in a stronger U.S. economy bolstered by tax measures and booming AI and data-infrastructure demand. As KPMG chief economist Ali Jaffery puts it in the report, “This isn’t a wholesale exit from Canada,” but a strategic rebalancing of capital toward higher returns.

The sector’s exposure is stark: 86 percent of manufacturers operate beyond Canada, and 61 percent say their business depends on access to the U.S. market.

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It gets worse.

Carney is planning on bilking us after he buys off MPs gets China to cheat for him the next election. 

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Because principles:

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s abrupt reversal on electric car mandates followed in-house federal polling that showed only a third of Canadians supported sales quotas, according to records. Opposition ran hottest west of Ontario including a majority of drivers in British Columbia, where Liberals held 20 seats: “We are making strategic decisions.”

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He's right:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Trump administration is “not at war” with Canada, dismissing Prime Minister Mark Carney’s concerns about the ongoing trade rift while also taunting Canada for its lack of military naval power.

In an appearance on CNBC, Bessent laughed off any suggestion that the U.S.-Canada trade dispute amounted to conflict between the two countries, then jokingly asked whether Canada would attack the U.S. with its fleet of defunct submarines that were once part of a West Edmonton Mall tourist attraction.

“We’re not at war with Canada. How are we going to be at war with Canada? What, are they going to take their two submarines from the Edmonton mall and sic them on us?”

Bessent, who was responding to Carney’s previous claim that Canada was now “at war” with the U.S. and fighting for its sovereignty, took direct aim at the prime minister in his comments, framing Carney’s posture toward the U.S. as being politically motivated.

The West Edmonton Mall previously had four white and yellow submarines operating at its Deep Sea Adventure ride, which opened in 1985 and took riders through the mall’s aquarium. The ride was closed in 2005 after ridership dwindled. The submarines, which continued to fall off of the tracks they travelled on, were later dismantled in 2012.

Canadian observers had long pointed out that the ride had more operational submarines than the entire Canadian military. The Royal Canadian Navy currently has just four aging submarines in its fleet, each with intensive maintenance schedules that typically keep just one or two operational at a time.

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A mouldy oldie:

Costs of lawyers’ billable hours on land claims and other Indigenous litigation went up 24 percent after then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau disbanded the old Department of Indian Affairs to create two new departments, figures show. “Roles and responsibilities are not always understood,” wrote auditors.

 

 

 

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