Wow. Carney just dropped this almost 10 minute video basically setting up Canadians for no deal with the US.
— Ryan Gerritsen🇨🇦🇳🇱 (@ryangerritsen) April 19, 2026
What people need to understand, this is Carney's plan, and not because of Trump. He is putting millions of jobs and countless businesses at risk to satisfy his agenda.… pic.twitter.com/p0PS0i1Hbj
(Sidebar: more here.)
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Prime Minister Carney’s message today was largely expected.
— The Food Professor (@FoodProfessor) April 19, 2026
The warning signs have been there for months, especially as he increased his international travel. We’ve also reached this point because he has not delivered on his key promise to secure a deal with the United States—a… pic.twitter.com/ajtKhuDRWi
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Imagine having a political leader seriously suggesting we abandon trade with the largest economy in the world--our closest neighbour, lowest-cost partner, and biggest customer.
— Keith Wilson (@ikwilson) April 20, 2026
Canada sends ~75% of its exports to the U.S.
For Alberta it's closer to ~85–90%.
That’s not a minor… pic.twitter.com/kBHY9WroUP
It’s just over 500 days since the 51st state remarks. Canada ought to have started a new pipeline the next day. How much investment would be coming here if we had? https://t.co/ofpp9PLQCV
— Ian Brodie (@irbrodie) April 20, 2026
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Mark Carney – the world’s leading corporate promoter of carbon taxes before becoming prime minister who scrapped Justin Trudeau’s unpopular consumer carbon tax on his first day as PM – acknowledged last year that Canada was always going to fall far short of Trudeau’s 2030, 2035 (and thus, logically, 2050) emission reduction targets, despite committing more than $200-billion of federal taxpayers’ money to the effort in 149 government programs administered by 13 federal departments.
Which ones worked and which ones failed? Which were duplicates of other programs resulting in the double counting of claimed emission cuts?
Who knows? There’s never been a comprehensive audit of the feds’ climate strategy.
What we know is that whenever the auditor general, parliamentary budget officer and federal environment commissioner examine a sampling of these programs, they find widespread examples of incompetence, mismanagement and conflicts of interest.
Add in 364 provincial programs – which still excludes municipal ones – and a rough estimate of the total projected cost to taxpayers is more than $500 billion, or $12,000-plus per Canadian.
Today, governments constantly cite “climate change” as the source of the damage caused by every conceivable natural disaster.
In reality – since there has always been severe weather – the culprit in many cases is government negligence over decades to properly maintain public infrastructure such as roads, highways, bridges, sewers and dikes, as well as to update fire suppression strategies and building codes, while allowing massive developments on floodplains, in coastal areas and in forests prone to wildfires.
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The report released April 14 by Jordan Brennan and Farhad Panahov of RBC Thought Leadership details how for every inward dollar of foreign direct investment between 2015 and 2024, two dollars in investment left the country, leading to “the largest capital exodus in Canadian history.”
The extended period of investment leaving Canada has created what Panahov and Brennan describe as an “unprecedented capital recession,” which they say has been defined by “weak business investment, stalling productivity, and stagnating living standards.”
Brennan and Panahov identify structural and policy obstacles as the main reason that investment has left Canada.
“The barriers are execution, predictability, and risk tolerance,” they write, adding that regulatory delays, changing policies, and uncertainty about approvals have caused an increasing number of investors to stop investing in Canada.
While risk is a given in most investments, Brennan and Panahov say investors “flee when hemmed in by vague rules and shifting frameworks” to go to jurisdictions that are seen as more stable and predictable.
Canadians moved a record amount of money into foreign assets in February, causing more money to leave the country than foreign investors brought in. https://t.co/gTh8tBODhx
— BNN Bloomberg (@BNNBloomberg) April 18, 2026
Higher prices for energy due to the conflict in the Middle East—particularly for gasoline—drove prices higher, StatCan said in its April 20 report. Excluding gasoline prices, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by a slower rate of 2.2 percent, compared to 2.4 percent in February.
(Sidebar: don't we have our own oil?)
The statistics agency said that overall energy prices rose by 3.9 percent on a year-over-year basis in March after falling by 9.3 percent in February. Compared to the previous month, energy prices rose by 13.1 percent.
A one-time top-up will be distributed to millions of eligible Canadians in June, marking the launch of Ottawa’s new grocery benefit that will take the place of GST payments for the next five years.Prime Minister Mark Carney announced in January that the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit (CGEB) would increase the financial support provided to families and individuals through the Goods and Services Tax (GST) rebate.The benefit boost will begin with a one-time 50 percent top-up on June 5, followed by a 25 percent increase to the standard quarterly GST rebate in July under the new grocery benefit, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) said in a post on its website. The grocery benefit will replace GST credits through the summer of 2031.
In Canada the last 10 years, the Liberal party, particularly when led by Justin Trudeau, reasoned that its judgment was not just better, but far superior, than the market’s judgment, by which we mean the countless decisions made by people every minute of every day. The damage done to Canada’s economy has never been clearer.
An RBC report released Tuesday confirmed that new investment in Canada has completely collapsed during the Liberals’ tenure in power. “Between 2015 and 2024, more than $1 trillion of investment exited Canada — the largest capital exodus in Canadian history,” the report says. “For every dollar of inward FDI, two dollars exited.” Partly as a result, GDP per capita growth, the best indicator we have of standard of living, has been less than one per cent the last decade, by far the lowest of any period since the Great Depression.
The reason for this, the same reason why another $1 trillion in corporate capital is sitting idle, is what the RBC report terms “burdensome regulatory, permitting and project delivery barriers.” In other words, the Liberals introduced regulations on top of regulations and endless processes, in the name of fighting climate change, thus choking off investment.
The clearest examples are the introduction of the Impact Assessment Act, the government’s cancellation of the Northern Gateway pipeline, the carbon tax, the industrial carbon tax, the clean fuel regulations, and the constant atmosphere of uncertainty as Liberals kept promising new regulations, such as the emissions cap on the oilsands. If you want to achieve an environmental objective, the options are regulation or taxation. The Liberals opted for both, which was incoherent overkill, even from the perspective of centre-left environmentalism.
Some 10-20 years ago, Canada was teeming with proposals to build pipelines in every which direction, LNG terminals and oilsands mines. There was also tremendous investor enthusiasm in Ontario’s Ring of Fire mineral deposits. And then the Liberals came along and subjected everything to multiple reviews.
When for instance, the private owner of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion pulled out, the Liberals did not take that as evidence that project reviews needed to be streamlined. They took it as evidence they needed to buy the pipeline, expending taxpayer dollars that would have never been spent if Canada had a functioning infrastructure assessment regime. By 2020, in all, about $150 billion in energy projects were cancelled or delayed.
Similarly, the Liberals were dismissive of the Ring of Fire because of the peat moss in the area. Former environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson complained in 2023: “I actually bemoan the fact that everybody goes right to Ring of Fire.” After the project was subjected to a regional assessment by Wilkinson, his successor Steven Guilbeault launched another review, further duplicating processes already completed by the Ontario government.
The RBC report makes some useful suggestions around corporate tax reform and streamlining foreign investment approvals. But it is clearly a document written to appeal to the central planner currently in the prime minister’s office, Mark Carney. RBC devotes much of its recommendations to how the government itself should invest, encourage private investment or otherwise leverage “state capital.”
It even includes lines like this, which could have been written by Carney himself: “State capital could be deployed at scale, not to replace private capital but to catalyze it.” The recommendations are thus best left ignored because they do not properly address the severe capital shortage that the report so astutely observed, and the reasons behind that shortage.
Canada needs new thinking, quick.
Canadians are poorer than they otherwise would have been had the Liberals permitted business proposals to advance normally. These were choices made by Trudeau and his cabinet, choices driven by the belief that they were smarter and more wise than all Canadians put together. It is a mistake that will hold this country back for years.