With $400 billion to play with, one would think that Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s communications team could find at least one person to touch up her speech on Monday about the “Fall Economic Statement” who isn’t running an active vendetta against the English language.
It may be the only financial speech ever written that requires a compass to read. We are on the highway in one part, at sea in another and somehow end up in a farmyard at the end. Ulysses didn’t wander this much, and he was hounded by the gods. This wasn’t an economic update; it was a travelogue.
There’s talk of “fiscal guardrails” in one part that inexplicably mutates into “fiscal anchors” in another, and then, leaving the waves behind, we are on a farm: “The seeds we have sown and will continue to plant in the weeks and months ahead.” And having gone to the fantasy back forty, Freeland agriculturally assures us that “this husbandry will prevent scarring.” These are not simply mixed metaphors; they’re lexical warring factions.
It's a meandering way of not explaining anything.
Canadians voted for that.
Remember - no matter how incompetent, contradictory or outright lunatic, you can never lose your job in Canada:
Federal agencies spent millions on sneeze guards and plexiglass shields amid conflicting advice from the Public Health Agency on whether to wear masks. Dr. Theresa Tam, chief medical officer, has now recommended Canadians open windows as a pandemic precaution: “You have to be careful.”
No one invests in Canada for a reason:
A Kenyan door-to-door sales company that received federal subsidies lost more than $50 million on business operations, records show. The Canadian agency that approved the funding yesterday defended it as a good investment: “It has high potential.”
Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson yesterday vowed “aggressive action” in blacklisting plastics as toxic. MPs on the Commons environment committee questioned the impact on everyday products from baby bottles to intravenous tubes: “This is going to be extremely complicated.”
Getting the government one richly deserves:
A good illustration is the mangled thinking found on page 52. The government believes its whopping expenditure of $322 billion in direct support, plus the provinces’ $39 billion, stimulated demand and increased 2020 GDP by 4.6 per cent. It doesn’t really know that — its Keynesian model misses the supply shock from the pandemic. As a footnote explains: “the short-term boost in economic activity caused by government direct spending will be mitigated by the effect of social distancing, i.e., some households being more likely to postpone spending of their income support.”
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