Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
("Ozymandias", Percy Bysshe Shelley)
Canada was a country that was built from the ground up.
Now, it is a wasteland marked by failure to innovate, identify, protect, defend, or even exhibit simple human decency.
To wit:
0.5 per cent: Canada has had the lowest rate of economic growth in the G-7 over the last decade. In 10 years, the Canadian economy has grown less than one per cent. Germany’s economy is the second worst performing economy and it was more than nine times stronger (4.7 per cent). Other G-7 nations performed better: U.K. (7.7 per cent), France (8.2 per cent), Japan (8.7 per cent), Italy (13.2 per cent) and the U.S. recorded the best performing economy over the last decade (20.7 per cent).
40.1 per cent gap: Canada’s economy relative to the U.S. economy has been sagging through the past 10 years. When Justin Trudeau took office the per-person value of all the goods and services produced in our economy (Canada’s GDP) was US$50,055 (inflation-adjusted). That same year, per-person GDP in the U.S. was US$60,212, which represents a 20 per cent gap between the countries. Today the gap is double that (40.1 per cent) reflecting a Canadian economy that has lost ground with the country we used to think of as equal in living standards and economic opportunity. In 2024, Canada’s per-person GDP was US$51,649, and the U.S. was $72,350.
67 per cent: More GDP data from Statistics Canada and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis show Canada’s real GDP per capita grew at only 1.1 per cent annually since 1981. Canada’s productivity gain was 61 per cent since 1981, compared to 127 per cent in the U.S. Today the country’s economy is performing at a 67 per cent rate of the economic performance south of the border (in 1981 that rate was 94 per cent).
– 0.2 per cent: Statistics Canada reported that the country’s economy shrank in the last quarter of 2025. Canada is the only G-7 nation to see its economy contract instead of grow.
Less than 1.1 per cent: At the beginning of the year, the Bank of Canada forecasted Canada’s GDP growth in 2026 to be 1.1 per cent, less than half that projected for the American economy (2.6 per cent). The Bank Governor Tiff Macklem stated this week that the Canadian forecast is now out of date, “Near-term growth looks weaker than expected.” TD also predicted that business investment will actually be negative in 2026.
255,800: Statistics Canada reported that Canada lost 84,000 jobs in February. In the last six months there has been a total of 255,800 jobs lost; the private sector shed 269,200 jobs while the public sector gained 25,700. Prime Minister Mark Carney responded to the Statistics Canada news by stating, “If you look at the performance of the labour market over the course of the last 6 months, we have created over 80,000 jobs net.” What?
39: Canada ranks 39 out of 39 in the international OECD forecast for economic growth through to 2030. Canada has the worst performing economy of advanced economies around the world – at less than half the average growth rate for OECD member countries through 2030.
Consider Canada’s bigger government
$502,830,000,000: The Carney government just tabled in parliament its spending plans for fiscal year 2026-27. Ottawa plans to spend more than half a trillion dollars next year. For this fiscal year, it had planned to spend $486.9 billion and, to date, it has spent more than $510 billion. The Carney government is spending more than the annual amounts spent by the Trudeau government. Looking over the term of a five-year mandate, the Carney government plans to spend $47.8 billion more on programs than the Trudeau government projected over the same period.
$53.7 billion: In the upcoming fiscal year 2026-27, Canada’s total debt will demand interest payments of $53.7 billion. Canadian taxpayers are paying $1.03 billion a week in interest on the national debt – that is $147 million a day, $6.125 million an hour – or $1,700 in a blink of an eye.
43 per cent larger: The Liberals have ushered in a new era of bigger government in Ottawa. There are 110,738 more federal public servants employed today than when Trudeau took office in 2015. The federal bureaucracy grew 43 per cent larger, triple the rate of population growth (15 per cent) over the same period. In 2024 there were 367,772 people employed in the federal government and 43 per cent of them were employed in the National Capital. In 2025, the government trimmed 9,800 jobs but the cost of the bureaucracy actually increased last year. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation reports in its latest study that the cost of the federal bureaucracy increased 80 per cent in 10 years and nearly 40 per cent of them are paid a six-figure salary.
$143,271: The federal budget office reported that the average federal employee makes $143,271 in annual pay and benefits. That total increased 5.1 per cent last year. The federal bureaucrat on average makes more than two times the national average salaried Canadian, who is making approximately $67,500 according to data from Statistics Canada.
42 per cent: To pay for the country’s bigger government, Canadian households pay 42 per cent of their income on taxes, which is more than the cost of a family’s essentials like housing, food and clothing – all combined.
Consider Canadians’ financial burden
+ 4 per cent: This week the government announced the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 1.8 per cent on a year-over-year basis in February, and this followed a 2.3 per cent increase in January. A caveat to this inflation data was provided; the lower figure reflects the government’s GST/HST tax holiday which provided a relief to consumers’ through Christmastime purchasing food, alcohol, and gifts. The data taken in the first days of February also does not factor the huge hikes in gasoline; instead, the 1.8 per cent figure was arrived at by decreasing the cost of gas at the pumps by 14 per cent. Financial analysts point to other living costs that are not factored with the CPI, such as property tax increases (+5.6 per cent), childcare and education costs (+4.0 per cent), and insurance costs (+8.0 per cent). Some analysts put the real inflationary number at greater than four per cent, more than double the government’s CPI figure.
5.4 per cent: The same government’s CPI media release also included news that food costs increased 5.4 per cent year-over-year in February. Food inflation is 3.6 per cent above the overall inflation figure and it leaves Canada with the fastest-growing food prices in the G-7. Last year, Canada’s food prices rose 6.2 per cent, again the highest inflation figure in the G-7 and double the food cost increases south of the border. Since the federal Liberals took office in 2015, an annual family grocery bill has more than doubled, from $8,286 to $17,572.
103 per cent: Canadian household debt is the greatest of all G-7 nations with a debt load of 103 per cent as a share of the GDP. The second worst citizenry is in the U.K., who are a full 20 per cent better off than Canadians with a household debt load of 80 per cent. An American household has a debt load of 73 per cent as a share of GDP.
One-third: Canadians now owe $1.77 for every dollar of disposable income. One-third report they are unable to pay their bills every month. And 36 per cent say they rely on their credit cards to get by. Households have taken on $1.95 billion more in credit card debt in December 2025, and an alarming $7.99 billion of debt since Mark Carney took office. In fact, Equifax observed Canadians’ increased debt load is an “alarming acceleration of financial stress.”
So how bad is it?
This week Canada’s Human Rights Commission issued a report that concluded Canada’s economy is so poor it represents “a substantial cost of living crisis which at its core is a human rights crisis.” The commission reported a challenging situation, as “an alarming number of people in Canada face food insecurity as well as increasing levels of poverty and homelessness.” Inflation, housing shortages, and rising poverty rates have put the “the fundamental human right to an adequate standard of living at risk” for a great many Canadians.
Last words go to Tristan Hopper of the National Post who wrote on Mark Carney’s first anniversary as the country’s prime minister: “Carney was elected to save the economy. It’s only gotten worse. Lost jobs, stagnated productivity, and Mexico now claims the title as the largest U.S. trading partner.”
Buy Canada?
How?:
On factory floors across Canada, aging machinery hums in plants that are investing less and producing fewer goods than competitors. While other advanced economies upgrade and automate, Canada’s manufacturing sector has been losing ground for years, and experts warn it’s set to get worse without major policy changes.
Lagging productivity, heavy compliance burdens, provincial fragmentation, and trade instability are squeezing the manufacturing sector and clouding long-term planning, according to several experts The Epoch Times spoke to. Compounding those pressures is chronically low capital investment that has slowed modernization and weakened competitiveness.
“Our businesses are literally rusting out,” David Leis, CEO of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, told The Epoch Times. He argued that years of red tape, weak competition, and neglect have left many firms slower to modernize and less able to compete globally. In these conditions, productivity stalls, investment hesitates, and manufacturers gradually lose ground to more agile international rivals.
The Charter is garbage, but I repeat myself:
Outside of Quebec, the Notwithstanding Clause was little used over the first three decades of the Charter. Quebec made extensive use of Section 33 — in part to protest the adoption of the Charter without Quebec’s consent; and in part to shield its pro-French language policies from judicial review. This included the pre-emptive use of the Notwithstanding Clause to prevent courts from even hearing cases challenging such policies. While Quebec’s pre-emptive use was often criticized, its legality was never challenged.
In the last decade, however, there has been a dramatic spike in the provincial use of the Notwithstanding Clause. Section 33 has been used in ten different provincial laws since 2018 — not just by Quebec but also by Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. This resurgence has been described as part of a new “conservative provincial rights movement.”
Sensing the risk of losing the strategic value that the Supreme Court’s Charter decisions give to the federal government — i.e., disallowance in disguise — the Carney Liberals have now asked the Supreme Court to impose new restrictions on when and how a government (read: provincial government) can use the Notwithstanding Clause.
In an appeal case from Quebec, the federal government has intervened to ask the Supreme Court to rule that Notwithstanding cannot be used proactively to preclude judicial review of an alleged Charter violation. Ottawa’s legal argument contradicts both the text of Section 33 and its clearly documented purpose.
Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan have intervened to support Quebec, since they too have used Notwithstanding to preemptively shield statutes from Charter review. Equally predictably, over 60 rights advocacy groups — a who’s who of the “Court Party” — (almost all of whom receive funding from Ottawa) have now intervened to support the federal government’s position.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear this case in the last week of March. Cheered on by their Court Party supporters, will the nine Supremes — six of whom have been appointed by Trudeau — rule in favour of the Carney Liberals? If they do, they will have effectively amended Section 33 to mean something very different than what all the Western premiers and even the Trudeau government understood it to mean in 1982. For the Supreme Court to impose any new restrictions on the use of the Notwithstanding Clause would be precisely the abuse of judicial review that Section 33 is meant to prevent.
Political commentators are predicting that an adverse ruling against Quebec and its provincial allies could “inflame separatism” and lead to a “national unity” crisis. I agree. The logic of Section 38(3) should apply to Section 33. Section 38(3) gives every province the legal right to opt out of an otherwise valid constitutional amendment if the amendment removes one of a province’s enumerated powers. Still battling the effects of Trudeau’s National Energy Policy, Lougheed had firsthand experience with Alberta’s vulnerability to central Canadian majorities. He and the other Western premiers saw Section 38(3) as an “insurance policy” for Section 92(A), another one of Lougheed’s constitutional victories, which confirms the provinces’ exclusive jurisdiction over the development and management of their natural resources. But today, the same logic applies to the Notwithstanding Clause. Section 33, like Section 92(A), is a constitutional power of each province. Why should Ottawa be allowed to do indirectly through the Supreme Court what the constitution prevents it from doing directly by a formal constitutional amendment?
How do you opt out of absolutism?
Oh, please.
We're poised to kill children just like these kids who are only going without because of the decidedly bad political choices of their parents and grandparents:
Despite community efforts to feed the city’s youngest residents, the percentage of children using the Saskatoon Food Bank hasn’t declined in the last 18 years that Laurie O’Connor has worked there.
About 40 per cent of the food bank’s requests for hampers are made on behalf of children, according to O’Connor, the food bank’s executive director.
“That number really hasn’t fluctuated much in those two decades. So whether or not we can respond to the need hasn’t made that big of an impact on child poverty,” she told CTV News.
The number of children using the food bank coincides with the province’s high rate of child poverty.
Saskatchewan has the highest rate of child poverty out of any province in the country, according to a recent report from Campaign 2000.
New Brunswick has the sixth-highest child poverty rate in the country, but when only considering the 10 provinces, the New Brunswick rate rises to fourth, behind Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Never forget who these people voted for.
Canada’s immigration department only conducted 4,057 investigations in 2023 and 2024 out of a total of 153,000 cases of potential non-compliance under Canada’s international student program, according to a new report by the auditor general released on Monday.
The report said nearly 93 per cent of 700 Canadian learning institutions submitted reports between 2023 and 2024 that flagged the 153,000 cases.
But the department only has funding to investigate 2,000 cases annually. Of the investigations the department did conduct, the report said the department took “limited action” in confirming non-compliance beyond contacting the student for more information.
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