For them, not you:
Alto high-speed rail executives received more than $2million in bonuses last year and “they haven’t laid a single metre of track,” Franco Terrazzano, Federal Director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), said in a statement.
The federal Crown corporation created to oversee Ottawa’s high-speed rail project handed out close to $2.8 million in bonuses between Jan. 1 and July 16 of 2025, according to government records reviewed by the CTF.
“Why do these train executives think they deserve huge taxpayer-funded bonuses when they haven’t laid a single metre of track?” Terrazzano said. “Government bureaucrats don’t deserve bonuses before they finish their work, so they definitely don’t deserve bonuses before they even start their work.”
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The Liberals will put the blame on Ukraine, or Donald Trump or tariffs or climate change or just about anything, but what they won’t do is accept responsibility for a crisis that they most certainly have control over.
Some of those issues may have an impact, but the main reason people are facing huge grocery bills is because of a lack of competitiveness driven by structural defects like interprovincial barriers and the carbon tax.
Supply management, which is supposed to produce stable prices and a steady supply of things like poultry, is also failing in this crisis so perhaps we should call it supply mismanagement. Unfortunately, supply management is sacrosanct because of Liberal cowardice in not wanting to tackle that thorny issue.
On Monday, Statistics Canada announced that food inflation reached 3.8 per cent (a rise of 0.3 per cent from the month before) and food purchased from grocery stores had risen by 4.3 per cent.
Canada stands at the top of the G7 for food inflation, and not for the first time.
When inflation numbers are released, gas prices tend to get the main headlines. But the numbers for fresh fruit, vegetables and other food items are startling.
Tomatoes up 45 per cent, grapes up 23 per cent, carrots up 16.8 per cent, canned salmon up 14.3 per cent, coffee and tea up almost 13 per cent, a whole chicken up 12.5 per cent, beef chunk up 25 per cent, bananas up 12 per cent, lettuce up almost 11 per cent. Up and up and up with no end in sight.
Soup was down 0.5 per cent so maybe that’s what we’ll all be eating for the next year.
A year ago, Carney said Canadians had sent a clear message that their “cost of living must come down.” With “urgency and determination” his government would “bring down costs for all Canadians” and “make life more affordable.”
“Canadians will hold us to account by their experiences at the grocery store,” he said.
Canadians are currently experiencing shock at the grocery store, but thanks to Carney’s admission they can at least point to the Liberal government as being responsible.
Sylvain Charlebois, a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax and an expert on food distribution, security and safety, said a lot of the problem with food prices was “homegrown.”
“Canada’s return to the top of the G7 food inflation rankings should concern policymakers. At 3.8 per cent, food inflation isn’t a crisis, but it is a signal. Most G7 countries face the same global pressures. The fact that Canada continues to underperform suggests our food affordability problem is increasingly homegrown, not imported,” he said in a post on X.
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“It’s clearly a bailout. I don’t care what they say,” Rabidoux said. “They could be allocating those funds towards construction of new purpose-built rentals that would be geared towards lower income, and they could do it at considerably less than the outlays for this proposed measure.”
Rabidoux argued there are two interconnected forces driving the intervention in his estimation—and neither has much to do with affordable housing. The first is the close ties between the current government and the development industry in B.C., which he said are “particularly true of Housing Minister Gregor Robertson,” the former mayor of Vancouver. The second, he argues, is the Canadian banks.
“There’s not a solvency issue,” Rabidoux said, “but all else equal, if you’re a bank, you would rather not have to disclose major impairments with some of these very chunky development deals.”
According to Bank of Canada data, the major banks lending to builders and developers jumped exponentially from roughly $20 billion in 2020, to over $75 billion in 2025.
The economics of the conversion program itself, he argued, simply don’t hold up. “You’re going to buy these units at $800,000 to provide low-income housing in what can be relatively luxury-type units, and you’re just going to be massively negative carry on these, subsidized by taxpayers in perpetuity. Just none of this makes any sense.”
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WAKE UP CANADA 🇨🇦 We Tariff ourselves MORE than President Trump does 🤯
— Melissa 🇨🇦 (@MelissaLMRogers) June 25, 2026
9% internal regulatory barriers and some cases up to 40% 🤯 pic.twitter.com/V9O0XPQwri
Canada spent the past year treating a 5.9 per cent tariff as a national emergency. It has spent much less energy on the nine per cent tariff it imposes on itself.
The two figures come from different places. The 5.9 per cent is the Bank of Canada’s October 2025 estimate of the average United States tariff rate on Canadian goods. The nine per cent is the estimate published in January by IMF economists Federico Diez and Yuanchen Yang, working with University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe, measuring the ad valorem equivalent of Canada’s internal regulatory barriers. In service sectors including health care and education, the equivalent tariff exceeds 40 per cent. “Such a level would be prohibitive in most international trade agreements,” the authors write. Fully eliminating these barriers, they estimate, would eventually raise Canada’s real GDP, the total value of goods and services we produce in a year, by up to seven per cent. That’s roughly $210 billion — and if we kept them eliminated we would get it every year, forever.
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