Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week sorbet ...


Remind me again of who you voted for, Canada?:

We’re tapped out.

That’s the message Canadians have for Ottawa in a new Ipsos poll conducted for the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI), which shows 70% of Canadians believe high tax burdens are having a negative impact on their cost of living.

The results, released July 16, suggest a growing disconnect between government spending policy and the priorities of taxpayers. According to MEI’s vice-president of communications Renaud Brossard, Canadians are feeling the stress that high taxes are putting on their lives.

“What they’re seeing is that a lot of what Ottawa is doing doesn’t necessarily seem to be alleviating that,” he said.

Much of the concern surrounds Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to establish a so-called “sovereign wealth fund,” Brossard said — a scheme the PM announced in April but isn’t gaining very much traction among Canadians.

“Let’s not forget that this sovereign wealth fund proposal from Ottawa is not a sovereign wealth fund like that of Norway, it’s not built from budget surpluses, and isn’t aimed at generating the highest returns — it’s aimed at subsidizing a bunch of different projects in Canada,” he said.

“It’s not so much like a sovereign wealth fund as it is an industrial policy fund in which people can take ownership.”

Entitled the “Canada Strong Fund,” the proposed fund will launch with an initial $25-billion endowment, managed by an arms-length Crown corporation.

Exact details on the plan and the agency tasked with running it have yet to be released.

Within Canada, Alberta has successfully operated its own $30-billion sovereign wealth fund for over half a century.

Founded by former premier Peter Lougheed, the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund banks profits from the province’s oil and gas resources.

In the MEI poll, 58% said they oppose Canada borrowing $25 billion to finance the fund’s creation.

“The 58% that oppose the borrowing for this new infrastructure bank is quite telling, but more than that, I think the fact that there’s only 20% of Canadians that think it’s a good idea should signal this government that that it should abandon such a plan,” Brossard said.

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Canada has experienced a sharp decline in business investment per worker over the past decade, in stark contrast to gains in the United States, highlighting a deepening productivity crisis north of the border, a new study suggests.

Inflation-adjusted business investment per Canadian worker fell 18.8 percent from $20,310 in 2014 to $16,493 in 2024, according to findings from the Fraser Institute’s latest study. The United States’s equivalent surged 31.3 percent from $23,263 to $30,555 over the same decade.

The think tank’s study examined business investment per worker from 2007 onward but focused on the 2014–2024 period, when the gap between Canada and the United States widened most sharply.

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Despite that, a Nanos-Bloomberg poll showed most Canadians are satisfied with Carney’s performance on the economy.

They blame U.S. President Donald Trump for ongoing economic uncertainty over tariffs and the uncertain fate of the Canada-U.S.- Mexico Agreement on trade, which Canada and Mexico wanted to renew while Trump didn’t, leading to more uncertainty as the trade deal will now be subject to annual reviews.

But the root problems in our economy have been around a lot longer than Trump.

A major factor is Canada’s low productivity because of weak business investment.

Low productivity doesn’t mean Canadian workers are lazy.

It means businesses aren’t investing in new technologies giving workers the ability to work more efficiently, leading to a more prosperous economy and higher standards of living.

In March 2024, Carolyn Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, called this a “break the glass emergency.”

Even the Trudeau government acknowledged it during their near-decade in power, where many of their anti-business policies made the problem worse.

In her April 2022 budget speech, then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland described low productivity as the “Achilles heel” of the Canadian economy warning “we are falling behind when it comes to economic productivity.”

Her budget even cited a projection by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that without reforms, Canada’s real GDP per person from 2020 to 2060, would grow at the slowest rate of any of the OECD’s 38 industrialized countries.

Low productivity results from many factors including government over-taxation, over-regulation, a lack of competition and excessive and indiscriminate immigration policies.

The latter leads to businesses hiring cheap labour as opposed to finding ways for skilled workers to produce goods more efficiently, leading to higher profits, better wages and improved standards of living.

A report by the fiscally conservative Fraser Institute released Thursday compares business investment in Canada to the U.S.

While a lack of business investment resulting in low productivity in Canada goes back decades — with the study by the fiscally conservative tank using data from 2007 to 2024 — it notes that it accelerated after 2014, a year prior to the start of the Justin Trudeau era.

According to the findings, inflation-adjusted business investment in Canada per worker — including spending on equipment, machinery, factories and new technologies (while excluding residential housing construction and government projects) — declined by 18.8% from $20,310 in 2014 to $16,493 in 2024.

During the same period, inflation-adjusted business investment per worker in the U.S., in Canadian dollars, increased by 31.3% from $23,263 to $30,355.

“The economic well-being of Canadians depends in large part on the strength of business investment, so poor business investment is bad news for workers,” said Tegan Hill, co-author of the Fraser Institute study, Comparing Business Investment per Worker in Canada and the U.S., 2007-2024.

 “The waning ability to attract business investment in Canada should sound alarm bells and prompt policymakers to enact immediate policy reforms to make Canada a more attractive and hospitable destination for investment.”

In a speech to the Economic Club in New York in May, Carney said his government is “catalyzing one trillion dollars in investments in Canada over the next five years”, that “foreign investment in Canada is running at twice the rate of our nearest G7 peer and that Canada now ranks as the most attractive country in the world for infrastructure investment.”

An April report by RBC agreed Canada is back on the radar with foreign investors, but also noted, “the renewed interest comes after a decade of weak business investment, stalling productivity, and stagnating living standards. Between 2015 and 2024, more than $1 trillion of investment exited Canada — the largest capital exodus in Canadian history. For every dollar of inward (foreign direct investment), two dollars exited’”

Call it Canada’s lost economic decade under Trudeau.

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Nearly 13,000 people sleep in cars, alleys or abandoned buildings nationwide according to new data by Housing Minister Gregor Robertson’s department. The count of homeless people, the most comprehensive to date, found another 4,700 slept in tent cities: ‘Unsheltered locations included streets, alleys, parks, transit stations, abandoned buildings, vehicles, ravines and other outdoor locations.’

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Trump is sick of Canada’s sh--:

U.S. President Donald Trump imposed an additional 50 percent tariff on some Canadian goods July 20, saying the country has discriminated against American dairy, alcohol, and auto exports.

“President Trump is taking action to hold Canada accountable for its continued discrimination against and unreasonable and unequal treatment of U.S. commerce that has burdened and disadvantaged hardworking Americans,” the White House said in a statement.

The tariffs take effect in 30 days.

Trump said earlier in the day he spoke with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney about the need for Canada to intensify efforts to manage its wildfires. He floated the idea last week of imposing a tariff in response to Canada’s wildfire smoke spreading to the United States.

Trump signed three proclamations Monday to “level the playing field” on dairy, cars and auto parts, and alcohol, he said.

Each proclamation sets a 50 percent tariff covering nearly $20 billion in products ranging from wine to hockey sticks and cement.

 

These forest fires:

More than 950 wildfires are scorching Canada from coast to coast, the national wildland fire summary says. Roughly 241 blazes are out of control.

The fires have prompted Environment Canada to issue air quality warnings from B.C. to Quebec, as well as the Northwest Territories.

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Carney doesn’t care because none of this has anything to do with his stocks in Brookfield.

Prime Minister Mark Carney last night acknowledged new U.S. tariffs will cost Canadians but proposed no new initiatives. Under current law it would take an Act of Parliament to enter negotiations with the United States over dairy quotas: “This trade dispute has raised costs for families.”

 


Wary?

How about opposed?

Who needs children being burned alive, anyway?:

According to a recent poll, just under half of Canadians are opposed to the federal government’s recent decision to expedite Gazan student visa processing.

And I must say, I don’t blame them.

The decision to expedited visa processing for 37 Gazan students and their families was announced last month by Immigration Minister Lena Diab.

The Leger poll, commissioned by the HR Canada Charitable Organization, asked respondents whether, like some, they believed the policy would help students whose education had been disrupted by war, or whether they thought “speeding up the process could make it more difficult to adequately identify potential security risks, including individuals with extremist affiliations.”

Forty-three per cent of respondents opposed the decision to expedite visa processing, 38 per cent supported it, and the remaining 19 per cent answered, “I don’t know.” These results demonstrate significant public concern and uncertainty for accelerating Gazan student visa processing because of perceived security risks of allowing radicalized Palestinians into Canada.

The survey was conducted last month, between June 19 and June 26, among a representative sample of 1,528 Canadian adults.

Respondents’ opposition and uncertainty should not be surprising. Gaza, after all, is governed by the terrorist group Hamas, which was responsible for the heinous attack of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. At least 1,500 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists breached Israel’s borders by land, air and sea. In total, 1,195 people were killed, including infants, children, elderly and peace-festival attendees. Families were murdered in their homes, some, burnt alive, while others were executed in bomb shelters. Those kidnapped and taken hostage numbered 251 .

Keep in mind that polls conducted inside Gaza revealed that 72 percent of respondents felt the decision for Hamas to conduct the October 7 massacre was “correct” given the outcome.

“Canadians have witnessed an explosive rise in extremist rhetoric, ideological radicalization, and politically motivated violence, along with an unprecedented rise of antisemitism,” the HR Canada Charitable Organization commented in a statement . “As concerns about public safety have grown. . .so too have questions about how governments balance humanitarian objectives with security considerations.”

 



Now, hear me out -  Rubio and Vance in 2028.

Here is why:

These are numbers that would shock most Americans today, because we’ve been taught to believe that this kind of political violence, it simply doesn’t exist, or it’s being exaggerated. But it does exist, and we’re actually underestimating it, and our nations bear the scars to prove it. And today, we face a new wave of this old evil.

 Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40 per cent in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80 per cent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors.

These are not abstract statistics. Americans have seen what those numbers mean. An all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes, a transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, “Where is your God now?” A health-care executive executed in cold blood in the streets. Multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president. And the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation, a man who happened to also be a husband and the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students.

This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred, above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves “anti-capitalists” or “anti-imperialists” or “communists” or “anarchists” or “Marxists,” but the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.

It is a poisonous resentment, cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right, on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong. None of this is driven by idealism. It is not Utopian. In fact, it is the opposite.

One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, levelled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards. A world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God. For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization, for them, it’s an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be.

So they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines, they attack railroads, they attack power grids and laboratories — the physical, embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great. This is an international conference because we are facing … a transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself. They co-ordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission.

 

We can’t have anything this nice in Canada.

We can’t even launch a rocket into space.

 


Because Bill C-9 - the Bible and thought banning bill -  passed, this thing totally happened under penalty of a life sentence and probably getting your dog shot:

Totally happened.

(wink)




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