Canada

Canada has a national crisis of child care.

Beware whenever the government says it will intervene in some area of the economy to increase affordability or ensure quality. It means the government is about to destroy a market. Health care, rent control, labor relations, or anything else — the story is always the same. Canadians are now suffering the destruction of yet another market through the federal government’s takeover of child-care services. In 2021, the federal Liberal government committed $30 billion over five years, then $9.2 billion annually after that, to establish national $10-per-day child care. Researchers with the think tank Cardus estimate provincial governments will need to kick in at least another $4.2 billion (and possibly much more than that on top) to help achieve the Liberals’ child-care ambitions. Two years in, it’s already shaping up to be a massive disaster.

Less than a third of the population is optimistic about the future of Canada’s middle class, according to a new poll, which found that optimism has plummeted since 2020.

Released by Pollara Strategic Insights on Dec. 17, the survey said that only 31 percent of respondents expressed confidence in the future of the country’s middle class, reflecting a 22 percent decline from the 53 percent reported in 2020.

As anyone who consumes Canadian news knows well, “introducing American-style health care” is one of this country’s greatest policy bogeymen: plenty of people are terrified of it, but it literally doesn’t exist. Any politician who bequeathed this country America’s fantastically expensive and complex system would be burned at the stake — in effigy, if they’re lucky. Still it’s deployed all the time to oppose any private-sector involvement, or any hint of a second or third “tier,” in the system.