Just how far can the government go with costly and inconvenient environmental regulations of questionable benefit before citizens decide they have had enough of it?
Steven Guilbeault’s environment department appears determined to find out as they indicate plastic bags and wrapping used for meat and produce in grocery stores will be banned.
There just isn’t a bad idea this government won’t endorse.
Two statistics illustrate Canada’s disastrous economic outcomes in recent years and the bleak outlook. First, as Fraser Institute senior fellow and former Statistics Canada chief economic analyst Philip Cross observes in a recent study, Canada’s 10-year average real GDP growth per capita was its lowest since the Great Depression. And it’s not a problem we’ve imported: from the fourth quarter of 2015 to the fourth quarter of last year cumulative growth was about two per cent in Canada versus 12 per cent in the United States.
The federal Liberals’ new communication strategy appears to be doubling down on their signature tactic: gaslighting Canadians into thinking there’s no problem and, if that fails, blaming them for thinking there’s a problem at all.
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attempted to assert that housing isn’t primarily a federal responsibility, despite several key levers fuelling the crisis being very much under federal jurisdiction — and a history of campaigning on housing affordability.
Moving to green electricity will mean higher costs for consumers. That’s from a staff memo sent to federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
“As the economy transitions to net zero by 2050 there will be increased demand for clean electricity to decarbonize other sectors such as transportation or buildings,” said the March 27 memo. “Some experts are predicting that demand could double by 2050.”
For two decades, from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, through Liberal and Conservative governments, Ottawa was largely absent from housing.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2015 promised to change that, with major federal investments in affordable rental housing. As of March, Ottawa had committed more than $30-billion (much of it low-cost loans for rental housing), and the result is 107,519 new homes.
It is at once a success and failure. It’s more than Ottawa has done in a long time – and it’s far, far too little. The Trudeau government has been overtaken by events: an out-of-control housing market where the cost to buy or rent is extreme.
Canada’s housing shortfall could widen by another 500,000 units within just two years if immigration continues at its current pace, according to a recent report from TD Economics.
In the report, economists Beata Caranci, James Orlando and Rishi Sondhi note that Canada’s population grew by 1.2 million over the past year, as of the second quarter of 2023 — more than double the pace of population growth in 2019 and years prior.
Canada’s new immigration minister said he is open to “having a conversation” on concerns raised by some economists and groups on rising immigration targets amid a housing shortage, but said he still has no plans to lower them in the near future.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke from a podium in Hamilton this week sporting a circular bandage on his forehead, the result of an injury he sustained while playing with his kids. I won’t be surprised, however, if the PM appears with an additional band aid on his head in the coming days, the result of banging it against his desk after making arguably one of his worst gaffes in recent years.
Pretty bad when Blackie’s Star takes him to task.
Back in February 2021, Facebook blocked news on its platforms across Australia to protest a proposed law that would have forced it, along with Google, to pay media companies for stories appearing on their sites.
About a week later, Facebook and Google struck a deal with the Australian government and the restriction stopped. Yet in Canada, such a deal never materialized.
Instead, Ottawa passed the Online News Act in June, requiring tech giants to pay news outlets for content they share or otherwise repurpose.
Earlier this week, the federal Conservative Party dropped a new online ad targeting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
It begins with Mr. Trudeau, on the 2015 campaign trail, promising to “prioritize new investments in affordable housing.” It then jumps to 2021, with the Prime Minister talking about housing once again.
“For far too long a first home has been out of reach for far too many,” he says. “It’s time to change that.”
Finally, the ad concludes with a clip of Mr. Trudeau from this year. “I’ll be blunt as well, housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility,” he says.
In 2009, Ottawa made its first commitment to end “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies that “encourage wasteful consumption, distort markets, impede investment in clean energy sources, and undermine efforts to deal with climate change.” Last year, this was adopted as a mandate of the Trudeau government.
However, instead of delivering on this pledge when the federal government released its framework in July, the new policy consists only of guidelines to evaluate subsidies without announcing the elimination of any of them.
Economic decoupling from China gathered steam during the pandemic when the vulnerability of supply chains came to the fore. But Canada’s economic linkages with China haven’t diminished, despite its closest ally the United States actively doing so.
Whether it’s called decoupling or friendshoring or nearshoring, international trade expert Eric Miller says it’s primarily about reducing risk—de-risking—in trade with China and then adjusting to the impacts.
Trudeau focused to stay on as Canada’s PM amid separation, shuffle: analysts
Justin Trudeau’s surprise announcement that he and his wife were separating, just a week after a broad cabinet reshuffle, underscores the Canadian prime minister’s focus and intent to lead the Liberal Party into a fourth election victory, despite sagging opinion polls, pollsters and insiders said.
On Wednesday, Trudeau and his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau unexpectedly announced their separation, likely marking the end of their 18-year-long high profile marriage. The separation is one of Trudeau’s biggest personal crises, although insiders and political commentators said he wants to ride out the aftershocks.
Recently on Twitter, Alberta MP Shannon Stubbs, Tory shadow minister for energy and natural resources, put forth a series of tweets on Ontario’s Ring of Fire region, heretofore a promised land of metals and minerals invoked as an enabling resource for the Trudeau government’s electric vehicle (EV) dreams.
Canadians’ wallets have been hit hard recently by inflation. Prices have gone up at the grocery store, gas station, and pretty much everywhere else consumers shop. But don’t expect any sympathy from Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. Her recent remarks on the situation only rub salt in the wound.
Here’s the background to Freeland’s latest gaffe. On July 1, the Trudeau Liberals plowed ahead with their plans to increase the federal carbon tax yet again. This annual increase to what’s basically a “tax on everything” has sadly become a common occurrence.
