Author: Dennis

The Sinking Blowhard

Canada’s Bolsheviks Cronies 17 Comments

I’ve got a better idea as to how the Ontario Tories can regain their lead: get Dougie to resign. If he still wants a career in politics, he can run federally for the Liberals. Somehow I doubt they’d want him.

Now Ontarians have both a prime minister who speaks like a Conservative (sometimes) but spends like a Liberal, and a premier who speaks like a Conservative (until recently) and also spends like a Liberal. What can Doug Ford do to reverse his drop in the polls? Maybe he could try talking — and more importantly, spending and governing — like a real Conservative.

Going Bust?

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing There Goes The Narrative 16 Comments

About 10 years ago I visited Monette Farms and I was intrigued by their aggressive business model. But now that a lot of their debt has to be refinanced at much higher interest rates, their creditors are knocking at the door. I can’t help but think that they’re not alone.

…company founder Darrel Monette put land up for sale to generate cash. His largest creditor, a syndicate of lenders led by Scotiabank, worked with him time and again to try to keep the Saskatchewan-based farm afloat.

It didn’t work.

Monette didn’t sell enough land, and the syndicate loan, originally $950 million with $830 million outstanding, came due April 15. Monette owes about $905 million in secured debt, and the nearly 500,000-acre operation faces massive restructuring if it hopes to survive.

 

Borrow Some More, Daddy!

Drain The Swamp Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing 6 Comments

Judging by the headline, you’d think that the United States was the only country facing this problem. It would be difficult, in fact, to find a nation that isn’t looking down the barrel of the same gun. Aside from Milei in Argentina, it would be just as difficult to find a government willing to turn down the spending taps in any meaningful way.

As of Tuesday, government debt held by the public is about $31.27 trillion, according to the US Treasury. Meanwhile, the US nominal gross domestic product (GDP) from April 1, 2025, to March 31, 2026, was an estimated $31.22 trillion, according to new Commerce Department data released Thursday.

Circling The Drain

entitlement generation Gradually Then Suddenly Great Moments In Socialism It's Probably Nothing 16 Comments

Two notable takeaways from Newfoundland’s recent budget: this is a record breaking deficit figure from an allegedly conservative government, and health care now eats up nearly half of all spending. We’ll be well on the way to two thirds before long and that will be the case for every province.

The budget forecasts a deficit of $688.5 million and a $20.8 billion net debt by the end of the 2026-27 fiscal year.

The province will spend $5.4 billion on health care — 42 per cent of its entire expenses — including more than $47 million to create 200 new long-term care beds.

Open The Pod Bay Doors, Hal!

AI It's Probably Nothing Tech 13 Comments

I gather there’s still more than a few bugs to be resolved with AI. I’m reminded of a Dilbert cartoon from twenty years ago where the company rolled out a poorly tested backup product called Quik Protect which did nothing but erase your hard drive. Since that was back in the days of modems, it would call up all your friends and erase their hard drives too. And if you had a sound card, it would swear at you.

“Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider,” sums up the PocketOS boss. “It took 9 seconds.”

Circling The Drain

Canada’s Bolsheviks Children R Our Future Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing 8 Comments

Unaffordable housing creates a lot more problems than declining provincial education funding as families move to cheaper abodes. But then again, the same people bemoaning this problem are likely the same ones who cheered for zero percent interest rates that sparked the housing bubble to begin with.

Families aren’t just moving to a different neighbourhood; they’re leaving the region entirely. Driven by a cost of living that has become unsustainable for many young parents, the “Surrey dream” is being packed into moving trucks and headed further east — out of the valley and, in many cases, out of the province.

Child’s Play

Children R Our Future entitlement generation nannystate 9 Comments

There’s a simple option for people alarmed about the high cost of raising kids: don’t have any. But if you have enough political sway, maybe you can coerce that magical entity known as “others” to shoulder the burden for you. To be fair, California is really just following Canada’s lead on this matter.

The number of 4-year-olds attending state-funded preschools reached record highs last school year, driven by states embracing universal access and an unprecedented $14.4 billion in spending.

More than half the nation’s public preschool enrollment gain — some 25,000 students — came in California, which this year made every 4-year-old eligible for its “ transitional kindergarten ” program, or “TK.”

“Transitional kindergarten”? I wonder who came up with that title.

Paleolithic Justice

Canada’s Bolsheviks Our Diversities We Are All Treaty People 22 Comments

Comments about raping those you dislike would normally get political leaders fired, but then again, this is Canada, and certain racially defined “elders” can say whatever they like.

During the session, Belleau recounted comments she said she directed at Frances Widdowson at a campus encounter in late 2025. “I told her: ‘I wish our people could grab you, drag you over to the Kamloops residential school, put you into the basement, speak our language to you — nothing but Secwepemctsín — beat you, rape you, hurt you,’” she recalled at the UBC event.

Faint Hope

Canada’s Bolsheviks It's Probably Nothing New Governor 19 Comments

So Canadians rewarded Carney with a majority government so that he can try to backfill a hole previously created by his own party?  Note that this is merely a discussion forum as opposed to the implementation of any actual business plans. The mind boggles.

A recent report from RBC says that last year was Canada’s first to attract more than $100 billion in foreign direct investment since 2015.

More than $1 trillion in foreign investment exited the Canadian economy between 2015 and 2024, what the report calls the “largest capital exodus in Canadian history.”

Going Bust

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing 22 Comments

For over a decade, Canadian real estate markets and their lenders have acted like the housing price ratchet could only go one way: up. Now they’re finding out that the price ratchet can go the other way too.

The result was a sudden stampede of buyers who triggered an unprecedented run-up that put the average sale price of a traditional, ranch-style, Brantford bungalow close to $900,000 at the market peak in 2022 compared to a mere $300,000 or so in 2016.

Flash forward, and the average home in Brantford in February sold for $625,135, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association, a 30 per cent drop from 2022 that has saddled homeowners there with an unexpected housing crisis that Canadians…are all too familiar with today.

 

Alarming The Warming

Canada’s Bolsheviks Climate Cult nannystate New Governor 25 Comments

Now that Carney has a majority, expect his government to start taking these fools seriously again.

“It feels to me like this (climate) has been somewhat deprioritized. And that’s why we’re going to, as an industry, keep it at the top of the table,” Rowan Saunders, the CEO of the country’s fourth-largest property and casualty insurer ⁠Definity, said in an interview.

“We’re at a point now in Canada where we can have what used to be a year’s worth of severe weather losses happening in a single day. And ​we don’t have the level of public investment commensurate to that reality right now,” said David Leibl, vice president of sustainability and corporate affairs at Winnipeg-based insurer Wawanesa. “We ​need to close that gap.”

Sparky Car Confusion

Climate Cult nannystate 38 Comments

Does the government want Canadians to buy more EVs or not? The way to encourage people to adopt a particular technology is to allow them to source it as cheaply as possible. But the ultimate goal in this case seems to be nearly the opposite: Canadians are supposed to buy EVs at whatever price Canadian automakers and their unions demand, and in similar quantities to a much lower price point. Good luck with that.

Federal Industry Minister Mélanie Joly has also voiced opposition to the plan to ship cars in kits to Ontario, but the federal government has revealed little about how its plan for China to ship 49,000 electric vehicles to Canada at a 6.1 per cent duty rate will work, including who will choose which models are sent.

Slush Funds For All

Canada’s Bolsheviks More Money Than Brains nannystate New Governor 17 Comments

Well, slush money for Montreal at least. It’s anyone’s guess why a port currently at 72% capacity really needs to expand, but we can dream, can’t we?

Nathalie Pilon, the chair of the Port of Montreal’s board of directors, said the expansion is needed, despite a recent decline in overall cargo traffic she attributed in part to U.S. tariffs. She said the port is at around 72 per cent capacity now, and that problems arise when 85 per cent is attained.

You’d think that having a four lane highway across the country might be a priority too, but roads to the Arctic seem to be the all the rage now. Mexico’s got a better road network than Canada at this juncture.

The prime minister said construction on another project, the Mackenzie Valley Highway in the Northwest Territories, would begin this summer

New Nation, Same As The Old Nation

Canada’s Bolsheviks New Governor 29 Comments

It’s pretty much a slam dunk that Carney will have a majority after the April 13th by-elections, considering that two of the seats are in very safe Liberal territory. If so, how long will it be until he reverses course on his Conservative Lite approach to governance? Consumer carbon taxes, anyone? How about “Investments” in EVs and high speed rail?

If the Liberals win two of the three byelections, they will hold 173 seats, or 174 seats if they win all three byelections, which would let them pass legislation without needing to rely on the Speaker or on any other parties to support them.

 

Circling The Drain

Climate Cult Drill, Baby, Drill nannystate New Governor 10 Comments

Cushion the blow? That sounds like the Feds will hand out free Squishmallows at the gas pumps. Could’ve had some pipelines, but it’s getting a bit late even for that. An end to the industrial carbon tax would help, but I’m not holding my breath.

Oil prices have surged since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, averaging more than $1.80 per litre across Canada today, compared with about $1.32 a year ago.

Carney says his government wants to help “cushion the blow” for Canadians.

 

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