Author: Dennis

A voice in the wilderness

Great Reset It's Probably Nothing 19 Comments

This op-ed by David Rosenberg points out the problem with using GDP as the yardstick for measuring economic growth. If you discount the impact of governments borrowing capital that they have no intention of repaying as well as consumers borrowing to buy houses that they cannot afford, the economy is actually shrinking, not growing:

…the Canadian housing market has gone simply insane with ultra-low interest rates, easy access to credit, shifting preferences (work from home) toward more real estate and tremendous speculation. Total residential construction has surged 22.5 per cent in the past year and that has taken the housing share of GDP to a record high of 9.3 per cent — double the historical norm. Strip out housing, and GDP contracted 3.5 per cent in the past year (versus the actual decline of 1.5 per cent); strip out housing and government, and the economic contraction is -5.6 per cent.

One has to wonder what happens to the Canadian economy when the housing bubble finally does pop, the stimulus programs abate, and the commodity cycle runs its course. What is left? The reopening of the economy? I have news for you: If the real estate gravy train ever does end, considering the outsized impact it has exerted on the economy, there is no reopening large enough to offset the housing reversal and all the negative multiplier effects that will reverberate across the entire economy.

And then there is this related issue. Coincidence? I think not.

The One Trick Pony that just won’t die

Let Them Eat Taser Tommy Douglas: Not Dead Enough Wuhan Flu 23 Comments

It’s back to effective house arrest for every single Manitoban in the latest episode of “Micromanage my Life” starring Brian Pallister and Brent Roussin. Watch as our two anti-heroes impose another round of baffling edicts in an effort to postpone the death of socialized medicine.

After months of seeing ads on Facebook admonishing the province to bear restrictions for “just a little bit longer”, Manitobans are finding out what “a little bit longer” actually means:

The latest changes to the orders, which include a ban on both indoor and outdoor visits between households, kick in Wednesday and will last at least four weeks, Manitoba’s chief public health officer said Monday.

Under the new orders no indoor gatherings will be allowed, and outdoor gatherings will be capped at 10 people. Faith-based gatherings will be limited to 25 per cent capacity or a maximum of 10 people,…

It’s now illegal for our daughters to visit us at home, even if outdoors, but if we all went to a park, that’s okay. My golf partner can’t visit my house, but it’s perfectly legal for us to sit in the same golf cart on Men’s Night. Oh, wait, I don’t want to give these clowns any more ideas…..

Destroy the village in order to save it

Climate Cult Great Moments In Socialism The Libranos 41 Comments

As Lorne Gunter points out in this concise op-ed, “fixing” the climate with carbon taxes is about as far from win-win as you can get. If you think housing prices are crazy now, just wait until these carbon taxes are fully worked into the cost of a foundation.

Trudeau’s Thursday pledge works out to a reduction from 732 annual megatonnes of greenhouse gases to 439 megatonnes.

To achieve that, not only would Canada have to shut down Alberta’s oil and gas industry, but also the entire country’s transportation sector – cars, trucks, semis, school buses and delivery vans.

And probably any construction that uses cement. A lot of emissions are produced in making cement.

 

Dangerous precedents

Climate Cult Great Reset Wuhan Flu 41 Comments

Anyone half awake over the last year could see this one coming.

Now, spurred by alarming science, growing public fury and a deadly pandemic, government officials, corporate bosses and civil-society leaders are finally waking up to a simple idea whose time has come: climate is everything.

Five years later, the COVID-19 pandemic has given the E.U. the perfect opportunity to accelerate the remaking of its economic agenda with climate at its core—what Sefcovic calls the “new economy of the 21st century.”

The “new economy” will be the negation of the economy.

Listen to the experts…

Unsettled Science Wuhan Flu 63 Comments

Especially doctoral students in the medical field when they weigh in on the subject of  supply chain logistics and commercial trucking.

But if data indicates that truck drivers are a significant source of virus importation, it might make sense to have handovers of freight at the border so the drivers themselves don’t cross over, said McLaughlin.

There are likely some SDA readers out there with experience in the trucking industry who can elaborate on the nightmarish scenarios that might unfold should anyone should actually try what Ms. McLaughlin is recommending.

Unintended consequences

Great Moments In Socialism Wuhan Flu 26 Comments

Buried in this op-ed is the answer to a difficult question that no one, least of all Doug Ford, wants to acknowledge:

“He’s got the science absolutely upside-down,” University of Toronto epidemiologist Dr. David Fisman, chair of the province’s COVID-19 “science table,” told Global News. “We know in Ontario that the huge drivers right now of transmission are workplaces, particularly industrial workplaces, warehouses, Amazon distribution centres, post offices.”

These same “experts”, of course, admonished people since day one to try to do all of their shopping online. You would think they would know that this would exponentially increase demand for output from workplaces which were never designed for social distancing and which just happen to be highly concentrated in the GTA. Coincidence, or just the God complex of the central planners working its magic?

Magical Monetary Theory

Great Moments In Socialism Shiny Pony 20 Comments

While Terence Corcoran is on the money as usual with his latest op-ed, he omits to mention that the Liberals have been aided in their spending spree by an opposition party that has been largely complicit. If O’Toole can jump on the climate change bandwagon as easily as he did, what’s to prevent him from embracing an idea like MMT that seems to be gaining converts?

MMT has not been formally identified as official policy in Ottawa, either by the government or the Bank of Canada — even though Australian economist Bill Mitchell — said to have coined the MMT name — has described Canada as a potential “MMT poster-child.”  There can be no doubt, however, that MMT is an influence inside central banking and government finance circles.

A new report from the C.D. Howe Institute, however, warns that the inflation risk riding behind the massive fiscal expansion will not be so easily tamed.

I have to differ with Corcoran on the latter point: rising consumer prices will be the least of anyone’s worries as the drive for MMT gathers momentum. An exponentially rising debt burden distorts capital markets so badly that the funds needed to replace worn out plant and equipment simply become unavailable, having been hoovered up by net worth taxes, high speed rail networks and artists’ communes. There’s no profit in raising prices on goods that you’ve been denied the means to produce in the first place.

Another helping of fear porn, please!

Tommy Douglas: Not Dead Enough Wuhan Flu 18 Comments

Judging by this headline, you might come to the conclusion that Ontario’s hospital system is mere moments away from a dreaded  “last resort” stage where people are triaged like the wounded in a war zone. Get a little further into the story, and you have to wonder how a journalist can so cavalierly pass off speculation as if it were historical fact.

Hospitals are working flat out….transferring hundreds of patients from hot spots to communities with extra space, cancelling non-urgent surgeries to free up 700 critical care beds, and redeploying nursing and other health-care staff.

In Ontario, “we’re moving patients like absolute crazy; we’re surging like absolute crazy,” one critical care specialist said.

If you’re going to throw around the word “crazy” it would be helpful to define it. As anyone who is familiar with decades of hallway medicine in Canada’s health care non-system would know, crazy is nothing new. In any institution in which price signals and free markets are allowed to function, working flat out to meet rising demand is normal and expected. But in a centrally planned system, it’s evidence of failure.

If you get to paragraph 13, there’s this bit of news that for some reason was missed by the burial crew:

The number of deaths has averaged around 30 a day for several weeks, a dramatic drop from the peaks of wave one and two, when Canada saw the highest rates of nursing home deaths globally.

Don’t complain; just endure

Wuhan Flu 22 Comments

As Canada’s Covid theater goes from bad to worse, Ontario authorities have finally allowed wider use of one tool that should have been made widely available from day one. Its usage remained heavily restricted while the central planners presumably assessed just how much information the proletariat should be trusted with. In most jurisdictions, the central planners are still mired in exhaustive studies of proper nose-swabbing techniques.

But it was only on March 19 that Ontario allowed antigen test swabs to be done by a trained layperson instead of a healthcare professional — in other words, that someone without a healthcare background could swab your nose. In Quebec and B.C., the rules still require a healthcare professional to do the swab. Quebec’s ministerial order allows for acupuncturists, chiropractors and denturologists to swab a nose for COVID-19, but no matter how much training a layperson gets, they aren’t allowed to do it.

Breaking the narrative

Wuhan Flu 12 Comments

Once in a long while, a news story sneaks into the mainstream media that challenges the official narrative by finding experts who actually disagree with the conventional wisdom.

Better take a look before some “fact-checker” notices and gets the story removed.

A January paper in the journal Social Science & Medicine wrote that, “Long Covid has a strong claim to be the first illness created through patients finding one another on Twitter.”

Adding bricks to the camel’s back

Climate Cult Great Reset 36 Comments

While the CD Howe Institute is right about ditching Freeland’s $100 billion stimulus package, they go completely off the rails with the rest of the prescription.

The C.D. Howe as a result proposes a hike in GST from its current rate of five per cent up to seven per cent, reversing the previous Conservative government’s two per cent cut in 2006.

As if fearing that morale would not improve without further beatings, the report seems to believe that Canada’s carbon tax regime could use some additional help:

[The report] also proposes hiking GST on transportation fuels like gasoline and diesel by 10 per cent, which would “give consumers a strong price signal to discourage CO2 emissions,” it says.

What’s it called? Monorail!

Great Moments In Socialism You Might Be A Liberal 50 Comments

Lately we’ve heard of some overtly Marxist policy proposals emanating from the federal NDP convention, but concerned about being upstaged, the ruling Liberals have apparently decided to counter with some overtly Simpsonesque ideas at their own convention.

This year’s policy resolutions run a wide spectrum, with resolutions on such issues as expanding rural internet access, raising old-age security payments and creating a high-speed rail network across the country.

 As the nation slides into bankruptcy, supposedly we can take comfort in owning the world’s most expensive railway tunnel between Banff and Vancouver.

Could you please be more vague?

Quackery Wuhan Flu 34 Comments

If you’re wondering why this country’s approach to the pandemic is floundering badly, it’s precisely due to the fact that we put our trust in “experts” like these whose solutions are largely a pack of bromides, empty slogans and arguments over which version of central planning ought to be adopted. Just like in the Soviet Union where food supply problems were caused by perpetual “bad harvests”:

“We’re not going to be able to vaccinate ourselves out of this because of supply issues, distribution issues — we simply don’t have enough,” Warner said.

And no issue can be discussed these days without the obligatory nod to the non-concepts of racial and class consciousness:

Warner said that ICU doctors have been seeing “racialized, marginalized people getting nailed by this.

Of course, if the current lockdowns are not working as hoped, that can only be because they are not severe enough. If this one trick pony keeps kicking you, just tell yourself that it’s for your own good:

“We bring in these measures every now and then, they’re pretty lightweight,” she said. “Based on some other countries like Australia and New Zealand, Taiwan, China, […] if we had done a really heavy duty lockdown a year ago, we might be in a different situation, but now I think we’re all just tired of it.

If we all buckle down, we can get out of this. Someday. We’re not too sure exactly when…

“In Canada, we have the fundamentals pretty much, right. We have the tools available to us to get us out of this,” Conway said. “It’s just not happening today or tomorrow. And if it deteriorates over the next week, we need to adapt our behaviour to the circumstances of that day. Trusting that at some point in the future, by the fall or something, things will be better.”

Move those goalposts!

Great Healing Forward Wuhan Flu 26 Comments

After a year of lockdowns, things are starting to look a lot like a famous cartoon involving Charlie Brown, Lucy and a football. It’s just not nearly as funny when it happens for real.

The policy could best be described as barbaric.

Residents of Ontario’s long-term care homes begged on Tuesday to be allowed outside, saying anti-pandemic restrictions that have confined them indoors for more than a year make no sense given almost all have now been vaccinated.

Coming from the CBC, the news item naturally tries to blame the policy on for-profit senior care, whereas the reality is that the central planners have little interest in identifying an end game for their failing strategies.

Maybe the bailout will pay for itself

It's Probably Nothing More Money Than Brains 4 Comments

If this event has knock-on effects that threaten the solvency of some very large banks, one can be sure that the left will blame it on “capitalist greed”. The reality is that when central banks peg the price of capital near zero and thus incentivize investors to behave as if capital regenerates effortlessly, bad things are going to happen.

Nomura said it faced a possible US$2 billion loss due to transactions with a U.S. client while Credit Suisse said a default on margin calls by a U.S.-based fund could be “highly significant and material” to its first-quarter results.
 
For Credit Suisse this will mark the second straight quarter the bank has recorded losses on hedge fund exposure and adds to pressure on chief executive Thomas Gottstein, who is grappling with the fallout from the bank’s dealings with collapsed supply chain finance company Greensill.

Worst Case Scenarios only, please.

Media There Goes The Narrative 26 Comments

This commentary’s findings are not all that surprising to anyone who has seen the headlines about Covid in the Mainstream Media over the past year.

“In June, CNN served up a particularly flagrant example of Covid scaremongering: an article titled “Healthy teenager who took precautions died suddenly of Covid-19.”

The many who skimmed the headline received an anecdotal infusion of fearful misinformation. The minority who made it to the tenth paragraph would finally learn that doctors treating the purportedly “healthy” yet visibly obese teen found he had Type 1 diabetes with a blood sugar level 10 times the norm.

Two months earlier, the Centers for Disease Control announced that about 90% of those hospitalized with the virus had one or more underlying conditions. Among the most common were obesity (48%) and diabetes (28%). Rather than using this teen’s grim story to enlighten the public about who is at greatest risk, CNN aggressively pushed a perception that nobody is safe.”

“When predicted surges don’t happen, the media gives little attention to the happy news that their alarms proved false. Instead, they’re apparently hard at work drafting warnings about whatever’s next on the calendar.”

But this isn’t real socialism!

Great Moments In Socialism Great Reset More Money Than Brains 6 Comments

No matter how much borrowing the government undertakes, the only thing one can be certain of is that socialists will always claim it was never enough.

Although the article concerns the American experience with an avalanche of Covid crisis borrowing, the lessons apply equally well to Canada.

“The idea that “governments alone” can provide the “expertise and judgment” necessary to lead the way during an economic crisis is one that fails to recognize the shortcomings of large bureaucracies.

Governments are necessarily unequipped to deal with economic crises partly because they suffer no consequences for their mistakes. It is the people, the business owners and consumers alike, who pay the ultimate price.

Government’s lack of skin in the game excludes their so-called expertise. After all, if a single mom who’s a shop owner in rural Indiana loses her livelihood because of the mandated lockdowns, the governor won’t suffer a thing over it. The shop owner, on the other hand, will lose her home and be unable to feed her children.”

Defining Insanity

Basic Dictatorship Subsidy Fraud Boy 17 Comments

What’s notable about this news item is the way in which the story is presented as if this is a new phenomenon, or that a more sensible outcome might have been expected. It’s not just a matter of articulating the correct “goals”. Without price signals and the ability of investors to assess financial risk, “infrastructure” programs funded by the state will inevitably degrade into a fog of financial chaos. You’re just doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.

“The Liberal government’s $188-billion infrastructure spending plans continue to lag behind schedule, with government departments failing to provide adequate public reporting on the sprawling program, a new report says.

Auditor General Karen Hogan on Thursday released one of the most thorough reports to date on the progress of the Investing in Canada Plan, which found that “funds were not being spent as quickly as planned,” and that “objectives might not be met” after the full 12-year life of the program.”

Ironically, the one upside for taxpayers is precisely that the funds are not being spent as quickly as planned, and we may be better off if we actually don’t meet any of the objectives.

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