Category: nannystate

Juvenile Nation

Why are so many Canadians acting like twelve year olds in a high school art class? Are most Canadians just this incapable of critical thought?

…the bagels are made by taking white and red dough, and intertwining them in a colourful, wood-oven-baked treat that she says is a fitting metaphor for Montreal, Quebec and Canada.

Canadian pilot Michael Jones made news headlines after he flew… for two hours near the U.S. border, taking a meticulous path to draw a Maple Leaf in the southwestern Ontario sky.

Kicking Horse Coffee is offering cafes a “Proudly serving Canadianos” window display as a symbol of their participation in the patriotic movement.

I’ll bet that’s got Trump quaking in his boots.

Related, from Kate: Is this the end of Trump?

No Jack Daniels For You!

Predictably, Doug Ford has decided that the best way to deal with Trump’s decision to make Canadian products more expensive than they need to be for Americans is to deny Ontarians access to American liquor products completely. It’s none of the government’s business where you buy your liquor, but hey, in an “emergency” no measure is off the table.

American alcohol will disappear from liquor store shelves in Ontario and B.C. as the provinces add their own ammunition to a federal plan aimed at getting the U.S. to back down from tariffs.

Michelle Wasylyshen, president and CEO of Ontario Craft Wineries, said she saw Ford’s move as a particularly helpful way to ensure Canada’s retaliatory measures pack a punch.

The legally sanctioned obliteration of competitors might be viewed as helpful to a particular business, but it’s not so helpful to consumers who face vastly fewer choices.

Wise Words

Some serious self-reflection is in order, according to Jordan Peterson, before Canada embarks, panic-stricken, on the path to economic and cultural suicide. I hope enough people are listening.

Such behaviour is, sadly, a Canadian norm, particularly wherever the country is left-leaning; particularly wherever everyone believes axiomatically that we have all the virtues of our democratic compatriots to the south, and then some; particularly wherever everyone is inclined to point self-righteously to the wonders of our now-dreadful and even oft-murderous “free” health-care system and its associated highly dysfunctional, expensive and increasingly unsustainable social safety net…

That combined attitude of essentially socialist sentiment and moral superiority was exemplified above all, perhaps, by former Prime Minister Trudeau — … [the père] who dallied so self-aggrandizingly with the Chinese Reds and the dictatorial communist Fidel Castro and rubbed the Americans’ noses in it, moralizing intellectually and oh-so-fashionably all the while.

A Nation Of Ostriches

If given the choice, most Canadians would happily leave their heads stuck in the sand rather than meet the challenges of living and prospering in an industrial economy. Why does it take the musings of a foreign head of state to get us to wake up and think critically?

I may only be a cancelled bitumen pipeline, but after a cursory look at the modern state of the Canadian economy, it does strike me that your economic productivity sucks right now.

Per-capita GDP is in freefall. Each passing year, the average Canadian worker works the same number of hours as before, but they produce less. The problem is a lack of investment in per-worker productivity. If you hand a construction worker a shovel instead of a front-end loader, they’re simply not going to get as much done — and both your GDP and your people’s living standards will suffer in the long run.

Team Players

Basically, we’ll pretend to be on Team Canada if you fork over enough protection money. After all, you want to avoid “conflict”, don’t you?

First Nations also need to be partners in protecting and growing the economy in the face of Trump’s potentially devastating tariffs, the leadership council stressed.

“There can’t be a ’Team Canada’ [approach] if you don’t have a strong contingent of First Nations leadership sitting at that table with you,” Casimer said.

To avoid conflict and to craft a unified response, First Nations must have a voice at the table when decisions are being made that affect their lands and resources, she said, noting the council hasn’t been approached to be part of the tariff strategy.

 

Sparky Car Glut

The burden won’t be limited to the cost of unloading the current stock of EVs to consumers who don’t want them. There will be additional losses for dealers and automakers who built production and sales infrastructure to comply with mandates that are now disappearing across the board. Maybe it’s just that Canadian politicians pride themselves in policy failure. Otherwise, why are there so many failures, so often?

“There is no pathway to 100 per cent zero-emission vehicle sales in the next 10 years with the support [currently] being provided to Canadians,” Kingston said. “Dictating what vehicles Canadians can and can’t buy, without providing them with the supports necessary to switch to electric is a made-in-Canada policy failure.”

Baggage Train

Now that Mark Carney is going to spend the next several weeks pretending that the last nine years never happened, now’s a good a time as any to dig into his past. In a nutshell, you don’t want that for Prime Minister.

Carney draws inspiration from, among others, Marx, Engels and Lenin, but the agenda he promotes differs from Marxism in two key respects. First, the private sector is not to be expropriated but made a “partner” in reshaping the economy and society. Second, it does not make a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better, but worse. Carney’s Brave New World will be one of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience and more poverty: “Assets will be stranded, used gasoline powered cars will be unsaleable, inefficient properties will be unrentable,” he promises.

Let Cooler Heads Prevail

Before Canada gets caught up in an unwinnable race to implement self-imposed sanctions in response to the implementation of self-imposed sanctions by the United States, Terrance Corcoran has an alternative strategy.

Ottawa is reportedly gearing up tariff strategies, including one that would apply to every U.S. product Canada imports, from Florida orange juice to Pittsburgh steel.

All of which is a perversion of the economic principles of free trade, made even more perverse by the fact that these protectionist tariff plans mean that Canada would be adopting Trump’s economically irrational scheme to impose tariffs that would drive up U.S. consumer prices and raise costs for U.S. industry — all in the absurd belief that because Canada exports more to the U.S. than it imports there is a trade “imbalance” that needs to be fixed.

The Best Health Care System In The World

This is not even a case of “the doctor will kill you now”. It’s more like, “Please wait here quietly until you die“. The only “lesson” that needs to be learned here is that single payer healthcare needs to be ditched, and the sooner, the better.

Manitoba’s health minister, Uzoma Asagwara, says the death of a patient who waited eight hours for care in the emergency room at Health Sciences Centre (HSC) is a “devastating loss” that the health care system needs to learn from.

Up Or Down?

A frequent topic for discussion these days is the direction of interest rates. It’s not surprising, given that the rate of interest is pretty much central to determining where the economy is headed. In a recent Substack post, I offer my own thoughts on where things are headed. In a nutshell, it’s not looking good, given the inescapable nature of our fiat currency system.

…irredeemable fiat currencies have no means of extinguishing debt. Past bonds can only be “rolled” by issuing new bonds which must at least be sufficient to at least cover the interest and principal of the previous bond. However, the new bond carries an interest charge on its own. The burden of past debt is simply shifted to newer IOUs. Because no final payment, in aggregate, is ever possible, interest and principal can only compound and grow exponentially. The process can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped or reversed.

This creates what can be termed a “doom loop” of rising debt. The typical retort is that borrowers can always “inflate” their way out of that debt by progressively gutting the value of the fiat currency in question. In reality, this reduction of value offers no escape. While each unit of currency might command less value, the fact that they originate as part of a perpetual bond ensures that you owe exponentially more of them.

Be Afraid

Be very, very…afraid.

Telegraph- Don’t go outside in the morning or evening, NHS warns as Britain braces for snow

The advice comes as an amber cold weather alert has been issued across England for the next week. The UKHSA upgraded an earlier yellow warning to amber, warning of “significant impacts” on health services. According to the agency, amber alerts are issued when health and social care is impacted and there is “potential for the whole population to be at risk”.

Sounds serious. How cold is it going to get?

Temperatures could fall as low as -8C on Thursday night in rural southern Scotland and northern England, the Met Office said. It will also be cold in rural Wales and the south-west of England, with -6C expected.

A Culture in Decline

The fact that only around a third of Canadians found the pandemic measures excessive is troubling. One must assume that the other two thirds were either okay with the measures or felt they were insufficient.

Thirty-six per cent of Canadians agree with the notion that government reactions to the pandemic were exaggerated, according to the poll by Leger for the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS).

People in the Prairies and Alberta were more likely to have a negative perception of the decisions taken by government. Forty-seven per cent of Albertans and 45 per cent of Manitoba and Saskatchewan respondents agreed the COVID response was exaggerated.

But the “much too much, almost zealotry, related to being vaccinated” also came back to haunt public health officials, said Bowman, who has spoken out about how the unvaccinated were demonized as right-wing radicals. The vaccine passports and mandates had a politically polarizing impact, creating an “us-vs-them” mentality, he said.

Smear Campaign

Now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is playing on the other team, it’s clear that the knives are out. Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein review a recent hit piece in The Atlantic regarding RFK’s promotion of cooking with beef fat as opposed to seed oils, as if advocating the use of animal fat could never by anything but a conspiracy theory. The article is a classic example of pre-emptive stigmatization. As Heying relates:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s view on fats is is about bucking convention, not promoting health. And so let’s just start with that with that subtitle, which again, the author, you know, may not have anything to do with the title of the subtitle, but I’ve seen this critique before. It’s, oh, he’s just a contrarian. And we’ve been called just contrarians. And it’s one of actually the most insipid and wrong and ridiculous contentions that actual scientists can be can be slapped with.

Avalanche Alert

Will the camel’s back finally break in 2025?

Ten thousand illegals showing up at our borders “would throw our system completely off kilter,” he warns. CBSA is still dealing with the aftermath of 492 Sri Lankan Tamils arriving in British Columbia on a Thai cargo ship in 2010…

And while Immigration Minister Marc Miller cautions “not everyone is welcome here” — and promises he’ll enforce the rules — it’s difficult to paint over Canada’s well-established reputation as a country that rolls out the red carpet to asylum seekers. Each year, thousands of migrants enter Canada, without authorization, between official ports of entry.

 

Economic Illiteracy

So Canadians just don’t have the right vibes now? Is a recession defined by a “vibe deficit” or something like that? This is just more “animal spirits” nonsense.

Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Monday that she hopes her government’s proposed GST holiday will help bridge the gap between Canada’s macroeconomic picture and historically stressed-out households by bringing good vibes to the latter.

“People have been talking about a ‘vibecession’… and the fact that Canadians just aren’t feeling that good,” Freeland told reporters at a press conference in Ottawa to promote the temporary sales-tax reprieve.

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