Shocked, I tell you! Shocked! But I’m sure a Liberal majority will make it all better.
Small-business exit rates hit 5.6 per cent in the second quarter of 2025, while the entry rate fell to 4.8 per cent in the fourth quarter. The ratio between business starts and closures is among the worst since the COVID-19 pandemic, CFIB said in a report.
Related: “Roughly 40% of Canadians whose underlying ability/human capital would place them in the top 1% of Canada’s income distribution if they had stayed — now reside outside Canada.”
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.
When I first saw the headline, I thought maybe my provincial government was finally seeing the bigger picture. But again I was disappointed. We’re still at the “definition” stage of micromanagement.
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew says his government is working on the definition of a grocery store as it considers where to apply a tax cut on food.
Nine years to fully end door to door mail delivery? There’s obviously no sense of urgency despite the mounting losses. And no obvious outrage among taxpayers. That’s Canada for you.
Joël Lightbound, minister of Government Transformation, Public Works and Procurement, said last fall that the process to eliminate most door-to-door service would take about nine years, with most of it expected to be completed in the first four.
Canada Post lost $841 million before tax in 2024.
It’s my sense that interest rates are going to head down, not up, as the economy sours. While energy prices might be going up, their effect can be offset by slumping demand as businesses halt energy intensive projects. But in any case, David Rosenberg is spot on about there being no “vibrancy of demand” in the Canadian economy.
“But we are in a totally different orbit than we were back then,” Rosenberg said. “Where is the vibrancy of demand growth in a Canadian economy? It is nonexistent.”
First-quarter growth will likely come in below one per cent annualized, according to the latest gross domestic product data, well off the Bank of Canada’s forecast of 1.8 per cent, and core inflation has inched ever closer to the central bank’s two per cent target, though headline inflation is expected to accelerate on higher energy prices.
An unremarkable budget from what has become a have-not, unremarkable province.
Kinew, in a post on social media, says everything from rotisserie chicken to salads would be free of the provincial sales tax of the budget passes.
The government has promised to balance the budget by the 2027-28 fiscal year but has missed its annual targets so far.
Saskatchewan’s budget deficit will be up to a billion before long at this rate. And that’s for a resource rich province.
Finance Minister Jim Reiter tabled the 2026-27 budget on Wednesday. It projects a $819-million deficit this year with more deficits in the years that follow.
On a recent trip to Golf Town I noticed that new clubs are now locked in place so you have to get a clerk to get one out for you to examine. How long will it be before grocery stores are doing the same thing for steaks and roasts?
Police in Richmond, B.C., are investigating after a series of meat thefts from retail stores that they say may be “organized” crime.
RCMP say that there have been 39 cases of reported theft of meat from stores across the city since December.
The same @CityofRegina stripping hundreds of millions from their taxpayers for a swimming pool vanity project. https://t.co/Jcpi9mUKEE
— Katewerk (@katewerk) March 18, 2026
This is not the kind of history that any level of government should be making. But I guess it’s okay, as long as we call the spending “investment”.
The New Brunswick government says its investments in health care have helped push the budget into a record deficit. Introduced on Tuesday, the budget’s $1.4-billion deficit is the largest in the province’s history, according to Finance Department staff.
Speaking of investments…
The federal government is putting $200 million toward a Canadian-owned launch pad so it can send satellites into orbit without the assistance of other nations or other foreign third parties.
2. Canada is now a net importer of electricity.
/3 pic.twitter.com/M07s5P2nab— Heather Exner-Pirot (@ExnerPirot) March 16, 2026
Threadrolled here.
I imagine that most Cubans aren’t so fiercely proud of their revolution now.
Cuba’s electrical grid suffered a total collapse on Monday, the country’s power operator said, marking the latest nationwide blackout in recent years, and the first since the US effectively shut off the flow of oil to Cuba.
Ron Butler asks the tough question: are the problems in Canada’s private credit market an indication of a financial contagion?
We have Easy Financial. The stock price fell 50% in one day. Is this the private credit contagion?
Um, they’re restating earnings from over a year ago. What? What? What? What sense does that make?
I think something is wrong because you don’t want to see the CEO of a independent financial lending organization both quit within the same two year period.
“This land ♬ was your land, but now it’s ♫ our land…“
Kristi Noem is out as of tonight as head of Homeland Security.
The decision to replace Kristi Noem as Department of Homeland Security secretary came together quickly, and the timing of President Trump’s announcement caught many across DHS off guard, even as tensions had been building for weeks between Noem and the White House, according to senior White House and DHS officials.
“$9,000 for every single Canadian family of four across the country”
Construction of regional high speed rail is a $90 billion catastrophe for taxpayers, says an MP whose constituency is on the route. Conservative MP Scott Reid (Lanark-Frontenac, Ont.) yesterday warned of “ruined lives” and wasted billions as the Commons passed the High Speed Rail Network Act: ‘Why on earth should people in British Columbia, Alberta or Newfoundland pay for this?’
$100 billion of Canada Pension Funds invested in India. pic.twitter.com/ub5zTjFZTA
— Ivano Defazio 🇨🇦🇮🇹🇺🇸 (@DefazioIvano) March 2, 2026
… the economy capped off a volatile year with a contraction in the final quarter of 2025.
The agency said Friday that real gross domestic product declined 0.6 per cent on an annualized basis in the fourth quarter, falling short of expectations from the Bank of Canada and most economists for flat growth. Real GDP per capita was unchanged in the fourth quarter.
Here’s hoping that Javier Milei’s labor market reforms continue to gain traction. Notice how the news item is framed in such a way as to draw no connection between the undeserved power of Peronist labor unions and “frequent economic shocks”.
The bill, which grants employers greater flexibility in matters of hiring, firing, severance and collective bargaining, has drawn fierce opposition from labor unions and their Peronist allies, who argue it would roll back measures that protect workers from abuse and Argentina’s notoriously frequent economic shocks.
