Sorry, but I can’t show you a recent federal government ad. But you’re likely to see it.
It’s a shocker. As soon as I heard the claim that once again Canada was going big on huge infrastructure projects – as we did after WW2 – I had to laugh,
The basic sales pitch?
“The Government of Canada is actively promoting a return to building projects similar to the St. Lawrence seaway by implementing the building Canada Act and the Major Projects Office (MPO)”
Wow… The St. Lawrence Seaway! I ‘m old enough to remember that. It was HUGE! But at least it’s OK now to concede that politically we’ve been sleepwalking for decades.
But fear not. A suddenly aroused if typically lobotomized Ottawa stands ready to return us to the same conditions as experienced just after WW2!
Are they?
While exclaiming that soon the political tide will be turned (all boats surely must rise together) the ad provides zero details. No specifics are presented concerning what will be built or most crucially how this Great Leap Forward will be funded.
For those of us living outside the Ottawa bubble it’s like wondering – how useful is it to proclaim that a laundry detergent is, “Stronger Than Dirt” or that a shampoo, “Drenches Your Hair in Luxury?”
In 2012 Ellen Brown argued that what made post-war construction of thousands of affordable homes possible; what expanded Canada’s economic and social infrastructure so rapidly and effectively; and what made Canadian Medicare happen – was attributable to highly unorthodox Central Bank policy.
To limit Canada’s present and future debt to within acceptable limits the Central Bank was authorized to provide low interest loans for projects which pushed Canada far ahead of many other nations. Projects funded must be within Canada. Loans must be repaid to the Central Bank. In short this was to be a self-created and self-managed circular economy.
Apparently to Ottawa’s mandarins the choice was clear. Either fall prey to what Ms Brown described as the classic Debt Trap or experiment with a new economic model.
The Trap? Failure to control debt levels inevitably would render government increasingly dysfunctional where indebtedness vetoed crucial policy? In order to pay back only a tiny fraction of an accelerating debt government would become a policy hostage. This would entail being bled dry by debt collectors while simultaneously proclaiming the nation was being managed superbly well.
Would the public inevitably notice that Canada was becoming a have-not nation? Though the Stock Market might boom and the quantity of billionaires might blossom what would it be like if nothing for the remaining 99% was affordable? Name any country anywhere in history where such an absurdity was sustainable.
Why laugh at the ad above? Where will the money to fund our fantasy economic resurrection come from?
From where else? In Switzerland Canada agreed never again to allow its Central Bank do what it had already done. Growth must be limited by DEBT!
Accompanied by Austerity. Mass Defunding. More Clawbacks. More Deregulation. And for sure soon, Mass Job-displacement by AI. Social Chaos.
Meanwhile? Our politicians are simply incapable of imagining a return to saner policy is worth the risk.
Canadian’s just love oil and gas expansion?
Categories: Liberal Party of Canada
in-sights.ca 
Many of us had high hopes for the Carny. I’ve dropped the ‘e’ from his name as his post UK-Bank stint as climate activist and AI-means-we-need-UBI commentor was, in hindsight, worthy of a carnival barker and all round CON. Harper with better optics. Sigh.
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Until recently, I have always run away from economics as something arcane, arbitrary, and somewhat fluid, depending on what one’s moral underpinnings might be. Of late, there are some folks who elucidate a divergent view of the subject and a lot more of it falls into the realm of plausibility, Ellen Brown being one of them. Isn’t it strange that the Bank of Canada functioned really well until someone read Jean Chrétien, Finance Minister, the riot act about Canada joining the Bank of International Settlements in 1974, thereby removing the ability of Canadian governments to “borrow” from itself without interest for nation-building projects, and forcing said govs to borrow at interest on the market? Money is a human intellectual construct and we can make it do whatever we want as long as there is general trust in the processes. Reading Stephanie Kelton, Hazel Henderson and Steve Keen and watching them interact with their supporters and critics via a long trail of YouTube crumbs has lead me to believe that our current models are fundamentally flawed, and work to restrict money supply so that those who control and possess the bulk of available funds can continue to restrict the supply and beat up on the little people with austerity measures whose “necessity” has been occasioned by the excesses of the wealthy through wars, mega-projects and over-leverage. Until there is public control of public finance and a better set of guard rails for private debt, we will be unable to truly build a nation with the faith and finance of the nation itself.
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OUCH!
Could Canada be wasting a fortune in tax revenue by subsidizing foreign firms while deliberately ignoring Canadian firms?
Maclean’s Magazine thinks so. In considerable detail.
https://macleans.ca/economy/canada-is-funding-its-own-economic-decline/
The problem is simple and yet deeply destructive. Instead of investing in Canadian firms to help them develop, own and sell Canadian intellectual property, governments have poured billions of dollars into foreign multinationals to set up domestic branches, while most of the value those companies generate, particularly through the ownership of their IP, flows out of the country. We get the jobs. Someone else gets the wealth.
There’s no question that these investments create jobs, and those jobs matter. But the real wealth in these industries doesn’t sit on the factory floor, which is increasingly being occupied by robots. It sits with the owners of the technology underpinning those products. In the case of Stellantis, Canadian workers were not even allowed to install certain types of robotics equipment despite having the skills to do so, because the company wanted to prevent that transfer of technological know-how.
Global firms have learned from what happened in China, where companies like Apple built their products and, in doing so, helped train a workforce that later went on to build competing domestic firms like Huawei. Today, multinationals carefully guardrail their most valuable technologies to ensure that kind of competition never materializes.
At its core, Canada’s challenge is that we failed to recognize the shift from tangible to intangible wealth over the final three decades of the 20th century. Value is no longer captured primarily through labour in the way it was in an industrial economy. It’s captured through IP. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google derive their power not from the size of their workforce, but from ownership of algorithms, data and proprietary technologies, and their ability to extract rents from those assets.
The countries that are succeeding today are the ones that have globally headquartered firms that lead their markets. Instead, Canada has doubled down on a race to the bottom, competing on labour costs and subsidies while ignoring ownership and scale. If you’ve ever wondered why Canada’s productivity has stagnated, why highly skilled workers continue to leave for the United States, or why so many people feel like they’re falling behind economically even while working harder than ever, this is a big part of it. The result is a country that feels perpetually strained and under-resourced, even as billions of public dollars are spent in the name of economic development.
If we want lasting prosperity and true sovereignty, we have to recapitalize Canada for a global economy that has changed. As the Prime Minister argued in Davos, the old assumptions that governed trade and investment no longer apply. There has been a rupture. In its latest budget, the federal government said it expects up to $1 trillion in combined public and private investment by 2030 to support infrastructure projects and research and development. But we need to align our policies and capital so that the $1 trillion serves Canadians first.
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