Canadian Federal Politics Thread v5

[Firebot]

Originally Posted by Slava

I saw Poilievre say that the Liberals are just using Trump to distract voters. Can he possibly be that tone deaf? Does he not speak to anyone about anything? I think no matter your political stripe and thoughts, the US is the only issue that matters now. No one cares about the “wokeism” (although I’d love to see that be the main platform they run on), and things like carbon taxes are just non-starters.

And, when he does talk about the US, he seems to want to blame this all on the Liberals for putting us in the position to be bullied and attacked. Good luck with that strategy.

It's such a stupid strategy.

Canadians are worried about tariffs and being annexed right now from a very serious existential threat. He's still talking about Carbon Tax Carney like if we still care about it at the very moment. Yes I very much cared about carbon taxes and poor Liberal policies and still do. You know what else I care about? Not being invaded or annexed while the bozos down south are trying to destroy us.

It's weird because for the most part Carney (and Trudeau recently) are barely talking at all about Poilievre as there is a much bigger threat that needs to be dealt with.

And again, how else can Poilievre link his amazing site he built if he has to focus on Trump?

https://justlikejustin.ca/

[Blaster86]

Originally Posted by rubecube

*Alberta alienation

Don't lump the rest of us in with Alberta's brand of grievance politics.

In my politically aware life time, I have had two Reform/Alliance/PC/CPC MPs and two Liberal MPs.

Ted White and Andrew Saxton were do-nothing back benchers that either did nothing or did nothing and lost government contracts to groups and companies back east/other countries while their party was in power.


Don Bell and Jonathan Wilkinson either showed tangible results, were ministers or had enough support within the party to legitimately look at a leadership run before deciding against it. Also Don Bell was the MP who got the shipyard contracts that Andrew Saxton let walk back east/to Germany.

Guess which party is which. Cons take the west for granted and give nothing to us because they assume they'll get most of the seats without even trying. Just a few rousing speeches and declarations about taking things back from Ottawa and that's it. Then once they're in power, they send everything out West back East.

[Jimmy Stang]

Originally Posted by Whynotnow

All I know is that Trump may well be a liberal plant. There was only one path to a potential liberal victory and Trump has done it almost perfectly. I’m honestly torn, I don’t think the Liberals have earned the right to form another government, even with a new leader. The cons though have chosen a terrible leader and so want to run to the MAGA way of things. In the end the liberals are likely the lesser of two evils but I can’t shake the feeling of what that will also do to fuel western alienation.

I want neither to win is the conclusion.

Amplifying the feeling of alienation is politically advantageous for some politicians in Alberta. It always has been. The irony is that common (often misunderstood) complaints like equalization, for example, were renewed by conservatives that are very familiar to Albertans: Kenney and Harper. Even Pierre has said that he won't change the equalization formula. Why should he? What are Albertans going to do - vote against him?

So alienation, perceived or real, is about as Albertan as it gets. But I believe that Albertans don't do themselves any favours by voting so predictably on the federal level. The CPC doesn't have to do anything to earn the vote of Albertans because they know that they'll have it unconditionally.

So perhaps Albertans are right to feel alienated, but we don't give the federal parties any reason to sweat, including the CPC

[Jimmy Stang]

Originally Posted by Blaster86

Guess which party is which. Cons take the west for granted and give nothing to us because they assume they'll get most of the seats without even trying. Just a few rousing speeches and declarations about taking things back from Ottawa and that's it. Then once they're in power, they send everything out West back East.

If that. My MP was once the one and only Rob Anders. There couldn't have been a safer riding for a conservative.

His career was a continuous measuring stick of how useless a politician could be before people would stop voting for him. But... that blue sign prevailed and the riding got the representation it deserved, I guess.

[Azure]

Article goes into more details on what they are working on.

Business is booming for the Arctic Gateway Group (AGG) as they work to revitalize the Port of Churchill, the Hudson Bay Railway and ship critical minerals out of northern Manitoba.

“The Port of Churchill and Hudson Bay Railway are open for business, and ready to make Canada’s supply chains stronger and economy more resilient,” said AGG CEO Chris Avery Monday in a release. “We offer capacity and optionality to help make sure the vast resources of Western Canada get to foreign markets.”

According to AGG, work on the revitalization project is expected to be completed sometime in 2028 and could add as much as $1 billion annually to the Canadian economy and create more than 5,500 jobs.

https://winnipegsun.com/news/provinc...siness-to-boom

[Firebot]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montr...ebec-1.7481285

Quebec and federal government got hoodwinked but apparently the North American company is still solvent...for now as long as you pump more money in this vapourware.

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-re...tteries-quebec

Welp it was a good idea at the time. With tarrifs destroying the prospects and Nazi Musk destroying the Tesla brand, it's looking grim for the project.

[calgarygeologist]

Originally Posted by Firebot

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montr...ebec-1.7481285

Quebec and federal government got hoodwinked but apparently the North American company is still solvent...for now as long as you pump more money in this vapourware.

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-re...tteries-quebec

Welp it was a good idea at the time. With tarrifs destroying the prospects and Nazi Musk destroying the Tesla brand, it's looking grim for the project.

As much as I like EV vehicles it looks like that business is taking a big step back and it won't be a huge driver for new manufacturing in Canada.

Northvolt is a bust, Ford is cutting back and so is GM and Stellantis (Stellantis never really got started.) Tesla has fallen out of favour.

[direwolf]

Originally Posted by Azure

Article goes into more details on what they are working on.



https://winnipegsun.com/news/provinc...siness-to-boom

This is encouraging news.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

If the liberals are going to win this election they need to play that commercial on repeat for the next six weeks. It just aired during the flames game. Where they show clips of PP and Trump saying the exact same things verbatim.

[dammage79]

So when do we think this election will be called on election day?
Will it be before or after Manitoba begins their counts?

Because I don't see any way humanly possible Pollievre survives the east coast ballot counts.


Also, when will Carney call for the election?

[Wormius]

Did the urgency the conservatives had to call an election die down now that PP is looking pretty bad in the polls?

[Firebot]

Carney is supposedly planning to call an election prior to the start of parliament, date rumoured seems to be around March 19.

[Doctorfever]

Moving this discussion from the tariff thread because it has more to do with Canadian politics as opposed to tariffs.

Originally Posted by Fuzz

None of those people are pointing to Canada being broken. That's just more narrative you have heard or crafted. All countries have economic challenges, self made and external. We haven't been struggling for a long time. And I'm not sure company name recognition on a stock index tells anyone anything about anything. Is that an official metric I can lookup and bet on Polymarket?

What do you mean by "swallowed up economically"? Is that a traditional fear, or something new because an insane orange goblin took over the worlds largest economy and is swinging it around erratically like a rotten fruit bat? That's not something anyone in Canada ever expected to prepare for.

The reality is the US is our biggest trading partner because that's the reality of capitalism. Proximity to market. I couldn't imagine the outrage if we had a willing US, and we chose to only trade with distant countries which meant limited quantities, higher costs and lower profits while the worlds biggest market sat un-served, because we wanted to be diverse. You can force this stuff if you really believe it, but that chases companies away and our GDP and productivity would dive. Yes, we may have to do that now, but it's utter silliness to pretend that these are things we should have forced into existence in the before times.

Here's a good summary of where we are at, and it sure doesn't look like the Canada has been broken for years description you are peddling. :
https://www.international.gc.ca/trad....aspx?lang=eng

I would say that what you have posted is not a good summary of where we are at. I’m sure those numbers are correct, but at the same time they can be misleading because they don’t tell the whole story.

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/comm...e-ottawas-spin

Growth in gross domestic product (GDP), the total value of all goods and services produced in the economy annually, is one of the most frequently cited indicators of Canada’s economic performance. Journalists, politicians and analysts often compare various measures of Canada’s total GDP growth to other countries, or to Canada’s past performance, to assess the health of the economy and living standards. However, this statistic is misleading as a measure of living standards when population growth rates vary greatly across countries or over time.

Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, for example, recently boasted that Canada had experienced the “strongest economic growth in the G7” in 2022. Although the Trudeau government often uses international comparisons on aggregate GDP growth as evidence of economic success, it’s not the first to do so. In 2015, then-prime minister Stephen Harper said Canada’s GDP growth was “head and shoulders above all our G7 partners over the long term.”

Unfortunately, such statements do more to obscure public understanding of Canada’s economic performance than enlighten it. In reality, aggregate GDP growth statistics are not driven by productivity improvements and do not reflect rising living standards. Instead, they’re primarily the result of differences in population and labour force growth. In other words, they aren’t primarily the result of Canadians becoming better at producing goods and services (i.e. productivity) and thus generating more income for their families. Instead, they primarily reflect the fact that there are simply more people working, which increases the total amount of goods and services produced but doesn’t necessarily translate into increased living standards.

Let’s look at the numbers. Canada’s annual average GDP growth (with no adjustment for population) from 2000 to 2023 was the second-highest in the G7 at 1.8 per cent, just behind the United States at 1.9 per cent. That sounds good, until you make a simple adjustment for population changes by comparing GDP per person. Then a completely different story emerges.

Canada’s inflation-adjusted per-person annual economic growth rate (0.7 per cent) is meaningfully worse than the G7 average (1.0 per cent) over this same period. The gap with the U.S. (1.2 per cent) is even larger. Only Italy performed worse than Canada.

Why the inversion of results from good to bad? Because Canada has had by far the fastest population growth rate in the G7, growing at an annualized rate of 1.1 per cent—more than twice the annual population growth rate of the G7 as a whole at 0.5 per cent. In aggregate, Canada’s population increased by 29.8 per cent during this time period compared to just 11.5 per cent in the entire G7.

That is a decent summary as to why you need to account for population growth when discussing GDP. It makes sense when you have much different population growth between different countries.


This CBC article also highlights some of The issues with Canada economic growth.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/can...rich-1.7318989

Canada is among the richest countries in the world — but when compared to peer countries like Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, it isn't as rich as it once was.

And the wealth gap between Canada and the U.S. has only grown wider, according to figures published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Canada's relatively weak economic growth, combined with a population boom, has hit its standing among wealthy countries.

It's one reason why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has turned to former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney to give him and his cabinet advice on how to juice economic growth.

Treasury Board President Anita Anand is also launching what she calls a "working group" to study the country's lacklustre productivity and find ways to boost economic output.

The Bank of Canada is also seized with the issue. In March, Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers sounded the alarm about the need to boost Canada's productivity.

Here you even have the Liberal party and the Bank of Canada sounding alarms on our economy. There are definitely severe issues with our economic growth, even the Liberal party agrees with that.

[Fuzz]

Oh, cool, the Frasier Institute. These are the people writing the stories that the BS factories pump[ out to convince people our country is broken. Funny you left out this part of the CBC article:

Recent Statistics Canada data shows why: Canada's economy is growing overall but at a disappointing rate relative to population growth.

The country added nearly 1.3 million people last year — a 3.2 per cent increase — while the economy grew by just 1.1 per cent in the same time period. That means more people taking slices out of an economic pie that hasn't grown much bigger.

The news isn't all bad. Data shows real weekly earnings — a person's take home pay — has actually increased in Canada, even when accounting for inflation. The household savings rate is also up.

And there may be some improvement on the horizon; Canada's economic growth is expected to hit 1.3 per cent in 2024 and 2.4 per cent the year after, according to International Monetary Fund (IMF) data.

Are there challenges? Yes. Are we broken? No.

[Doctorfever]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Oh, cool, the Frasier Institute. These are the people writing the stories that the BS factories pump[ out to convince people our country is broken. Funny you left out this part of the CBC article:


Are there challenges? Yes. Are we broken? No.

I guess it depends on what metric you are measuring by.

Relative to our peers, we are not doing well. Relative to our biggest trading partner and neighbor, we are doing quite poor.

Would you agree?

[surferguy]

Is comparing ourself to America really the best measuring stick? Sure their economy is going strong (for now) but at what cost to the people? America values money over everything.

Just look at the overall quality of life in the states. There are more poor people there than Canada has in total, that is not a good thing. If America actually cared about its citizens then their economy wouldn't be as "red hot".

Can Canada do better, yes. Should we compare ourselves to a place that will do anything to pry 14 cents from your pocket? No.

Unfettered capitalism preys on the disadvantaged and poor, its not a bug its a feature.

I don't think there is value in that.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Doctorfever

I guess it depends on what metric you are measuring by.

Relative to our peers, we are not doing well. Relative to our biggest trading partner and neighbor, we are doing quite poor.

Would you agree?

No, I'd disagree. I think the mis-step on immigration has distorted the GDP per capita numbers that should improve as those new immigrants enter the workforce and our immigration numbers decline. Of course there are things that can be done and improvements to be made, and we are far form perfect. But we are also far from broken. I suspect someone with Carney's background has a pretty good understanding of the steps that need to be taken to adjust, but the reality of the US right now makes future outlook very uncertain, and potentially ya, we could have some bad years coming.

[TheIronMaiden]

The people who think canada is some struggling #### hole are un happy, and want someone to blame other than their own sorry asses.

[puffnstuff]

Originally Posted by TheIronMaiden

The people who think canada is some struggling #### hole are un happy, and want someone to blame other than their own sorry asses.

And they want you to vote for them and their slogans.

[Azure]

Originally Posted by Firebot

Carney is supposedly planning to call an election prior to the start of parliament, date rumoured seems to be around March 19.

lol, poor NDP.

Either way, he's going to be sworn in as PM tomorrow, and there are rumours flying around he's cutting his cabinet size in half. Depending on who he gets rid of will be a huge indicator on his priorities going forward and also how I know whether I voting for him or not.