We should be even more upset than we polite and tolerant Canadians are at present. Pictured: Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland. Photo Credit: Chrystia Freeland/X.
Canadians can be forgiven for having exhausted their patience with virtually all of our major institutions in this country. Indeed, a cursory review of the news – as reported by a largely irresponsible media, another institution in disrepute – suggests we should be even more upset than we polite and tolerant Canadians are at present. Here are a few of the outrageous developments in just the past few days that should worry us all about the state of our beloved nation.
The House of Commons is back in session this week and considering the certainty of an election on the horizon in the next year, it can be expected to be even more fraught with discord, hyperbole, grandstanding, dishonesty and ridiculous accusations than it has been in the past. Which is saying something.
Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland chose this occasion to announce a new approach to mortgages. Going forward, Canadians can now obtain mortgages ensured by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) up to $1.5 million from its previous level of $1 million. As well, 30-year amortization periods for first-time homebuyers will be permitted as compared to the prior limit of 25 years. The Liberal government, having significantly contributed to the problem of a serious shortage of housing supply by failing to enact policies to assist homebuilding, ensuring interest rates stay high via massive government overspending, continuing out-of-control immigration policies and over taxation reducing Canadians’ net income, is now going to solve the problem by ensuring that we remain indebted for longer periods of time for properties with inflated values. What a solution!
As well, every housing-related policy the Liberals have enacted over the past few years has been focussed on increasing demand, which will simply hike housing prices even more in the absence of added supply. Clearly, a refresher course on Economics 101 and supply and demand realities is long overdue. Freeland’s latest mortgage gambit is however very consistent with her government’s practice of creating a serious problem then proposing a tiny policy bandaid that only ends up making the problem worse.
In other stupid federal news, Canada’s Auditor General (AG) has overseen an audit of hapless Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s department and found it seriously lacking. Guilbeault’s tenure in Cabinet has been pathetic, with courts overruling his intrusions on provincial jurisdiction, ridiculous bans on products like plastic cutlery and bio-degradable plastic bags that show his adherence to extreme ideology over facts and ignoring warnings from his own department that forests in Jasper, Alberta were a tinderbox, to name just a few faux-pas.
The recent AG’s report was damning, stating that the mismanagement of many millions of taxpayer dollars on “green” projects by Guilbeault’s department was so abysmal that “potential legal and reputational damage” could be forthcoming. The really sad part is, are Canadians at all surprised by this zealot’s abuse of their tax dollars? Unlikely. And never forget that these governments always tell us there are no efficiencies to be realized in the spending of our money.
Speaking of traitors, the judge heading up the inquiry into foreign interference in our elections, Marie-Josee Hogue, has declared that the names of the MPs and Senators that were found to have “semi-wittingly or wittingly” been meddling in Canadian affairs at the behest of foreign governments will not be released publicly. This should outrage Canadians, who richly deserve to know which players in our well-compensated political class are betraying our interests. The fact that we will be facing a federal election in the next year and will not know whom of the candidates are traitors to Canada is unacceptable. Other countries have criminal sanctions for these types of reprehensible individuals, and rightly so.
Moving to the left coast in B.C., some lawyers who are trying to get some incorrect information fixed in legal training materials in that province are running up against the woke hordes. It seems that some content in a mandatory First Nations section in lawyers’ training materials states that “the discovery of an unmarked burial site containing the bodies of 215 children on the former Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds” was found in 2021.
This has subsequently been proven to be untrue but some groups seem to want to perpetuate the fiction. In this recent case, the B.C. First Nations’ Justice Council decided to call the attempts to correct the record racist and denounced the factual correction as “alarming Residential school denialism.” The perverse notion of trying to maintain a fiction in the face of clear facts contradicting it is absurd and undermines the credibility of any groups doing so. This is especially true as many First Nations organizations have agreed that the initial presumption that the Kamloops site contained unmarked graves has been shown to be incorrect.
Oh, and by the way, the Air Canada pilots have just been granted a 42 per cent salary and benefit bump over the next few years. If you were planning a winter vacation, you might want to think twice as guess who’s going to be paying for this nice salary hike? Maybe a better answer is to open up our well-protected airline industry to international competition so consumers could actually enjoy some choice for a change. Canada has for decades protected a ridiculous number of its key industries in air transportation, railroads, banking, telecommunications, ports and elsewhere, all paid for by inflated costs to Canadians who are already struggling with the cost of living.
The foregoing examples only cover the last few days and are hardly an exhaustive list of the idiocy Canadians are being subjected to on a regular basis. It is however indicative of how so many privileged groups within our society are letting down the rest of us. I recently ran into a quote from the former U.S. President George W. Bush, who was considered a dim bulb intellectually by many. He said, “You wonder why populism is on the rise. It starts with taking taxpayers’ money and giving it to the powerful.” He’s not wrong and this is true in spades in grossly overtaxed Canada. At a different time, all of the tales cited above would be considered fiction. But unfortunately, it’s really hard to make this stuff up.
She has published numerous articles in journals, magazines & other media on issues such as free trade, finance, entrepreneurship & women business owners. Ms. Swift is a past President of the Empire Club of Canada, a former Director of the CD Howe Institute, the Canadian Youth Business Foundation, SOS Children’s Villages, past President of the International Small Business Congress and current Director of the Fraser Institute. She was cited in 2003 & 2012 as one of the most powerful women in Canada by the Women’s Executive Network & is a recipient of the Queen’s Silver & Gold Jubilee medals.
