Canada is on an economic road to nowhere – by Diane Francis (Financial Post – January 7, 2020)

https://business.financialpost.com/

Who’s going to look after Canada’s economic wellbeing for the next five years? Canada slips and there’s nobody to catch it, not Parliament or other levels of government. The Liberals spent five years variously pandering to environmental, regional or anti-capitalist interests. Now in a minority position, the situation will worsen.

The country’s governance, like a 100-car pile-up, is a tangled mess that is transiting out of the free enterprise system every year.

The Liberals have adopted a soak-the-rich taxation approach and swallowed whole the green’s concocted “Climate Change Emergency.” As a result, Canada has missed out on what The Economist labelled the recent, half-decade global “jobs boom.”

Deficits were supposed to disappear but have soared. Jobs and unemployment calculations are suspect and include so-called “part time” and “self-employed jobs.” For instance, before the Oct. 21 election Ottawa claimed that job gains hit 81,000 in August, then another 54,000 in September. Then suddenly, post-election, gains turned into losses of 1,800 in October and 71,000 in November, the biggest decline since the financial meltdown in 2008.

Since 2015, median income has increased only $38 a year under the Trudeau regime, compared with $428 a year increases under Prime Minister Stephen Harper (even though he had to steer through the financial meltdown.) Consumer debt has become the highest in the G7, because Ottawa has not cracked down on illicit capital flows into condos in Toronto and Vancouver, which has helped drive housing prices to excessive levels.

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