Liberal Wisdom from PEI

 

Two prominent news items in Canada this past week have been the Federal Cabinet meeting in PEI to discuss the housing crisis and the expansion of the BRICS coalition. I plan to say something about BRICS next time.

We --- the residents of Canada --- had hoped that the government would find mercy and wisdom to develop a strategy that was more than having a good time in PEI and the taxpayers’ expense.

Our housing shortage is a function of demand versus supply. Typically, an unfettered free market would pay attention to supply and would meet the demand to the point of equilibrium. We do not have such a market. We have a market distorted by the pressures of government meddling, with the consequences of unreliable price signals and interference with profit opportunities. The result is that supply of housing is not enough to meet the demand.

Demand is fairly inelastic. People need a place to live. Sadly, the only idea that I heard reported as coming from the unimaginative PEI meetings is the proposition that Canada could relieve housing demand by limiting the number of student visas. It is a mistake to try to resolve the housing problem by stifling demand. It doesn’t work. All it will do is lower the standard of living by reducing wealth that could otherwise be.

It’s no wonder we are short of housing. We are a rather unproductive country. GDP per person is about 70% of what it is in the USA. We have immense natural resources and an educated workforce, so what makes the difference? In Canada, so many of our economic inputs are diverted into government activities (or inactivities) that our production of useful goods and services is crippled. Government wastes resources that could otherwise be used to benefit the population. The consequential shortages of real wealth manifests in desired purchases being out of reach for many people --- so out of reach that a lot of them live on the streets. That’s the wisdom of Canadian government.

There’s more wisdom, spouted by Chrystia Freeland, who answered a journalist’s question about the effects of the punitive carbon tax on PEI by responding that she doesn’t have a car in inner Toronto and often rides a bike or takes the subway. Why didn’t those Islanders think of taking the subway, or even of riding their bikes, especially in the PEI winter? She neglected to mention her chauffeur driven limousine, which even drives from Ottawa to Toronto to be available to her after she has done the journey by private plane.

Our government is so out of touch. It can easily happen. My parents came from poor families who were victims of the Great Depression. I recall one of my aunts telling me about her mother crying because she had nothing to feed the children. It’s a common story. Yet I recall talking to a man that grew up in the depression but who said he didn’t know much about it because he was from a family that knew no want: his father was employed lucratively by government. I think many of us in Canada are very unaware of the suffering --- the hunger and other deprivation --- that fellow Canadians are enduring right now. So I get that Freeland and her accomplices can easily be unaware. I wish they would care enough to become aware.

 

WHAT'S HAPPENING TO CANADA?

 

It’s been a really busy several months since I last posted. A good kind of busyness. For a few weeks now, beginning on Canada Day, which I spent in Regina, I have been thinking about how crippled Canadian functionality has become by the ill-informed policies of the Liberal/NDP federal government.

Here in Victoria, the homeless have proliferated beyond the toleration of many people. There is public pressure on municipal government to do something, even if it is simply making property more vandal-proof. What are people supposed to do when they have no housing? And how will they have housing with rents as high as they are?

I have never lived on the street, but I can imagine how time consuming it would be to find a place safe from humans, animals, and weather, and then maintaining a claim to it. I can imagine how difficult it must be to find employment with no fixed address, no place to bathe, and no facility in which to press clothing. It would be challenging to eat nutritiously and to maintain a positive and realistic enough attitude to systematically look for employment. Doing so depends on wanting to do so, and that somewhat depends on optimism --- rather elusive, I expect, when one has been beaten to the knees in Trudeaupia.

We seem to have economic policy specifically designed to destroy the morale of Canadian residents. It is reported that one in six people go hungry in this country. Let’s have people live in fear of the future. Fearful people are more likely to submit.

A couple earning a quarter of a million dollars annually has an almost impossible time finding an affordable starter home in major cities, even mid-priced ones such as Calgary. Prices in Vancouver and Toronto are bizarre. But the amateur federal government should keep spending money like it has no value. And it doesn’t, thanks to the proliferation of dollars by a Bank of Canada that tag-teams with the government. At least not enough value to meet people’s needs. Yes, let’s have people living in fear of the future. Fearful people are more likely to submit.

Let’s open the borders to a flood of people who are not like us and who will not be assimilated by us, but who will eventually want to assimilate us --- people who consume more than they produce because we basically do not allow them to ply the professional skills they bring with them. Let’s have them also depending on a whimsical government for help, further adding to price inflationary pressures. And let’s have those people also living in fear of the future. Fearful people are more likely to submit.

I like the idea of immigration. We need it. As a people transition from rural to urban bases, the birthrate falls. Agrarian people have lots of kids: kids are an asset. In the city, kids are expensive pets. So people have less of them. We are now, and have been for many years, possessed of a birthrate that is way below the approximately 2.1 kids per couple that is needed to maintain a population quantum. You can find various figures for Canada’s birthrate, but it seems to be a bit over 1.4. So we need people to do the work that is necessary to enable the huge number of Canadian seniors (the big baby boomer generation) to not work in their old age. Having well educated immigrants and enabling them to practice the occupations for which they have been trained, is different than having a target of 500,000 immigrants per year and putting hurdles in the immigrants’ way that keep them from adding to the wealth of the country.

I have seen a couple of disturbing videos recently, and I don’t know which is worse. The first was of Justin Trudeau creepily asking moms to leave a room so he could talk to their kids. I saw another video, this one not disturbing, of Trudeau talking with kids in what seemed to be a classroom. Maybe the video occurred later in the same session where he told the moms to leave. One of the kids asked him why he painted his face black (or maybe the child said “brown”). His reply was that he should not have done so, but he didn’t know better. He has received a huge amount of what I think is undeserved flak. I am sure he did not see anything offensive about it. I recall playing the part of Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet that was an all-male cast, as was the practice in the bard’s day. Should I be pilloried for it? I don’t get why Trudeau should be as attacked over what seems to have essentially been playing a role. He has real scandals that could use that attention.

The second disturbing video was of Chrystia Freeland apparently addressing a graduating class and their guests and raising the question of whether the concept of a capitalist democracy is viable.  What does she know of capitalism? Capitalism depends on having a free market, and her government has run crippling interference with free markets from the time it took office. Canadian governments typically have interfered with markets, but her government is an outlier at the extreme interference end of the range.

Happily, the polls are consistently showing that Canadians have generally had enough of Trudeau and his globalist agenda. Sadly, he will likely be dissuaded from calling an election before 2025, but who knows? Jagmeet Singh may come to see that he made a huge mistake in abandoning the role of being in His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Nothing loyal about an Opposition propping up the worse federal government in Canadian history. The role of the Opposition is to energetically and creatively attack proposed legislation so that only the best legislation receives Royal Assent. When an Opposition rubber stamps everything a government decides to do, especially when the government is as inept and amateurish as ours, that Opposition, in this case the NDP, do the country a big damage. Nothing loyal about that. Well, maybe loyal to the desire to be in office the minimum six years required for collecting a pension.