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Notes -
Canada’s decline
Things are not going well in Canada. The hashtag #Canadaisbroken has been going around for a while, but the scale of the decline remains underdiscussed, especially in our media. Canada’s real GDP per capita is 2.5% lower now than it was in 2019. In the U.S. its 6.0% higher. For decades, Canada has had per capita GDP (adjusted for purchasing power) that was about 80% of the U.S. level, now its 72% and falling. Canada is rapidly becoming a European country in terms of living standards. This understates the problem because in Europe its easier to live on less: cars are not necessary in many places and, crucially, rent is much lower. Canada is in the midst of an unbelievable housing crisis. At current prices and interest rates, the ownership costs of a typical home would consume 60% of the median household's income, the highest ever recorded. I went to the U.S. southwest recently and my overriding impression is how much better off America is than Canada now.
The Liberal government’s response to this has been deficit spending. Their lack of fiscal responsibility was dramatic during Covid, but hidden under the guise of emergency they spent $200+ billion on new entitlements and spending programs which has resulted in Canada running a permanent structural budget deficit. When combined with our provinces (which unlike U.S. states are allowed to borrow) and measured as a % of GDP, the country is running Bush Jr.-tier fiscal deficits without wars. And what are these new programs? Almost all of them are means-tested benefits for behaviours progressives like. A new daycare program aimed at moms working 9-5 jobs (i.e. white collar) that does nothing for SAHMs, a dental care program which is only for families making under 90k (creating a huge marriage penalty and implicit tax rate), a carbon tax rebate which is income redistribution in disguise, replacing the modest but universal child benefit with a generous means tested one, etc. If you put it together, Canada has largely rebuilt our 1970s welfare state but will claw it back from you more than dollar for dollar as you earn more. We variously incentivize poverty and moms to work, stay unmarried and put their kids in daycare. Our taxes are high.
The other big push from our government is immigration. They occasionally frame it as a way to stop inflation, but usually they don’t defend it at all and assume the pro-immigration consensus is unshakable. The levels were shocking last year, but they keep rising. Over just the past 3 months, Canada admitted 430,000 new people. Canada now has an absolute annual level of legal immigration (including temporary migration) of about 1.2 million -- higher than the United States. We get about 500,000 traditional immigrants, but the big change from recent years is about 700,000 net “non-permanent residents” who form a new helot class. Canada now has 2.5 million temporary residents who come to study or work low-paid jobs and it has rapidly transformed the entire country. These people represent 6% of the population, but because they are highly concentrated by age, they are about 20% of adults aged 20-40. I spend time in a small town that is hundreds of kilometers from any major city and nearly every store now employs temporary foreign workers from India. Every worker at McDonalds. Every worker at Tim Hortons. They live 6+ to an apartment and have tightened the rental market pricing locals out. With population growth running at its highest ever pace, homebuilding is unchanged at about 250,000 units creating an incremental housing need of a quarter million units per year. Rent inflation is over 7% compared with approximately 0% month over month in the US.
What the past few years has made plain to me is how deep leftism runs in Canada and how dedicated it is to ignoring the effect of incentives on behaviour: We can just subsidize bad behaviour and punish good behaviour endlessly without actually changing behaviour. In many ways Canada is running on the fumes of vestigial British earnestness, politeness and self discipline which has made this work in the past, but I think we’re rapidly burning up our cultural capital and once its gone, I think we’ll tip into a much worse equilibrium. I have leftist friends whose perspective is: “sure things aren’t great, but would the conservatives do better?” which makes me sad. For most people, even smart people like my friends, seeing the bad consequences of things they support doesn’t move the needle at all in terms of their worldviews. And I didn’t get into spiraling crime and government celebration of the deracination of our traditional culture.
I think part of what is happening is Anglo culture’s seemliness has become our greatest weakness. Its unseemly to ‘punch down’ and blame an avalanche of mostly-poor international students for the rental market, or permissive and ‘anti-racist’ criminal justice policy for a huge increase in crime so we equivocate and people say things like “its so brutal, how sad” while continuing to vote in the same way. There is no transmission from failure in office to electoral results, so we end up with people like Trudeau for three terms. One astute observation I’ve heard about Canadian ‘niceness’ is that its fake: people are very cagey about saying what they think in public about anything controversial. Our entire country is a university campus. Canadians live in a world of feel good pablum as our way of life is destroyed. People rage about it, but there is no honest sensemaking apparatus in Canada – because talking about things plainly is unseemly – so rage is dissipated randomly. Even today, even after its failures, the combined polling share of the LPC-led ruling coalition (i.e. LPC+NDP) is nearly 50%.
I'm not trying to morally compare the current Canadian government to the Nazis, but I was thinking the other day about how they are comparable in terms of "commitment to the bit". The war was well-lost and everyone knew it, but they were still rounding up Jews until the very end. We see that now and think "Guys, take the hint, throw in the towel," but Jew-gassing was just THAT important to the Nazis.
It looks like the current government is finished. Pretty much everyone hates them, Canada is (relatively) crumbling around us, and the government is trying to do things like find a path to citizenship for illegal migrants. I used to console myself with the knowledge that they were a bunch of bad-faith virtue signalers, but their laser focus on moremoremore immigration- to the exclusion of many, if not most, other issues- makes me think they really do believe in this stuff. Talk about commitment to the bit.
The comparison doesn't really work because the Nazis never expected to get back in power and their efforts to continue the war were delusional. But the liberal party is very rationally using their remaining time in office to do unpopular and destructive things that will increase their power next time they get elected, and prevent the current opposition from fixing the disaster they inherit.
In another decade everyone will have forgotten why they voted out the liberals in 2025. But their children will have been raised by the education bureaucrats being appointed today, and their managers at work will have been promoted the same way.
Left wingers have mastered the science of turning the political pendulum into a ratchet by manipulating procedure.
No the liberals are well aware they're possibly never getting back into power.
All of Canada's left depends on Canadian media propped up by government subsidies. There isn't a newspaper, tv channel, or magazine that survives without it.
The conservatives have made it a CORE part of their platform that they'll defund it all... this is the thing their base cares about, this is the thing the party bosses all salivate over... If you told them the journalists would starve to death on the street they'd take the week off to watch it happen and jeer in real time.
They'll Let the CBC and every Canadian broadcaster die, such that it will just be Rebel News and American Media.
Unlike the US where there is sufficient demand and backdoor bribes to keep legacy media going, in Canada it will just die.
And then it will be 4 YEARS until the next election.
The big lesson they learnt from Harper and the convoys is the only thing preventing the total Americanization of Canada (and permanent shift to a US style 60-40 right-left division of time in power (as opposed to the 20-80 Canada had in the 20th century) is State funding of Media...
And they will spend ANY political capital and suffer any scandal to watch those journalist die deaths of despair.
The Big Shift (title of the book that predicted this would occur naturally in the 2010s) was Harper's dream, that if he hit the liberals at just the right angle enough times, their party would die. The New Democrats would become the left wing party, the bloc would become permanently more powerful in Quebec, and Canada forever after would function as America Jr. in terms of how politics played out...
This didn't happen because Trudeau had a magic to him, and every institution fought tooth and nail to prevent the 4th Harper Victory that would have locked it in.
But with Conservative Pierre Poilievre's now 40+% in national polls (this in a 5-6 party system)...and with Poilievre framing himself as Stephen Harper, but more blood-thirsty and Trucker levels of hostile to the media...
This looks like it might be the end of the Liberal-Laurentian era of Canadian politics.
Canada is a country where the parties aren't systemically locked in like in the states... and Great parties have died before. (see the progressive-Conservatives going from a Majority government to 2 seats in the 90s never forming government again, and then harper and his hostile Westerners to absorb them, then slowly purge the remainder of their leaders)
Remarkably optimistic for you, Kulak. What do you think is the real chance they abolish the CBC?
Not Kulak but 50-50. The CBC has been slipping in public conciousness ever since they lost the NHL rights to Roger's in 2015 and Peter Mansbridge retired. The only people who watch CBC news are old Lauerntian boomers. The only relevant CBC show in the last decade was Schitts Creek which ends this year. I'm not sure the majority of Canadians would notice or care.
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