Be Pleased at America's Greed

The Canadian Shield.

Days! I have spent days wanting to write about Canada's attempts to negotiate a reduction in these coercive tariffs. But the news kept changing: an impending deal, a different impending deal, then no deal at all. So I sat on my hands.

I want to be clear about this: These were not normal trade talks. They were attempts to ratchet down a trade war Trump started, under threat of even more tariffs. Canada was being asked to hand over lasting concessions in exchange for reducing the severity of an attack that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

We'll give you all this if you shoot a little less.

When Canada walked away and the talks fell apart, I had hoped that it had always been Carney's intent to not accomplish anything.

I'm not so sure that's true. We apparently came disturbingly close to a deal, until Trump added final text that was too much for us to take. This is vintage Trump bargaining: get close to the deadline, then demand more.

But had he not done so, we would have ended our retaliatory actions in exchange for a mere reduction in tariffs. No wonder they went after more: There was blood in the water. Canadian red.

Be pleased at America's greed. It stopped us from making a mistake.

Carney now sounds like someone who understands the problem. He says America's behaviour has called “into question the reliability of any deal.” America, he says, has changed. Washington has learned to use “economic integration as a weapon,” while its signature is “written in pencil.”

Carney also objected to a late American demand that could have restricted Canada's freedom to make trade arrangements with other countries. That isn't tariff relief. That's leverage over Canadian sovereignty.

And the actual CUSMA negotiations are still ahead of us. These weren't them. Washington is trying to collect Canadian concessions before we even reach that table. Anything we surrender now is something we cannot bargain with later.

My concern is that Carney seems to understand exactly what kind of negotiating partner this is—and yet was still prepared to make a deal on those terms.

We are at war. CUSMA is in place for another 10 years. We have time to negotiate. It's going to hurt, but this is more than a trade war. It's a fight to retain sovereignty. One that will require sacrifice on our part.

We need to remember that Trump's deadlines are not our deadlines. There is no compelling reason to accept a bad deal simply because Trump drew a line in the sand with a Sharpie.

I know that some Conservatives argue they would have had a deal last year. That we have a long-standing relationship with America that matters. That Trump won't last, so make a deal now we can renegotiate later.

This is a mistake. Yes, we may see some improvements after the midterms—assuming those aren't interfered with. Maybe Trump will be gone soon. But Trump did not invent the forces behind this. He harnessed them. The people enabling him will remain long after he is gone.

Always Wrong: The Fraser Institute

It's that time of year again. The Fraser Institute has released its inflated "Look How Bad We Are Taxed" report.

Canadians spent more on taxes than basic necessities in 2025: Study

The 42% of income going to taxes figure is not what a typical Canadian family actually pays.

This so-called average family? It's a hypothetical construct which includes unattached individuals, and assigns it not only personal income, sales, property and payroll taxes, but also corporate taxes, import duties and resource revenues, even though much of those burdens falls unevenly on shareholders, workers, consumers and foreigners.

It also treats taxes paid directly by employers—such as the employer portions of CPP and EI—as costs borne by families on the theory that they reduce wages. Fraser assumes that employer payroll taxes ultimately come out of workers’ wages, so it adds them to the family’s tax bill. 

We all know that corporations are begging to pay us more, and to charge less for their products and services, instead of increasing profits, right? Right? 🙄🙄

If payroll taxes and corporate tax rates were reduced, we'd never see a penny of it.

It also counts CPP and EI payments without recognizing their associated benefits.

The tax burden portioned to the average also includes capital gains paid on the sale of secondary properties—hardly a typical family experience.

I do not know what the correct percentage is. I do know that year after year, Fraser produces an inflated one.

What we pay in taxes is a topic worthy of discussion and debate. It does not need to be exaggerated to be so.

The Time-Travelling Bill C-75

According to the Conservative Party of Canada, Canada's crime wave is the result of Bill C-75, the Liberal bail reform that became law in late 2019. This presents one obvious difficulty: Canada's Crime Severity Index began rising in 2015, reflecting an increase that started in Alberta's with its oil shock downturn in 2014.

Apparently the legislation was so dangerous it travelled backwards through time.

Crime in Canada has increased since 2015, though it remains well beneath 1990s levels. The question is whether the Conservative claim fits the evidence.

But first, some blatant misrepresentations by the CPC need to be dealt with.

Misrepresentations

Section 493.1 of the Criminal Code was added by the Bill:

“A peace officer, justice or judge shall give primary consideration to the release of the accused at the earliest reasonable opportunity and on the least onerous conditions that are appropriate in the circumstances…”

But the CPC cites:

“at the earliest possible opportunity, under the least onerous conditions.”

Placing that in quotes is supposed to mean that it is an exact citation. It is not. The bolded phrases have been changed from what the Criminal Code actually says. The CPC doesn't cite the source, which is a hint that they don't want you checking. Now, it is plausible😒 that they aren't citing the Criminal Code, perhaps instead citing some unknown person who has what I'll charitably call a minority interpretation of the law. We don't know which—if there even is a "which" to consider—because they don't tell us. Those of us understandably less informed are left to believe it is a damning quote with accurate provenance.

Replacing “reasonable” with “possible” and deleting “appropriate in the circumstances” turns a qualified legal principle into something that sounds suspiciously like an automatic-release command.

If you have to lie to prove your point, that's good evidence your point isn't up to snuff.

The Bail Crisis

Section 11(e) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states:

"Any person charged with an offence has the right not to be denied reasonable bail without just cause."

Canada has a genuine bail crisis. When this Bill was crafted, provincial jails increasingly held more people awaiting trial than serving sentences. Bail hearings were delayed. Legally innocent people accumulated stacks of bail conditions only vaguely related to the charge. Court dates were consumed dealing with technical bail violations resulting from those conditions.

As we do have constitutional rights in this country, reforms were needed. Bill C-75 was an attempt to solve this problem.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association reported in 2024 that more than 70% of people in provincial and territorial jails are awaiting trial or bail rather than serving a sentence, with Ontario approaching 80%.

The problem has not gone away, despite claims our courts are leaking felons at an alarming rate.

Rising Crime

This is real, though it has been declining in recent years.

As mentioned, blaming it on Bill C-75 is ridiculous.

What we have been seeing are a steep increase cybercrimes, which are heavily weighed in the Crime Severity Index. There is a well-known greater willingness to report crimes traditionally stigmatized like sexual assault and fraud. There's effects from housing affordability and inflation. Organized crime soared, and let's not forget the opioid and toxic-drug crisis. many more...

I'm sure the CPC would blame the Liberals for those too; but at least note that none of those came about due to Bill C-75.

Chronology is not Causation

The real problem with the Conservative argument is that it mistakes chronology for causation—and in this case, it doesn't even get the chronology right. Canada's Crime Severity Index began climbing in 2015. Bill C-75 did not become law until late 2019. Yet readers are invited to believe that the latter caused the former. This is political storytelling, not evidence. Proper evidence would compare before and after controlling for the many factors criminologists have identified.

Travelling backwards through time is not one of them.

It Doesn’t Have to Be False. It Just Has to Seem to Prove Something that Isn't So.

 

Is Canada printing proportionately more money than anyone else in the G7?

So, a few days ago, Build Canada produced this chart (below), and I was immediately suspicious. The claim that Canada “prints too much money” is a repeating CPC fallacy, not a serious position. Canada hasn't hit the presses to increase the supply of money for a very, very long time.

The graph appears genuine. It plots the M2 money supply of each G7 country, indexed to March 2004. Look how “bad” Canada is!

The claim

Every G7 country hit the brakes on money printing. Except Canada.

is bunk. Or, at least, the chart doesn’t actually show that.

The chart seems to have originated with Scott Stevenson, who created it in TradingView in March 2026 (below). Within days it had spread through Reddit, Facebook, X, and eventually, it seems, Build Canada.

The problem here isn’t that the graph lies. The problem is that it quietly asks the reader to make a leap the data do not justify.

Even the Creator Clarified His Position

Scott Stevenson later wrote:

That clarification changes the argument considerably as there’s a significant difference between saying that Canada’s broad money supply continued to expand and that Canada kept printing money.

Most readers interpret “printing money” as governments or central banks creating money. Scott now says that’s not what he meant.

Words matter. Especially when they’re doing most of the persuasive work.

There’s Another Wrinkle

Former deputy finance minister Tyler Meredith caught on.

M2 doesn’t only increase when governments or central banks inject money into the economy.

It also changes because people move assets into bank deposits, money-market funds, GICs and other instruments included in M2.

Banks create deposits when they make loans.

Mortgage lending creates money shown in M2.

If Canadians continue taking out enormous mortgages—as they have for years—Canada’s M2 can continue growing even after quantitative easing has ended.

The chart itself cannot distinguish between those causes.

Private lending—not government—is a major source of M2. Most money creation in Canada is private, not public.

Confused?

Well, I don’t blame you.

I excised a lot of criticism in order to keep it this simple.

Know this: The chart is real. The data is real. It's simply not showing Chretien, Martin, Harper, Trudeau and/or Carney revving up the government printing presses. The reason why the Canadian curve edges out the other G7 members is likely because it’s disproportionately affected by Canada’s oversized mortgage market.

Housing is a whole other issue encompassing macroeconomic policy, federal-provincial relationships, and a lot of provincial policy over the ages.

I’m not going there today.

Liar, Liar, Poopy Pants on Fire

If Canada is negligent because its forests burn, then by Donald Trump’s own standard, the United States is the greater failure.

The United States has less forest than Canada, but vastly more people, money, equipment and institutional capacity with which to manage it. Yet American wildfires still burn at least as much land, on average, as Canadian wildfires do.

The numbers are not close when it comes to the resources available.

Using the same United Nations definition for both countries, Canada had approximately 346.8 million hectares of forest in 2023. The United States had about 309.8 million hectares. Canada therefore has approximately 37 million more hectares of forest. That's about 12% more. (World Bank Open Data)

Canada had an estimated population of 41.4 million on April 1, 2026. The United States had approximately 342.6 million people on July 1. The United States therefore has more than eight times Canada’s population with which to support the protection of a smaller forest area. (Statistics Canada)

Put another way, Canada has approximately 8.4 hectares of forest for every resident. The United States has about 0.9 hectares per resident. Canada must manage more than nine times as much forest per person.

The financial disparity is even greater. World Bank figures put the 2024 American economy at about US$28.8 trillion, compared with approximately US$2.24 trillion for Canada. The United States economy is nearly 13 times larger. (DataBank)

Despite all those advantages, the United States does not keep its forests and wildlands from burning any better than Canada does.

The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre’s 2023 report placed Canada’s ten-year average at 2,718,762 hectares burned annually.

Using the National Interagency Fire Center’s published American totals for the preceding ten completed years, 2013 through 2022, the United States averaged approximately 7.18 million acres burned annually. That converts to roughly 2.91 million hectares—about 188,000 hectares more per year than Canada’s average. (National Interagency Fire Center)

So the United States has less forest, more than eight times the population and nearly 13 times the economy. It has only about one-ninth as much forest to manage per resident. Yet it still loses at least as much land to wildfire as Canada does.

By Trump’s standard, that is not merely negligence. It is negligence with every conceivable advantage.

Trump either does not know these facts or does not care. The accusation is not a serious assessment of Canadian forest management. This is cheap “America First” theatre, built for an audience he has trained to mistake hostility for strength and repetition for evidence. Canada is declared negligent, the United States is excused for doing worse, and tariffs are presented as punishment for a problem America cannot solve within its own borders. The contradiction does not trouble him because consistency is not the point. The point is to manufacture another foreign threat he can solve with threats of tariffs and annexation, flatter American superiority and rely on his followers never checking whether the charge survives contact with reality.

Yes, Mr. Poilievre, Canada is wealthier than the USA

One of Pierre Poilievre's favourite talking points is that parts of the United States—Alabama, Mississippi, or the country as a whole, depending on the speech—now produce more GDP per person than Canada.

The statistic is real. The conclusion does not follow.

GDP per capita measures how much an economy produces. It does not measure how much wealth the typical person owns, or how that wealth is distributed.

Does the generate wealth flow broadly through society or accumulate among a relatively small number of shareholders, executives, and asset owners? I think we all know the answer to that.

If GDP per capita were all that mattered, economists would have stopped measuring everything else decades ago.

UBS's Global Wealth Report measures something entirely different: net wealth per adult. By that measure, the median* Canadian adult owns more than twice the wealth of the median American adult. Meanwhile, the United States has a dramatically higher average wealth per adult than Canada.

Those two facts are not contradictory. They tell us something important.

(* median means half above, half below.)

America is exceptionally good at creating wealth. It is considerably less successful at ensuring that the wealth it creates is broadly held.

That distinction matters because the people invoking American GDP figures are not merely making an economic observation. They are making a policy argument. The implication is that Canada should emulate the American model because it produces better outcomes.

But which outcomes?

If the result is a country where aggregate wealth soars while the typical citizen owns comparatively little of it, that is hardly a self-evident success. It is a policy choice—and one that deserves scrutiny rather than admiration. 

To put recent history "down there" mildly: Recent American policy has moved toward weaker antitrust enforcement, reduced consumer-protection enforcement, and greater political control over regulatory agencies that were designed to operate independently. This reflects a philosophy that places greater faith in concentrated private economic power and less in institutional checks upon it.

There is no evidence that simply pointing Canada in the same direction would cause the median Canadian to become wealthier. If anything, the available evidence suggests otherwise. The United States generates extraordinary wealth while the benefits are distributed far less evenly than in many comparable countries.

If the problem we face is reclaiming prosperity for middle class that we also hope to expand, anyone suggesting that the United States has already solved the problem, or is at least on its way, is a person at best stumbling into endorsing regulatory capture in the least. In reality, evidence of outright corruption is not hard to find—what are they thinking?

Trump has publicly praised the Gilded Age—a period of extraordinary industrial expansion and immense fortunes built by men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt. It was also an era of minimal regulation, weak labour protections, rampant political patronage, and vast concentrations of economic power. By the end of the Gilded Age, while a handful of industrialists possessed fortunes unprecedented in human history, many ordinary Americans endured dangerous working conditions, child labour, tenement housing, repeated financial panics, and wages that left them only a paycheck away from destitution.

Sound familiar?

Regardless of Canada's own challenges, pointing to the United States as the obvious answer is simply not credible. Before we decide to imitate another country's economic model, we should first ask whether it is producing the outcomes we actually want.

My Postal Code Is Not a Tax Return

I was called an “Eastern parasite” on Facebook the other day.

This was not based on a detailed examination of my finances. The gentleman😐 had not seen my tax returns, reviewed my income, calculated how much federal tax I pay, or performed an actuarial analysis of the government services I consume now, or over my entire life (much of it spent in the GTA—another aggrieved region).

He figured out I live on the East Coast.

That was enough.

I understand the thinking. I have heard variations of it for decades, particularly from Alberta. Alberta pays more into Canada than it gets back. Atlantic Canada gets more than it pays. Therefore, Albertans are supporting people like me.

Therefore, parasite.

Apparently, I Could Move West and Be Cured

I have a job. I pay federal income tax.

Were I doing roughly the same job in Alberta for roughly the same income, my federal taxes would not be dramatically different. The same federal tax brackets apply whether I live in New Brunswick or Alberta.

So:

Me in New Brunswick: Eastern parasite.

Me in Alberta: hardworking Albertan whose tax dollars support Eastern parasites.

Same person and work. Roughly the same income and the same federal tax contribution.

Different postal code.

Apparently, moving to Alberta has remarkable restorative powers. I would not need to work harder, retrain, start a business, or increase my income. I would simply cross a provincial boundary and be fiscally redeemed.

This is a clue that something is wrong with the "parasite" argument.

Who Is “Alberta”?

Dougald Lamont recently wrote about the Free Alberta Strategy, a document used to make the intellectual case for greater Alberta autonomy and, increasingly, Alberta separation.

Lamont asks a question that should be obvious but rarely is.

When people say “Alberta pays,” who exactly are they talking about?

The Free Alberta Strategy, according to Lamont, focuses overwhelmingly on oil and gas while barely accounting for the rest of Alberta's economy. He notes that oil represents about $88 billion of a roughly $400 billion economy and employs only about 5.3 per cent of Alberta's workforce.

In other words, most Albertans do not work in O&G, and most of Alberta's GDP is generated elsewhere. Yet the political rhetoric routinely turns the financial performance of one highly profitable, capital-intensive industry into the collective accomplishment of an entire population.

The tax numbers raise the same problem.

Using Statistics Canada tax-filer data, Lamont notes that half of Alberta tax filers make less than $44,100 and contribute only 3.8 per cent of the province's income tax collected. The top one per cent, about 35,000 people, pay more than a quarter. About 350 people in the top 0.01 per cent pay roughly one dollar in twenty of all income tax paid in Alberta.

As Lamont rather effectively puts it, the taxes paid by those 350 people are what the strategy calls “Alberta's.”

That does not mean ordinary Albertans contribute nothing. Obviously they do.

It means that saying “Alberta pays” hides an enormous amount of information about who actually pays.

And that brings me back to my Facebook friend.

Tribal Bookkeeping

The man who called me an Eastern parasite knows nothing about my finances. Neither of us has seen the other's tax return.

Yet he believes he has standing to identify me as a recipient and himself as a contributor.

How?

Well, geography.

He has taken the net fiscal position of Alberta and assigned it to himself personally.

Then he has taken the net fiscal position of Atlantic Canada, and assigned it to me personally.

Every Albertan gets collective credit for the taxes paid by Alberta's richest taxpayers and most profitable businesses.

Every Maritimer gets collective blame for the federal transfers received.

This is not accounting. This is tribal bookkeeping.

Why Stop at the Alberta Border?

Why is a province the correct geographical unit for deciding who is a parasite? Why stop there?

Within Alberta, Calgary and Edmonton generate enormous amounts of economic activity and tax revenue. Presumably there are smaller Alberta communities where the identifiable government spending per person exceeds the tax revenue generated there.

Are those communities parasites?

Maybe Calgary should leave Alberta.

Then again, within Calgary there will be neighbourhoods where residents have much higher incomes and pay far more tax than residents of other neighbourhoods.

Why should someone in Mount Royal support someone living in a poorer part of the city?

Parasites!

We can keep going.

Perhaps one side of a street pays more property tax than the other.

Maybe the people at number 42 should demand fiscal independence from the deadbeats at number 38. 

Sidebar

The same sort of fiscal imbalance exists inside cities. Peer-reviewed research on municipal finances has repeatedly found sprawling, spatially extensive development more expensive to service. A meta-analysis of 125 local fiscal studies found that residential land uses, on average, consumed about $1.18 in attributed municipal spending for every dollar of revenue they generated, while commercial and industrial land uses consumed just 44 cents. The exact balance varies from place to place, but the idea that one geographic or economic part of a community subsidizes another is hardly a uniquely Albertan phenomenon. 

At some point the absurdity becomes obvious.

Or we could stop drawing circles altogether and look at individual taxpayers.

Do that, and we discover the shocking truth behind much of this grievance.

People with high incomes generally pay more income tax than people with low incomes.

Government spending is not returned to each citizen in exact proportion to the taxes that citizen paid.

That is how progressive taxation and government work.

The Alberta grievance industry draws a provincial border through this ordinary fiscal reality and declares the statistical result evidence of regional theft.

But the boundary is a political choice.

The province is the unit of calculation because Alberta is the political identity being mobilized.

Strangely Collectivist Libertarians

There is an irony in all this.

A great deal of Alberta separatist and autonomy rhetoric comes from people who describe themselves as individualists, libertarians, or advocates of personal responsibility.

There is nothing particularly individualistic about declaring the taxes paid by millions of other people to be “our money.”

The argument is remarkably collectivist.

The income of millions of individuals and businesses becomes Alberta's wealth.

The taxes paid disproportionately by a relatively small number of extremely high-income people become what Albertans paid.

Then millions of people living somewhere else are sorted into a geographic debtor class.

I am no longer a person.

I am The East.

The guy insulting me is no longer whatever his employment income, tax bill and personal circumstances say he is.

He is Alberta.

He has appropriated the tax contribution of oil executives, engineers, entrepreneurs, wealthy investors and corporations he has never met and is waving the total around as if he personally wrote Ottawa the cheque.

Then he calls me a parasite.

I almost admire the confidence.

If Alberta were to separate, the very few who pay so much of the tax base in that province would consider the many who do not parasites. I assure you, they have no intention of showering the commonwealth of Alberta with their billion$. Their aim is to keep it for themselves.

Provinces Are Not People

A province having a positive net fiscal balance does not make every resident a net contributor.

A province receiving Equalization does not make every resident a net beneficiary.

An Albertan does not inherit the tax contribution of the richest Albertans as a personal moral achievement.

And I do not inherit my current province's fiscal capacity as a character flaw.