Canada’s Credit Card Economy

It’s been a very upsetting past month, for several reasons. Passengers on a recent Air Canada flight from Jamaica, rows 30 to 36, may have been infected by at least one other passenger testing positive for Covid 19. If you Google ‘covid flights public health agency of Canada’, you’ll find infected flights arriving into Canada EVERY DAY, from Paris to Abu Dhabi and everything in between above and below. How is that possible if Canada requires all passengers on incoming flights to provide a negative Covid test result before boarding to Canada? And if you go to ‘Domestic flights airline flight number’, you’ll find inter-provincial travelers (many of whom arrived on a previous international flight) testing positive, every day. Their temperature is taken before boarding at Canadian airports and should have been refused unless their result was between 36.1C and 37.2C. What happened?
Variants in Quebec and Ontario account for more than half of Covid infections and according to McGill University epidemiologist Mathieu Maheu-Giroux, the variants from UK and South Africa will account for ALL of the infections in our province by July. Yet Minister of Public Safety Bill Blair insists Canada’s border restrictions are “composed of several layers of protection.” Excuse me? I would have asked Mr. Blair to repeat and explain had I done the interview.
Call me old fashion, or, ‘so yesterday’, but I’m not accustomed to a budget that calls for spending, under pretext of jumpstarting an economy that has already gained momentum and is accelerating like a CNR freight train. Current low interest rates are no excuse to borrow more. And two former BOC governors, Mark Carney and David Dodge, and even the Parliamentary Budget Officer, agree. No sense in going into familiar figures. Suffice to say another $101.4 billion dollars were spent. The Trudeau administration has amassed money owing equal to that “racked up after we built a transcontinental railroad, won the First World War, survived the Spanish Flu pandemic, weathered the Great Depression and beat the Nazis”- National Post.
The difference between us, and the government, is that they simply ask the bank of Canada to print more through the purchase of government bonds. Injecting credit card money into an economy may be for ideological and partisan purposes, but naïve as it may sound, I believe in motivating and encouraging Canadians to create wealth. I have no argument spending on our seniors in long term care homes, $10 day care outside of Quebec, a 15.00 minimum wage. And not many will feel the pain of taxing the purchase of a Ferrari or Lamborghini (well over 100 thousand dollars) or the purchase of that cute yacht docked over there.
Encouraging green is without a doubt a must, but balanced with our plentiful natural resources. Arguably, the world will be using oil and natural gas for the foreseeable future. With economies around the world ramping up, the thirst for Canada’s resources is monumental. Why not capitalize on what is nearly 20% of gross domestic product.
The Canadian government has stopped construction of the Trans Canada pipeline to the West Coast until the end of August, because of a few nesting humming birds “in the vicinity” of the construction site in BC. Seriously? I have not been able to get a straight answer from anyone, but I have heard work on the $12.6B project has been ordered stopped because of “one nest, and as many as five nests…maybe a dozen”. I love birds. My granddaughter feeds them from her hand. But really, how politicized will our natural resources become especially when demand for oil is ramping up. The American Petroleum Institute is predicting “a shortage in world oil supply by as early as next year”. Incentives and encouragement instead of the stunning distaste this government has for our resources, is a key to paying off a colossal debt that is being left to our grand kids and their kids.
Are you not concerned about Bill C10? The Trudeau bill would control visual content, for now, on social media? Watch what you post on YouTube, Facebook or whatever other platform you use. It smacks of a control method used by Russian/Chinese dictatorships. Now Canada is doing it. It’s no less than an assault on free speech.
And, what’s this? Our woke Prime Minister will be appearing as a feminist and whatever label he will have us believe, at the celebrity-laden global concert promoting vaccine equality next month. This after firing two female ministers, one of whom would have served as an invaluable, experienced, intelligent, physician Health Minister during this pandemic. Jane Philpot. And the same Prime Minister on whose watch was allegedly unaware of any of the 802 sexual assault accusations in our Canadian Armed forces from 2016 to today.
Shameful.
That’s What I’m Thinking
Robert Vairo
robert@newsfirst.ca