Just Another Carney

I lived in a great neighbourhood in Burlington Ontario for many years. Millcroft Country Club was a suburban development that began in the 1980’s. An executive housing development built around a golf course. Beautiful homes, beautiful people, it was often referred to as Milfcroft due to its preponderance of beautiful moms particularly my wife!

Yet once a year the fact that we were living in this upscale neighbourhood made us a target for band of thieves. Clearly do I remember one night eighteen years ago when my daughter and I were enjoying camping in the backyard when the knock of the police came to our door and my wife came to get me.

The car doors of our vehicles were open, effects strewn about the driveway as they were with many of our neighbours. A robbery crew had hit our street breaking into cars, stealing everything they could but the vehicles themselves. A short while later we we told it was a group of carnies from a travelling carnival that set up every year on the south side of our little neighbourhood. All fun and games when the lights are on, devious thefts in the dark.

Kind of like what we are experiencing today with our new, old Liberal government. During the daylight all elbows and great national projects, but in the dark backrooms they are all about command and control and how to best hide the fact they are stealing our national wellbeing from us.

And just like the barkers running the games at the carnivals, our federal leaders call out to us with unbelievable claims our votes likening to the inevitable ball toss where the barker convinces us we are capable of winning the kewpie doll, or a better Canada. Sure you just lost with the last try, we are completely different though and certainly you will have a better future with us.

And we say to ourselves, let me think about that offer and go and take a ride on the tilt-a-whirl spinning the memory of the past loss from our minds, allowing us to be lulled by the sound of ‘doggy doggy, who wants to go home with this big doggy.’ Only this past spring the chant was ‘orange man bad, we will save you from him,’ so of course we lined up to rid ourselves of this doggerel of US political narcissism .

With remarkable sleight of hand our new Carney convinced us that he was the ‘one’ who could lead the country from the ravages of the bad man. His first trick was to lower the tax of gas recently brought in to zero percent. Not to eliminate the bad law that required the tax in the first place, nope, let’s just temporarily reduce it to nothing. There are several recent laws restricting everything from new building in the energy and mining sectors to pipelines to west coast shipping. All of which are compounded with strict environment restrictions and oversight by native groups that have severely limited the desire for corporations to invest here.

Does our new leader remove these restrictions? Certainly not, we get a further regulatory structure to ensure complete government control over any development that may have national significance. Yet we hold our collective national breath as we await the first release of the list of prioritized projects. And with great slight of hand, presto chango, the five on the list are all currently in development or construction, expansion of an LNG facility, a container port expansion, SMRs that are being added to an existing nuclear facility and a couple of mine expansions.

Not one of these is a green sheet project. Sure a doubling of the potential output of the west coast LNG project can add to our national accounts, yet no increase in pipeline capacity to the west or east seems to be in the works, certainly though Bill Gaqtes and Warren Buffet like the sound of that project as they own the railways that will benefit from the increase in NG deliveries need to supply the plants.

On the other hand we are told that not to worry, I am a banker and understand national finances better than anyone and so I will change how we report government expenses into operating and capital expenses hiding from you the true costs of our spending. But the potential numbers are being leaked in preparation of the fall budget, crazy numbers like $80 billion dollars in deficit spending. And that is with only a 3.5% of GDP allocation to military spending not the 5% that fearless leader promised NATO. (Each 1% adds $30 billion to spending, which places potential spending closer to $125 billion in deficit)

Now these numbers are clearly unsustainable. That our economy is tanking, we no longer have a petro dollar, and crime is spiking dramatically in our urban centres do not even seem to make the radar of our current government. Just spend more and study area that industry experts say are the problems. Right, let’s study all these things that the simplest of citizens knows inherently are dumb. Why not just remove all the restrictions placed on the economy by the government and let the market have a go at improving all our lives?

To do that would have the same effect as unrigged carnival games. No control for the carnies. Or at the national level no control for Carney. And it seems that this is completely unacceptable. This truly seems to be taking Canadians by surprise. I guess the lack of due diligence by the media and unwillingness of the people to buy and read his book mean folks are willing to be lulled into belief just like at the carnival. Lets hope this national nighttime is soon over.