Even among Washington policy wonks, very few realize that, some 15 years ago, Canada successfully dealt with a fiscal and economic emergency almost identical to America’s current crisis. The Canadian experience has prompted only a few op-eds, written mostly by Canadians, and some obscure academic studies. The defining analysis is “Canada’s Budget Triumph,” a 2010 study produced by (Canadian-born) economist David Henderson for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Canada, Henderson wrote, “achieved fiscal discipline, turned a budget deficit into a surplus, and in the process became one of the healthiest economies” in the world.
Current inflation is killing off the Canadian middle class
This week, new figures from Statistics Canada show annual inflation hit 2.4 per cent. That’s up from 2.3 per cent last month, the ninth month in a row of a rising inflation rate. And while the things you buy are more than two per cent dearer (three per cent if you live in Ontario) than they were a year ago, wages have not been keeping pace.
Over the same period, StatsCan data shows that Canadian wages rose only 1.9 per cent. In Ontario, where prices were up three per cent, wages rose a mere 0.7 per cent. That means if you live in Ontario and spend what you earn, you are effectively 2.3 per cent poorer than you were only one year ago.
Is Canada Tarring Itself?
START with the term “tar sands.” In Canada only fervent opponents of oil development in northern Alberta dare to use those words; the preferred phrase is the more reassuring “oil sands.” Never mind that the “oil” in the world’s third largest petroleum reserve is in fact bitumen, a substance with the consistency of peanut butter, so viscous that another fossil fuel must be used to dilute it enough to make it flow.
Never mind, too, that the process that turns bitumen into consumable oil is very dirty, even by the oil industry’s standards. But say “tar sands” in Canada, and you’ll risk being labeled unpatriotic, radical, subversive.