Liberal Minority Government 2025 - ???

[Halifax Tar]

Under the Canrey government, Canada is moving forward by continuously announcing we're moving forward.

Careful comrade.

 

[Altair]

Little chicken shit things eh

You know things are happening in the background when Smith is largely silent.

 

[daftandbarmy]

Careful comrade.

It's important that the propaganda posters include images with alot of movement too

 

[Brad Sallows]

Statement on the Canada - Sweden strategic partnership


This part raised my eye brow

That part makes me laugh. A country needs a high degree of homogeneous social cohesion for that.

 

[Altair]

We shall see if that comes to fruition.

I get the weird sense that you're more annoyed when the LPC does something you like than when they do something you don't like.

 

[dapaterson]

Is the AAR an engineering challenge, or a human factors challenge?

The RCAF is creating an air to air refuelling occupation, what if we make them jump qualified, they leap out of the CC330 pulling the fuel line with themselves, land on the GlobalEye, plug in the fuel line, then, once done, unplug and hold on while the line gets reeled back.

/s

 

[PPCLI Guy]

So- let's look at the budget that was tabled, with the benchmark PP put forward (without putting in the effort to show how he would do it). 78 Billion of crippling disaster vs. 42 billion of common sense affordability. Let's add them both to the $1.46T estimate, at the same level of rounding.

1.46 + .042 = 1.50
1.46 +.078 = ... 1.53

add another digit, we're looking at 1.502 vs 1.538.

Useful to put it into a broader context. I have always been frustrated by our fetish for absolute balancing a budget of ~1.5T. The pursuit of that symbolic but relatively meaning less objective can leads to unforeseen consequences. One could argue that the balancing of the multiple budgets over the last three decades has led to things like deliberate sabotage of defence spend to ensure funds are lapsed, in order to hit that arbitrary target.

That's just not true. All extactives - not just oil and gas but mining and quarrying as well- made up 5.1% of Canada's 2023 GDP

That will be enough of your pesky facts Mister! They upend shopworn and familiar narratives.

 

[daftandbarmy]

Is the AAR an engineering challenge, or a human factors challenge?

The RCAF is creating an air to air refuelling occupation, what if we make them jump qualified, they leap out of the CC330 pulling the fuel line with themselves, land on the GlobalEye, plug in the fuel line, then, once done, unplug and hold on while the line gets reeled back.

/s

As long as they don't get the privilege of wearing a maroon beret, we're good with that

 

[Brad Sallows]

Has it ever been so high that we pay more in interest than we collect in GST?

In the mid '80s we had years where public debt charges ran a little above 1/3 of revenues (GST, income taxes, etc).

Maybe it's nothing to worry about, has happened before, and this is just how things are sometimes. Maybe my concerns are totally unfounded. I am the first to admit I am not an economist by any means.

High spending and indebtedness relative to revenue has happened before. It's the important controlling variables that are different this time. Interest rates peaked sometime around '81/'82 and started declining. The government flipped its operating balance from deficit to surplus between '85 and '87. Those were the two main factors leading to eventually producing a net surplus, which probably would have happened around '00/'01 if the government hadn't goosed the operating surplus by cutting spending through '96 and '97.

The cost of public debt charges relative to accumulated deficit is around 1/3 what it was 40 years ago. There isn't much room to rely on falling interest rates to do the heavy work to correct the deficit.

The government was still running an operating surplus other than immediately after the '08 fiscal shakeup and COVID, but finally slipped a couple of years ago. If there's no popular and political appetite for spending discipline to restore an operating surplus, then that factor, too, is off the table.

With those two factors - the most important ones last time - out of play, we're in a much worse position - not as a snapshot in time of the usual coarse measurements like debt-to-GDP, but because of the vulnerability of the position.

At what point do we start to pay that debt down at all? Or do we even try?

Basically we roll over debt - borrow new to pay off old. If lenders ever tighten up, some future generation is going to really feel it.

the one industry that's currently paying for a majority of our expenses as a country, not just for Alberta.

O&G is a small piece overall, but resource extraction - agriculture and animal husbandry, forestry, fishing, mining, etc - supports everything else. As a fraction of economic activity it's collectively dwarfed by the service layer, but much of the service layer ceases to exist without the resource extraction layer. We see it happen whenever a primary employer goes under - 50 or 100 direct job losses, several times more in the total local economy.