It’s quite true that according to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that the government can simply create the money to build things like transit. But the political culture of Canada is that this can’t possibly be true—so the Conservatives would fight tooth and nail against it. If something remains a Crown Corporation there is inevitably pressure to politicize it. But selling it to the private sector, the new owners get to own whatever anger comes from users–not the government.

This is the core problem with the Leftist idea of government ownership of everything. If we do that, then business decisions start getting made for political reasons–which destroys the efficiency of businesses. And this sucks the productivity out of the economy. And that makes workers poor. And that gets us back to the ‘losing jobs’ aspect of what Lewis was saying. I’m much more in favour of Social Democracy where business is business and government is government–and government is there to firmly regulate business and make sure that it doesn’t abuse people or the environment.

All Carney has to do is put a tax on use of airports, and use that money to fund LRT.

The problem with that is there will be pressure from the Conservatives to cut the taxes and then the LRT ends up being stranded without a funding source. Does that sound plausible to you? It certainly does for me.

What about the sale of Petrocanada? Was that also a terrible idea? My understanding is it served its purpose and made a profit for the government.

I’ve never understood why folks think that ‘preserving jobs’ is a reason to not pursue a government policy. If it gets in the way of increasing productivity, it just means that wage increases stop. The only reason why autoworkers make so much money is because of all the robots that work besides them. And it’s those robots that have dramatically cut the size of the human work force–not exporting jobs to Canada or China.

Also, Avi Lewis purports to be someone who is a radical with regard to the Climate Emergency. But the dramatic increase of frivolous air travel is one of the biggest and most intractable sources of CO2. Why should he be so concerned about keeping the price of air travel low for the masses? After all, wasn’t the whole point of the carbon tax to discourage carbon-intensive behaviour (like flying all over the planet to go on holidays)?

Carney has said that he wants to use the capital liberated by selling off the four biggest airports to build-up other aspects of the Canadian public transit system (including smaller airports). So he increases the cost of flying between Toronto and Ottawa or Quebec city by 10% and then uses the capital raised to support a high-speed rail system between these cities, and then builds a regional traditional passenger rail and bus network that feeds into that high-speed rail system (like GO Transit does in Ontario). Obviously a nefarious scheme by the Carney government to destroy the working class.

I joined the NDP to support Avi Lewis’ vision of a grassroots-based party built around consciousness-raising and building local base communities. Instead, all I see is the same old tired nonsense.

Quite right. You might be interested in my article where I explain how Britain got bamboozled into leaving Europe: https://billhulet.substack.com/p/the-stupid-and-the-gullible-19-08-02

I think it’s important to understand what happened during the Industrial revolution. It involved a lot of booms, busts, and a tremendous amount of wasted investment. In Ontario, where I live, there are pieces of extremely expensive to build, but ultimately worthless infrastructure projects all over the place from this time. There was a tremendous over-build of railways and also some canals, for example. In Guelph Ontario, for example, the city owns a railway that it took over when it’s parent went bankrupt and stranded local industry that depended on it. And in Perth Ontario, there’s a dead canal that goes through the downtown and is a remnant of another failed infrastructure project. These are the 19th century equivalents of LLM data centers.

It’s not a question of AI being a bubble or a new industrial revolution. It can be both. And governments have a responsibility to navigate this stuff to minimize risk to the ordinary citizens. Instead, it looks to me like the US is terrified by Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), so it’s putting the deed to the farm on the table. This is a profound misallocation of the nation’s resources.

What a surprise! Carney tells big business people what they want to hear.

I also listened to his BBC lectures about how economics is only of value if it is in service of the public good.

Carney couldn’t be as successful as he has been without learning how to be ‘all things to all people’. I’m not convinced that I know who he is. But I strongly suspect that other people who are absolutely convinced they do might not be right.

I voted for him because I was sure that he would be better than Poilievre. I still think he’s better than anyone else on offer. Maybe you’re right and he’s a closet neo-liberal. But I don’t want to dismiss him out of hand because I think you can also look at what he’s done and see something else altogether.

I remember hearing once that F.D.R. was called ‘a sphinx’ because no one could tell what he really thought. I think Carney is a sphinx too.

Well that’s the thing I point out at the end of the article. Carney doesn’t have to say he follows MMT. In fact, I suggest it would be best not to mention it if he does. But if he does believe, then he’s not going to be anywhere as concerned about the cost as he would otherwise. (And, as I point out, him having been in charge of two monetary systems uniquely prepares him to accept the basic premises of MMT.)

I’m not sure about the defense spending being the largest ‘by a large margin’. There are details that need considering. A large fraction of getting to 2% of GDP was by making the Coast Guard part of the military–like it is almost everywhere else in the world. Also, a significant fraction of the defense spending can involve things like building a road, airport, and deep water port in Nunavut. The benefit would not primarily be for the military, but they are certainly something that increases the defense capabilities. Also, investing in building airplanes in Canada–like with both the Gripen Fighter and the Swedish AWACS plane–helps the entire economy. There’s also the dramatic expansion of the reserves that’s being proposed. What I’ve heard being proposed is more like a citizen-based emergency preparedness structure. Of course it would be useful in a war, but it would also have been really useful during COVID and fire and flood seasons. From what I’ve read, a lot of the proposed investment is going towards a very wide definition of ‘national defense’.

So yes, the submarines are eye-wateringly expensive. But Canada does have the world’s longest coastline. And we simply cannot trust the USA anymore. And if we want to have allies we can depend on (ie: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany, etc), we have to be willing to ‘do our bit’. But I’m not a pacifist. And I don’t see all soldiers as being ‘baby killers’.

Of course. That’s why I focused on other projects.

That doesn’t mean that I agree with you 100% about the oil pipelines, military spending, etc. I personally think, for example, Canada needs to spend more on defense. But these are separate issues from whether or not the country can afford to do them.

Thanks muchly!

Is that what the extra stuff on the URL does? If so, I’ll stop using the auto-generated link and use the cleaner one. I changed the link on the original post too.

Thanks for pointing this out. I didn’t realize that a pipeline was part of the NEP—although it’s obvious once you think about it.

Since something like 96% of Canadian oil was sold to the USA in 2024 (I posted a chart that says this in the article), I’d be really surprised that there was enough bandwidth in the pipeline to really pull a lot of oil out of the American market and switch it to China and Europe. And don’t forget I was saying that these pipelines probably won’t make strict market sense. They aren’t meant to be about making money for shareholders so much as to build resilience and independence for both ourselves and our allies in other countries. That’s part of what I meant when I talked about the end of the neo-liberal consensus.

That’s my understanding. Although if you read you hear lots of conflicting things. I try to restrict myself to good news sources like the CBC, government websites, peer-reviewed articles, etc.

I don’t see how we can remove economics and politics from environmental policy. We’re not talking about climate science, we’re talking about what human beings are doing to the environment. And everything we do isn’t a question of doing the best thing possible—it’s about doing the best thing that the citizens and the ‘players’ will let you do.

I’ve argued for ‘leave it in the ground’ most of my life. I was pretty successful in that I got people elected and build a large body of people working together. But the fact was both inside that organization and among the general public the vast majority weren’t going to buy a simple ‘leave it in the ground’ strategy.

China doesn’t post any statistics about its prison population. So, yes, it’s off the list.

But please note, China isn’t imposing tariffs on other countries that use forced labour either–which is the point of the article.

I keep hearing about these changes that Carney is making, but I have yet to see a real smoking gun.

Yes, the changes he’s bringing in could cause real problems. But they also could be exactly what he says he’s doing—making it easier for the government to actually get stuff done. A lot of regulation that’s come down the pipeline since the 1960s has been about giving various parties the ability to oppose and slow down action by both business and the government. The problem with this type of regulation is it has the opportunity cost of making everything more expensive and a lot slower to do—even if it is meant to, and actually could be a good thing for everyone.

The most obvious example of this is housing. We’ve made it really easy for existing home-owners to get Councils to refuse new housing construction. The result is a housing crisis. I suspect it’s much the same thing with regard to environmental regulation and working with the First Nations too. It’s understandable, there has been a lot of bad-faith bargaining by both business and government. But this adds a lot of costs to everything in society–and that’s money that doesn’t end up in social programs or worker’s pockets. (Yes, and profits too. But they can–at least in theory–be taxed. But that’s another issue.)

If we are going to build a carbon-free, sustainable, and just society, we aren’t going to do it by slowing everything down to a crawl and giving lots of people a veto. We shouldn’t go back to the capitalist free-for-all either. But there needs to be some sort of ‘third option’ on the table. I don’t know if Carney’s the person to do it—but I still don’t see anything from him that says for sure he isn’t.

The tone of Gilmore’s comment was pretty hot. But the interview with Guilbeault seemed a little less—he is still a Liberal MP after all. I’m still waiting to see more from Carney before I make up my mind about him.

I get accused of being too easy on Carney. But I wonder if the Strait of Hormuz is already enough inducement to get people to become more efficient and pivot away from fossil fuels. I’d suggest that the trickle of Chinese EVs that he negotiated to allow into the country might have a more positive effect than a higher industrial carbon tax. The fact that solar panels and wind turbines are the cheapest electricity sources also enters into the equation. If the need for taxes is waning, I think it would make sense for Carney to bargain some of it away so he can get concessions from Alberta.

I don’t know what specific campaign against Section 239 you are referring to, but it strikes me that it has pretty much been allowed to gut laws against libel, hate speech, truth-in-advertising, election financing, etc, much to the detriment of our society. It may be the case there could be frivolous lawsuits, but if so, I’d suggest the problem there would be the frivolous lawsuits, which could be dealt with without gutting hundreds of years of regulations that tried to curb the worst excesses of publishing. For example, there are anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) laws that have been passed in various jurisdictions. There is also the Fair Dealing provision in the Copyright Act. Both of which are meant to prevent frivolous lawsuits from harming people.

I don’t think the response to wrong-headed attacks on the Internet is to support the status quo. There are an awful lot of very bad things happening on line, and governments need to reign in the worst abuses. But it has to be done by people who know enough to preserve what is good while limiting the bad.