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.

You make a good point about the $300 billion in investment. That will have to be up to the government in Tehran when it comes to signing off on any specific investment. But once the US carriers leave, I’d suggest that a lot of the leverage that Trump still has will vanish–no one is going to come back to the strait after the this humiliation. If Trump wants some graft for the deal, the Iranians can probably tell him to pound sand by that point.

Thanks for the suggestion about accessibility colour thing. I had no idea what you were talking about so I went down a bit of rabbit hole. It looks like none of the colours on offer from Substack meet the regulations, so I just removed them.

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.

All you have to do is click on the ‘no thanks’ at the bottom. If you already have an account with substack it automatically goes to the article.

I suspect most people know that Pierre Poilievre is no friend of anyone who isn’t a cis-white-male-Christian

Hmmm. I don’t generally like human interest stories, and I grew up in a redneck part of the country, and have worked at a variety of gruesome jobs–so while never working as a rough neck, it sounds familiar. As usual, the title doesn’t really describe the article, but you can’t blame that on the author. At the end there was a little bit of information but beyond that it’s just autobiographical narrative.

If anyone is interested, I’ve written four articles that give an analysis of how the oil industry has damage Alberta (collectively about the same size as the “Walrus” article): https://billhulet.substack.com/p/something-impossible-just-happened https://billhulet.substack.com/p/the-social-cost-of-oil-part-one https://billhulet.substack.com/p/part-two-about-oil-and-canada https://billhulet.substack.com/p/the-resource-curse

There’re several points to this article: first that it’s unhealthy to the Parliamentary system to put so much emphasis on the party leader, that this over-emphasis is a result of how they are chosen, second that politics is a lot more than just elections and progressive parties in particular have to work hard at things like public education and community organizing if they want to change the status quo, and finally that the Conservatives aren’t really “conservative” anymore because they’ve formed an unholy alliance with some pretty unsavoury types who are trying to undermine our political system through disinformation campaigns led by neo fascists.