Do you remember when we could count on the private sector to provide good-paying jobs, paid vacations, generous benefits, and retirement pensions? You don't? Maybe you're not old enough. Maybe that was before you were born. You'd pretty much have to be a baby boomer to remember any of that.
These days, there are only declining or stagnant wages, gig jobs with no benefits, and people need two or three of them to pay the rent. Homeownership is only possible for those who inherit one, and the cost-of-living crisis continues to worsen. Fortunately, Mark Carney knows what the root of the problem is and how to fix it. Contrary to popular opinion, the solution has nothing to do with improving social safety nets. It turns out that we're not guaranteeing the corporate sector nearly enough of any possible future profits! The price of corporate sector help has gone up considerably!
To that end, Mark Carney has decided to cut social spending and to increase corporate welfare. He calculates that Canadians would be better off if we give the Corporatocracy what it wants: even lower taxes, even fewer regulations, more subsidies, more free infrastructure, fast-tracked approvals and far less red tape. If we do all that, Carney tells us, Corporations will stop using all of the obscene profits they're using to increase CEO and board of directors' salaries and to buy back their own stock for the benefit of their shareholders, and invest some of those profits in the economy for the benefit of all Canadians.
Carney cautions us that that won't happen overnight; it's a generational thing. Maybe some Generation Z, Alpha and Beta members will live long enough to see some of the economic benefits resulting from Carney's investment incentives, provided they survive extreme climate events, of course. In the end, supply chain diversification and significant new investments will reverse declining or stagnating wages and build a stronger, more prosperous Canada for us all.
Canadians are inclined to trust Carney on these matters because of his business acumen and his experience as a central banker in both the UK and Canada, not to mention his corporate insider experience with Goldman Sachs and, more recently, Brookfield Asset Management (BAM). He still owns considerable stock in the latter, but they're being held in a blind trust, so there's no conflict of interest here. It's all good. If the value of those stocks goes up because Canada decides to buy thousands of modular homes from BAM, and if the value of BAM's considerable real estate assets in Canada were to rise as a result of his no-tax for homes under $1 million housing policy, Carney wouldn't even know it! Not for sure, anyway. Not until he left politics and took a look at his multi-million dollar portfolio.
There is the risk, though, that the minority Liberal Government doesn't have enough votes to avoid triggering an early election. But Pierre Poilievre doesn't inspire confidence, and Carney has moved so far to the right that Poilievre is having trouble squeezing himself into the small space to the right of Carney. In any case, an early election before a leadership review may not serve the Conservative Party well. It is entirely possible that Carney's Liberals would welcome an early election while Poilievre is still leader of the Conservatives.
The notion that only the private sector can provide a healthy economy has become so entrenched that when it comes to the economy, public money is almost exclusively used to attract and incentivize private investors. Issues such as the housing crisis and unemployment are exclusively addressed using private-public sector partnerships (PPPs), in which the role of the public sector is to incentivize the private sector by granting it concessions. (They're almost as demanding as Trump in that respect.) The private sector -the investors- will always be in the driver's seat. They're not going to invest in something they can't control. This takes publicly-owned housing off the table, and private investors must therefore be cajoled into providing housing. Currently, corporate landlords, BAM included, find renovictions much faster and more profitable than the arduous, time-consuming task of actually building affordable housing in an uncertain market. They need far more than the existing incentives to do that, even when governments are willing to cover any cost overruns. Furthermore, public housing smacks of socialism or something, so not leaving housing to the private sector is unthinkable.
Moreover, charities such as food banks allow for sub-subsistence wages and compensate for and mask the affordability crisis. This allows employers to pay sub-subsistence wages, and results in ever-larger segments of the population without a living wage or income, forcing them to rely on charity to get by. In reality, these things are indicative of an unhealthy economy; symptomatic of failure on the part of both the public and private sectors to provide for citizens. Clearly, PPPs alone are not going to resolve these issues. The private sector may not even consider them to be issues.
Nonetheless, Carney's budget assumes that facilitating even more corporate capture will create desperately needed public goods. Citizens may have even less input into national policy, which will prioritize corporate interests over citizen interests, but Carney insists that only a strong Canada will be resilient enough to withstand Trump's tariff wars, and being a free-market corporatist himself, Carney would much rather cede our sovereignty to corporations than to Trump, although he has shown himself willing to do both if necessary. That's what he's doing now. That's how it's always been done. Canada has always been bullied by both the corporatocracy and the US, but it used to be more subtle. It's becoming more overt and more extreme. Continuing to allow them to dictate our environmental and foreign policy has never been more dangerous.
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