Quotulatiousness

February 18, 2026

It’s not just Britain that gives asylum-seekers better care than citizens – Canada does too

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

We had a look at how well the British government looks after asylum-seekers yesterday, but other nations are probably doing similarly inequitable things to give money and services to non-citizens than they ever would for the people who pay the taxes for these over-generous programs. In the National Post, Tristin Hopper outlines the findings of a recent analysis from the Parliamentary Budget Office on the costs of supporting huge numbers of foreign nationals in Canada:

An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.

Paying the health-care premiums of refugee claimants will cost Canadians a record $1 billion this year, with some of the beneficiaries continuing to receive free health care despite their claims having already been rejected.

That’s according to a new analysis by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and it’s just one of several ballooning costs wrought by the unprecedented number of foreign nationals currently living in Canada by virtue of a claim of refugee status.

The Interim Federal Health Program, which offers premium health benefits to asylum claimants, is soon set to hit $1 billion in annual costs for the first time, according to an analysis last Thursday by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

This is a five-fold increase from just six years ago, when the program was costing $211 million per year. The analysis also projects that costs are expected to surge for the foreseeable future, with the annual budget likely to hit $1.5 billion as early as 2029.

All told, between now and 2030, Canadians are on track to spend $6.2 billion on health care for refugees or refugee claimants.

“The rising volume of asylum claims, along with the longer duration of eligibility caused by extended determination times, has been an important growth driver in recent years,” reads the PBO report.

The report was commissioned following a Conservative-led request made at the House of Commons standing committee on health. In a Thursday statement, the Conservative party noted that the Interim Federal Health Program can be accessed even by asylum claimants who have had their case rejected.

It also offers a higher level of care than that enjoyed by the average Canadian citizen. In addition to hospital care and surgical care, the IFHP also covers dental care, vision care, pharmacare and other services not typically covered by public health plans.

“Rejected asylum claimants are now receiving better health care than many Canadians who have paid into a system their entire life,” read a joint statement by Dan Mazier and Michelle Rempel Garner, the shadow ministers of health and immigration, respectively.

It added, “at a time when six million Canadians cannot find a family doctor and are waiting for care, it’s unacceptable that bogus asylum seekers are receiving better health benefits than Canadians”.

January 28, 2026

An ADA unintended consequence in Los Angeles

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve heard many people refer to the Americans with Disabilities Act as the worst piece of legislation in US history, and stories like this one make it easy to agree:

Los Angeles’s streets are in notoriously bad shape. Fewer than two-thirds are considered in a state of good repair, according to the city’s Department of Public Works. Broken sidewalks have spawned years of costly litigation, and Los Angeles pays out millions of dollars each year to drivers whose cars are damaged by potholes.

Many cities would see this situation as a mandate for change. And Los Angeles has indeed made a change: last summer, the city quietly stopped repaving its streets. Not slowed. Not fell behind. Stopped completely.

The Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA) has not repaved a single street since last June, and the city’s latest budget practically zeros out repaving for next fiscal year. StreetLA crews are still doing some road repairs, fixing potholes and patching problem areas. But the most basic form of urban maintenance — full street resurfacing — has all but disappeared in America’s second-largest city.

Why has Los Angeles stopped repaving its streets? The answer, it turns out, has to do with federal disability rules that, paradoxically, have made fixing roads legally riskier than letting them fall apart. Though well-intentioned, L.A.’s shift shows how such policies can unintentionally worsen urban quality of life.

The clearest explanation of the city’s shift comes from L.A.–based housing and transportation advocate Oren Hadar. Digging through budget documents and engineering classifications, Hadar explained in an essay from late last year that the city didn’t necessarily abandon street work so much as reclassify it out of existence.

The city seems to have invented a new category of repair specifically designed to avoid triggering costly federal accessibility mandates. Instead of repaving streets, StreetsLA now performs what it calls “large asphalt repairs”. As Hadar explained, these repairs address localized damage — areas larger than a pothole but smaller than full resurfacing. Essentially, the city repaves only part of a street rather than the entire width, as shown below.

A “large asphalt repair” on L.A.’s Century Boulevard. Courtesy: StreetsLA on X

But, as Hadar wrote, “the thing about large asphalt repair is that it’s … not a real thing. It appears to be a term made up by the city some time in the last year.”

Why invent a new classification? The reason lies in federal disability law. Under regulations implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act, when a city alters a street, it must also bring associated pedestrian infrastructure into compliance. That means installing ADA-compliant curb ramps at every intersection along the way.

Repaving is considered an alteration that triggers these requirements. Maintenance activities, such as filling potholes or making minor repairs, are not. The city claims that large asphalt repairs are “pavement maintenance activity” and therefore do not require ADA upgrades.

That distinction carries enormous financial and logistical consequences. Hadar found that each curb ramp costs roughly $50,000, totaling about $200,000 per intersection. With roughly ten intersections per mile, curb ramps alone can add around $2 million per mile to the cost of repaving — a figure that often exceeds the cost of the asphalt itself. Design and construction typically take 9 to 12 months per ramp, and federal rules require the ramps to be completed by the time the street is resurfaced.

Update, 29 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 1, 2026

Canadian government spending … with convenient “by recipient” lookups

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s no secret that the Canadian federal government spends a lot of money every year. It’s public information, but it’s made available in a form that is very difficult to track across all the various ministries and other government bodies. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, The Reclamare has posted a free consolidation website that gathers all these separate reports into a single database that you can query on a by-recipient basis. This means that you can see how much money a given company or organization received from all government sources in one convenient result.

The link is https://thereclamare.github.io/CDN_Govt_Spending/. I hope you find this useful!

December 14, 2025

Where does all the money go for so many First Nations bands?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Earlier this month, I shared a long thread highlighting some incredible findings from the audit of a single First Nations group in Saskatchewan (here). On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @Martyupnorth discusses how the federal government has gone out of its way not to ensure that First Nations funding is transparent:

    Cory Morgan @CoryBMorgan
    The Siksika reserve got $1.3 billion a few years ago and the housing is still predominantly shit.

    It’s not lack of government funding folks.

    It’s a broken system of racial apartheid.

    This ruling won’t help a bit.

Let’s talk about transparency in First Nations reserve finances in Canada. It’s topic that’s sparked a lot of debate.

Back in 2013, the Harper government passed the First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA), which required chiefs and councils to publicly disclose their salaries, expenses, and audited financial statements. The goal? To ensure accountability for the billions in federal funding going to reserves, empowering community members to hold leaders responsible and curb potential corruption.

But the Act was controversial from the start. Critics, including many First Nations leaders (no surprise there), called it paternalistic, imposed without proper consultation, and an infringement on Indigenous sovereignty. Some argued it violated privacy by forcing the public release of sensitive financial details, like personal remuneration schedules.

Enter Justin Trudeau. During his 2015 campaign, he promised to repeal the FNFTA, saying it wasn’t “respectful” to First Nations and needed replacement with a co-developed approach. Once in power, his government didn’t formally repeal the Act, but effectively reversed it by suspending enforcement. They stopped withholding funds from non-compliant bands, halted court actions, and reinstated frozen money. Compliance rates plummeted afterward, with fewer bands disclosing info publicly.

See the screen shot below. The Siksika Nation, to whom Cory refers to, hasn’t dislosed financial data since 2013.

The Liberals’ rationale? Building “mutual accountability” through partnership rather than top-down rules, addressing privacy concerns and respecting self-governance. But a decade later, as of 2025, the Act remains on the books unenforced, while polls show most Canadians still want transparency in how reserve funds are mis-managed.

What do you think? Does ditching enforcement help or hinder real accountability?

Update: At some point, the audits have to start and the government and the courts will then have their hands full:

December 9, 2025

Auditing where the money goes, First Nations edition

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t think many Canadians would argue with the government providing funding to First Nations groups in remote areas so they have access to services and amenities that most of us take for granted. But the government has been giving so much money for so long with very little evidence that the money is actually making a difference. Surely, a regular system of audits would show what happens to the money after the feds cut a cheque and why conditions in First Nations communities aren’t improving? Well, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @The Reclamare shares a thread detailing some of the findings of a recent audit of a First Nations NGO and it’s kind of disturbing:

Where our taxes go, First Nations Edition

KPMG audited the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) representing 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan

They analyzed spending between April 2019 and March 2024

Hang on🧵

#1 – COVID Funding

$26 million was audited
KPMG found $23.5 million was questionable
** an 89% failure rate**

– no records
– missing contracts
– missing invoices

# 2 – Travel expenditures

$800K of travel spending was audited
$316K was flagged by auditors, a 39% failure rate

Half the travel bookings couldn’t be justified, either policy violations or they couldn’t explain the purpose. And one Vice Chief was billing personal trips

# 3 – Executive Pay Raises during Covid

On November 5, 2020, a briefing note went to FSIN’s Treasury Board recommending:

$60,000 pay raise for the Chief
$40,000 pay raise for each Vice Chief

Retroactive 8 months prior

(more…)

December 8, 2025

“Canadian culture” apparently doesn’t include books anymore

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte considers what the omission of financial goodies for the Canadian publishing industry in the latest federal budget (unlike the CBC, music, film and TV subsidies) says about the government’s view of what “Canadian culture” actually is:

You might have noticed that last month’s federal budget introduced a whack of new cultural spending. The CBC got another $150 million, the Canada Music Fund took $48 million, film and television raked in over $300 million. Books? Nothing.

The budget’s rationales for this new spending are to foster a sense of cultural identity and belonging in Canada, to sustain an informed citizenship, and to protect vulnerable industries. The unwritten context is the recent American assault on Canada’s independence. You would think there would be room for books in this sort of budget. Is there anything more foundational to Canadian identity and an informed citizenry than books by Canadians and about Canada?

Yet somehow our political leadership overlooked the literary sector. It’s odd. The first thing our politicians do when they want to explain or advance their own careers is knock on a publisher’s door.

Granted, it’s usually the door of an American publisher, because the net result of our government’s efforts to nurture the publishing sector in Canada over the last several decade has been to drive Canadian-published books from more than 20 percent of those sold in Canada to less than 5 percent. We have the weakest domestic publishing industry in the developed world. Our prime ministers think nothing of taking their books to New York-based Penguin Random House or Simon & Schuster. Most of our most prominent fiction writers give all their North American rights to US publishers instead of separating out Canadian rights and leaving them with a Canadian publisher. It’s a travesty.

I have a solution. In fact, I have many solutions. I have a whole book of solutions coming in January from Canadian public policy guru Richard Stursberg. It looks like this:

Richard’s solutions are not the same as my solutions. I like his, too. I’m not picky. I’m going to flood the zone with solutions and hope people in Ottawa wake up to the fact that we have a problem. The solutions will almost all involve more public support of the industry, not because I’m keen on public support of the industry, but because we have ample proof that the alternative to more public support is no domestic book publishing industry. Also, if you’ve been following us here (see SHuSH 232, The Wasteland), you know this is a “you broke it, you own it” moment for our federal government.

So here’s my solution de jour. Given that books are fundamental to any notion of Canadian identity, given that our domestic publishing sector is pathetically weak, given that any self-respecting country needs to be able to publish its own stories rather than rely on the branch plants of an increasingly difficult neighbour to do it for us, we arrange the following.

We massively expand Canada’s public lending right program (PLR). At present, the ridiculously underfunded PLR pays out about $15 million a year to some 20,000 authors whose books are circulated in Canada’s public libraries. The distributions are based on a complicated formula that mostly notices how many libraries hold the author’s book. It’s capped at $4,500 an author, and most receive only a few hundred dollars annually.

We expand the PLR’s spending envelope by a factor of ten: $150 million. Does that sound like a lot of money? It’s not. It comes to about $3.75 per capita. That’s about a tenth of what we spend annually on the CBC, which employs roughly the same number of people as book publishing. It’s about a tenth of what we spend in direct funding and tax credits on film & television. It’s less than half what we’re spending on newspaper and magazine subsidies. A small price to rebuild a decimated publishing sector.

I think you could argue that the dollar amount should be much higher. As a society, we believe that books are more important than the products of other media. The governments don’t give you free cable or a free opera pass or a free spotify subscription: they give you free books through public libraries, because books are that important to the well-being of our citizenry. We’re so good at promoting the value of our public libraries that four out of every five books read in Canada are borrowed rather than bought. If books are that important, $150 million is a bargain.

QotD: Austerity versus “austerity”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Too great attention to the use of language is a distraction from the essential and easily becomes mere pedantry; but to pay too little is to risk being deceived or manipulated by those who use language wrongly. Words, Aristotle said, should not bear more precision than possible; but neither should they bear less than possible.

Words have connotations as well as denotations, and one way of insinuating an untruth into someone’s mind is to disconnect the two, so that the denotation and the connotation are at variance and even opposite. An excellent example of this is in the use of the word austerity as applied to certain government economic policies. Frequently one reads, for example, that the difficulties of countries such as Britain and France in the matter of responding to the Covid-19 epidemic were caused by previous government austerity, that is to say, failure to spend more. But irrespective of whether, had the governments spent more (and France already devotes a greater proportion of its GDP to healthcare than the great majority of countries at the same economic level), the epidemic would have been more easily mastered, their policies in restricting their expenditure cannot be called austerity, because they still spent more than their income: as, in fact, they had done almost continually for forty years.

Supposing I were to say, “This year I’m going in for austerity. Last year I spent ten per cent more than my income, but this year I am going to spend only five per cent more,” you would think I were uttering a sub-Wildean paradox. But if I were to say only, “This year I’m going in for austerity,” you would think I were going to wear a hair shirt and subsist on locusts and honey. To say that the British and French governments have exercised austerity is to mean the first and imply the second, which is clearly dishonest: though we should note that the proper term, reduction of the deficit, is neutral as to whether it is economically wise or unwise. After all, I can borrow equally to start a business or drink champagne for breakfast.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Controlling Thought”, New English Review, 2020-06-09.

Update, 9 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 18, 2025

Canada’s divide isn’t left versus right, it’s old versus young

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

Older Canadians seem to be taking joy in sticking up their elbows and robbing younger Canadians of opportunities, jobs, and hope. It’s quite literally un-Canadian, but the Boomers have always been a generation apart and this is merely the latest manifestation of their self-centred worldview. Alexander Brown wonders if this divide can be fixed before the country itself is ruined:

“eLbOwS uP!”

“Talk to your parents,” the host of an event for Pierre Poilievre joked on Saturday in Vancouver — an event I happened to attend. “But be patient. Be kind.” And he’s right.

The cross-talk, the rock’em sock’em robots, the continued slap-fight between warring consultant tribes, it isn’t getting us anywhere, clearly. When the present iteration of the party of the status quo wedges a nation against itself, and denies a reform election after a decade of haphazard redistribution, non-growth, and abject decline, you get a traditional voter-demographic breakdown flipped entirely on its head.

The party of seemingly endless opposition dominated with youth, held strong with the 35-54s, but found itself walloped 52% to 34% among those aged 55+. Since then, those 55+ numbers have only widened, as the “safe” choice, that more stately actor (when he’s not radicalizing those who don’t know any better with claims of false invasion) can do little wrong, even coming out of “middling” budget heading to a vote Monday, and with a nation remaining pessimistic about its future prospects.

If the Liberals are voted down Monday, they would likely relish that opportunity to seize on a majority. The spin is already built in.

    The Conservatives don’t want to stand up against Trump!

    At a time like this, when we should be coming together, it’s un-Canadian …

    We’re supposed to be one Team Canada right now (offer void in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec), we can’t afford Pierre Poilievre’s divisive Trumpiness.

On and on. Yada and yada.

Nowhere in that comms exercise, drummed up by those who spend more time in America or the Arab Emirates, or meeting with Chinese proxies than they’d publicly care to admit, would there be a defence of younger Canadians, of those still on the launch pad, worried about, say, supposed ‘fixes’ to immigration riddled with creative accounting and more of the same.

Nowhere would they address housing, set to get much, much worse, under both the federal Liberals and targets they’re admitting they won’t come close to hitting, and Ontario’s ‘Conservative’ premier who leads the galaxy in not getting off his ass to get out of the way on starts and lowering punitive development costs.

Nowhere would one find a stout defence against “deconstruction“, or the daily humiliation ritual of flags flying that aren’t our own, or imagined and inflated woke excess meant to sully the memory of our war dead and marginalize normal people.

Following recent debates sparked by Without Diminishment, where we’ve argued a version of “it’s not just the economy, stupid,” when it comes to what’s animating young people and young conservatives — actually talk to them, and half of them are trending towards fascism with how alienated they feel by a lack of upward social mobility, or a society without rules or those willing to enforce them — it’s been easier for some serving in established camps to mischaracterize these conversations as focusing too much on culture, or, ridiculously, “blood and soil nationalism”. But we’re not. If one is dealing in good faith, it’s plain to see we’re trying to talk about both.

Of course, the Liberals survived Monday’s budget vote … for now:

When I saw Elizabeth May stand up and ask Mark Carney what looks like a completely planted question, I assumed the budget would pass and I was correct. Planted questions normally come from government MPs and are a soft way for the government to push their agenda.

This time, it wasn’t a Liberal MP, well at least not a Liberal MP in name and fact. Instead it was Green leader, or deputy leader, or let’s be honest the lonely lady in the corner who is the only Green MP asking the question.

That statement put the Liberals one vote closer to passing their budget and of course May later confirmed ahead of the vote that she would back the budget. This was after saying couldn’t back the budget, might back the budget, would probably back the budget, definitely wouldn’t back the budget and finally would back the budget.

How anyone can take Elizabeth May seriously is beyond me.

How the other votes went…

Ahead of the vote there were lots of questions about how things would go. Would all MPs show up or be able to vote online? Would people abstain? Would MPs vote for the budget without crossing the floor?

In the end, the budget passed 170 to 168 with two NDPers abstaining. That leaves five votes not accounted for and we will figure out.

Here is how the vote went.

Now, some members who were not in their seats did vote electronically. I didn’t see Matt Jeneroux vote electronically and I’m told that he is in British Columbia with is family. Also not voting, Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs.

Conservatives Andrew Scheer and Scott Reid both voted no but only in the time that is allowed for MPs voted electronically to claim tech problems. They were both in the House, so why were didn’t they vote in person?

Regardless, the NDP rushed out to say they voted against the budget but also made sure that it passed with their two abstensions.

As for all this talk of a Christmas election, had the government lost this vote and the PM gone to see the Governor General tomorrow, the earliest election date would have been December 25.

A Christmas election.

November 7, 2025

Crossing the floor in Parliament

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s not an everyday thing, but I saw someone mention on social media that there had been over 300 floor-crossings since Confederation. The latest Member of Parliament to switch parties … to literally walk across the floor in Parliament to join Carney’s Liberal party is Nova Scotia’s Chris d’Entremont:

The speculation in Ottawa about floor crossers is getting silly, some of the names being pushed don’t make any sense. Which makes me think that this is really an attempt by the Liberals to try and destabilize the Conservatives.

Sorry, that would be “destablise” in Mark Carney’s new English but more on that shortly.

We have seen Liberals push name after name including Chris d’Entremont who did cross, but others who have said they have no interest in crossing. That was the case for Dominique Vien the Conservative MP from Quebec’s south shore who had to post a video after jerks like me published her name following weeks of speculation.

If you don’t speak French, let me summarize, or sumarise in Carney English. She says that she’s heard the rumours that she would be leaving the Conservative caucus to sit as a Liberal or an independent, but that’s not true. She states clearly that she is and will remain a Conservative and that she doesn’t like Mark Carney’s budget.

Meanwhile, Joël Godin, the MP for Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier a riding northwest of Quebec City, who has been named as a possible floor crosser declined to answer questions entering caucus on Wednesday. Does that mean he’s ready to cross or not just putting up with the BS?

Conservative insiders tell me that he won’t be changing teams anytime soon.

The rumour mill is insane, with Liberals pushing the idea that all kinds of Conservatives are looking to jump ship. I’ve had several Liberals tell me that Michael Chong has been looking to cross the floor, an idea that is so ridiculous that I didn’t even call Chong to ask him because anyone floating that doesn’t know the man or conservative politics.

After I mentioned that on 580 CFRA in Ottawa, Chong called me to assure me that he wasn’t crossing to the Liberals. Michael, I never doubted you.

It’s doubtful that other names Liberals are pushing will come to fruition.

What is clear is that Carney and the Liberals are reaching out to Conservative MPs and making them offers to switch parties. Are they making illegal offers? I’d really like to know what has been put forward.

Is a “comfy landing” being offered for those that will cross? It wouldn’t be the first time that kind of thing has been offered.

As to the particular motivations for d’Entremont decamping to the Liberal benches, discussions on the social media site formerly known as Twitter indicate that he just barely got elected this time around, that he’d been fired by Pierre Poilievre as Deputy Speaker, and he decided he had a better chance of getting back into Parliament as a Liberal in the next election. Quinn Patrick reports that the Liberals had been trying to get d’Entremont to join them for quite some time:

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said the Liberals had been courting former Conservative MP Chris d’Entremont behind the scenes for five years before he ultimately crossed the aisle.

“We’ve been trying to recruit him for a long time,” Joly told reporters in French on Parliament Hill on Wednesday. “Finally, he saw the light.”

D’Entremont had served as a Conservative MP for six years, after first being elected in the 2019 election.

As several people pointed out, that conveniently meant he’s qualified for the platinum-plated MP pension plan … but I’m sure that’s not why he switched parties.

Liberal MP Kody Blois, who also represents a riding in Nova Scotia, confirmed that he and d’Entremont had been speaking “for a long time about the ways in which we can collaborate.”

“It’s great to see Mr. d’Entremont join. If there’s other members of Parliament feeling the same way, again, I think we’re always welcome to those conversations,” said Blois.

While Blois didn’t explicitly say he had been attempting to enlist d’Entremont, he said the Liberals are a big-tent party with room to accept more “moderate” conservatives.

When asked if the Carney government was actively trying to recruit more MPs, Blois said that “wouldn’t be a conversation I’m going to have right here in front of the media.”

The former Conservative MP met with Prime Minister Mark Carney at a post-budget media conference on Wednesday, saying he didn’t believe his values as a “red Tory” were being “represented.”

“I didn’t find I was represented there … my ideals of an easterner, of a red Tory and quite honestly of trying to find ways to find solutions and help the community rather than trying to oppose everything that’s happening,” said d’Entremont.

He also alluded to the possibility of other Conservative MPs “in the same boat” but stopped short of naming anyone specific, saying he would let them share their stories “if the time comes.”

However, he has been the only one to cross the aisle thus far.

Conservatives and their supporters have accused d’Entremont of betraying his constituents and his values in pursuit of his own ambitions.

November 6, 2025

Reactions to Tuesday’s budget announcement

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Food, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Carney’s government finally got around to releasing their 2025 budget and lots of folks have thoughts and concerns about what is in it and what isn’t in it. After all, it could be the best possible budget, but it would still not satisfy all concerns … and nobody is pretending that this is anything close to “best possible” territory. Sylvain Charlebois says that the budget ignores the food insecurity issues and grocery prices for ordinary Canadians:

Graphic stolen from Small Dead Animals.

For a government that often talks about food affordability and insecurity, Budget 2025 offers surprisingly little that directly addresses either. There’s no bold food strategy, no affordability roadmap, and no new incentives for domestic food production. Yet, in between the lines, Ottawa has quietly set the stage for some indirect relief — not through grocery subsidies or consumer-facing policies, but through infrastructure, trade, and administrative reforms that could make the food system work a little more efficiently.

The largest signal comes from the government’s $115 billion infrastructure plan, one of its so-called “generational investments”. The new Trade Diversification Corridors Fund aims to modernize ports, railways, and airports — all chronic weak points in Canada’s food supply chain. When bottlenecks ease, goods move faster, and perishable products arrive fresher and cheaper. While no one in Ottawa framed this as a food-price measure, logistics efficiency has long been one of the most effective — and least visible — forms of price control.

[…]

Still, the absence of a broader vision for food affordability stands out. After years of grocery price volatility and public debate about “greedflation”, Canadians might have expected a more direct focus on food resilience — investments in innovation, local processing, or retail transparency. Instead, the government seems to have opted for a quieter, systemic approach: strengthen the arteries of trade and logistics, and trust that efficiency will trickle down to the dinner table.

The budget forecasts a $78.3 billion deficit for the 2025-26 fiscal year, which is significantly higher than notorious spendthrift Justin Trudeau’s last budget number. This adds to an already staggering $1.27 trillion debt load, which is nearly double what it was just before the pandemic. In the lead-up to the budget release Mark Carney had hinted at major sacrifices to be made, and while there wasn’t a lot in the document directly corresponding to sacrifice, the need to service that long-term debt will do the job quite adequately.

In the National Post, John Robson says that the budget is “elbows up, IQs down”:

Since I was last propelled years ago into the purgatory known as “the lockup”, where journalists spend budget day, have either process or contents improved? No. Instead they now insert a false stolen-land “acknowledgement” before even getting to the same old same old labeled bold and new. Which is especially troubling at this supposedly critical juncture.

The document is the familiar brick, 406 paper pages and 493 digitally with no explanation for the discrepancy and no excuse for the length. (Or for being called “Canada Strong” with an inexplicable picture of a ship.) Especially as the Finance Minister gabbled “This is a budget that talks to everyday Canadians,” and its purpose is to state plainly how much the government intends to spend, where it hopes to get the money and how far short it already knows it will fall, you shouldn’t have to wade through 248 pages of sludge to find out.

As P.J. O’Rourke said, “beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud”. Though we “privileged” insiders search “Summary Statement of Transactions” and voila, submerged on p. 249 (all references digital) is a $78.3 billion deficit next year if all goes well, and the national debt increasing $80.5 billion so it already didn’t.

Much commentary, and special-interest attention, focuses on trivial fiddles. But what matters is that Leviathan is in hock up to its horns, with interest payments projected at $55.6 billion next year, soaring to $76.1 billion by 2029-30. If the Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise, both forlorn hopes. NDP MP Leah Gazan, who would jail you for “downplaying” residential schools, snarled about not supporting an “austerity budget” but she won’t get the chance.

Some may bleat that times are tough. Indeed the finance minister’s campaign-speech “Foreword, Budget” gasses “The world is changing, profoundly and in real time; we are no longer living in an era of calm, but of significant change”.

The projected deficits are clearly hallucinatory, as the Liberals never seem to get deficit spending to go down, running deficits every year since 2015:

However, on the ludicrous side, the feds want to spend money to “investigate” Canada taking part in the freaking Eurovision contest:

On the slightly less ludicrous side, Noah considers the military aspects of the budget:

Budget 2025 outlines the government’s generational investment to quote, “defend Canada’s people and values, secure its sovereignty, and position the nation as a strong, reliable partner to its allies“. This starts by initiating a process of rebuilding, rearming, and reinvesting in the DND, CCG, and CAF to provide everyone with the necessary tools and equipment to protect sovereignty and bolster security.

Budget 2025 starts by outlining the government’s previous commitment to accelerate investments to meet NATO’s 2 per cent defence-spending target this year, which is five years ahead of schedule.

Budget 2025 goes a step further by setting Canada on a path to meet NATO’s 5 per cent Defence Investment Pledge by 2035. This will be broken down into two categories, 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035 in core military needs, including supporting the CAF, modernising equipment and technology, and building up defence industries, and 1.5 per cent on security-related infrastructure and investments.

This reinvestment in defence and security is the largest in decades, totaling $30 billion over a five-year horizon on an accrual basis. This funding is allocated across three main pillars: $20 billion for capabilities, $5 billion for infrastructure and equipment, and $5 billion for industrial support.

On a cash basis, Budget 2025 proposes to provide $81.8 billion over five years, starting in 2025-26, to rebuild, rearm, and reinvest in the CAF. This figure includes over $9 billion in 2025-26 that was previously announced in June 2025. This is the funding previously set out for Canada to reach the 2 per cent NATO target.

Key investments from this $81.8 billion fund include $20.4 billion over five years to recruit and retain a strong fighting force, which incorporates the previously announced updates to pay and support for CAF health care.

An additional $19.0 billion over five years is allocated to repair and sustain CAF capabilities and invest in defence infrastructure, including the expansion of ammunition and training infrastructure. Upgrades to digital infrastructure for the Department of National Defence, CAF, and the Communications Security Establishment, particularly for cyber defence, are funded with $10.5 billion over five years.

Finally, $17.9 billion over five years is designated to expand Canada’s military capabilities, with investments in logistics, utility, and armoured vehicles, as well as counter-drone, long-range precision strike capabilities, and domestic ammunition production.

This is a serious chunk of change, although sadly, and as you will see, we don’t get a major breakdown of what this looks like. What we are left with are general piles of money, which isn’t always a bad thing. It’s also expected. The budget is set for a timeline before many critical capabilities will be delivered, so they won’t be included. Almost everything comes after 2030.

November 1, 2025

EBTpocalypse imminent?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The US government’s extended “shutdown” may trigger the loss of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to around 10% of America as of Saturday. A few years ago, Nathan Mayo pointed out that despite the good intentions of the SNAP program, it isn’t actually doing the job it is meant to be performing:

A recent administrative action has permanently increased benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by 25 percent. Unfortunately, this historic boost fails to address the structural problems that plague this nearly 60-year-old program.

The official Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) webpage proudly proclaims that, “SNAP provides nutrition benefits to supplement the food budget of needy families so they can purchase healthy food …”

To that admirable end, the program formerly known as food stamps distributed $79 billion to 40 million people last year. Yet this desire to provide wholesome food to needy families conflicts with clear evidence that wholesome food is not what they think they need. Whether they play by the rules or not, people receiving SNAP benefits currently spend between 70-100 percent of that benefit on things other than healthy food.

Government researchers determined that average SNAP recipients increase their food expenditure by only 30 percent of the value of their benefits. In other words, a person previously spending $300 on food a month who qualifies for $100 of food stamp benefits will start spending $330 on food and shift the $70 from his existing budget to other purposes. This surprisingly low percentage suggests that food is not recipients’ top priority, as people who were in dire need of food would be expected to boost their food budget by the full value of the benefits.

What of the hope that needy families will buy nutritious food? According to a study of a major retailer, recipients spend about 20 percent of their total grocery budget on junk food, with soft drinks as the top purchase—enough to supply a family of four with 20 two-liters of soda per month. Given the marginal amount of SNAP spent on food and the typical benefits for a family, SNAP literally expands the grocery budget by the exact amount needed to cover the junk food. SNAP recipients also spend about 27 percent less on fruits and vegetables than non-SNAP households. This difference cannot be attributed to a lack of access because around 85 percent of SNAP purchases are made at large chain grocery stores with vast produce selections. However, one factor in these choices is likely smaller grocery budgets and the fact that fresh produce is more expensive.

A less savory contributor to this poor nutrition may be that SNAP encourages unhealthy purchases through the “house money” effect. When gamblers win money, they are less careful with their winnings since they view the “house money” as more disposable than their own cash. Similarly, when people receive SNAP dollars, they are sometimes less careful about their purchases than they would be with their hard-earned dollars.

On the one hand, the lack of SNAP benefits might be lower impact than expected, or it might mean most major American cities go “full Mad Max“:

There are 41.7 million Americans slurping up Supplemental Nachos And Porkrinds (SNAP) benefits. That’s an amazing number, and it shows just how far down the bread and circuses route that we’ve gone. I was surprised at the number, but I can now surmise that the only people voting for Democrats are single white women and freeloaders. But I repeat myself.

The federal government shutdown is, as I write this, dragging into its fourth week. I’m generally pretty happy about that since the impact to almost everyone I know is … zero. However, that may soon change. EBT cards, (EBT stands for Entitled Bums Treats) are about to have a zero balance.

The Democrats in the Senate have voted a dozen times as I write this to not fund the SNAP (Socialist Nourishment And Pampering) program. The reason? This is one of their key weapons against Trump. They want to blame Trump for not having a budget because it won’t fund the SNAP (Scam Network for Appetite Pandering) program. Since people who use EBT (Endless Bailout for Takers) aren’t generally the ones who pay attention to anything that takes longer than 17 seconds, they’ll buy it.

Some states (Virginia, for one) realize that the place will look like Mad Max in by Monday if the pizza rolls stop flowing, and have found some cash in the couch cushions to kick the can down the road. New Jersey doesn’t even own a couch, so they have no money, and Connecticut has mobilized their National Guard for emergency ramen drops.

No more swiping for that purple drank or Hot Pockets®. When the EBT (Everyone But Taxpayers) card goes dry, life may get … interesting.

What will happen? “Mostly peaceful” flash mobs looting grocery stores. These flash mobs will make the 2020 riots look like a church picnic gone wrong because someone demanded gluten-free tofu.

Because SNAP (Subsidized Nuggets for Apathetic Parasites) isn’t just a program: it’s the duct tape holding urban America’s powder keg together. As mentioned, there are 41.7 million people, about 12.3% of the U.S. population, who rely on those cards for daily food.

H/T to Clayton Barnett for that link.

Oh, but wait … yet another judge has issued a ruling directing the federal government to ignore the lack of congressional approval or funding:

An order today from a federal judge in Massachusetts requires the Trump administration to pay SNAP benefits even though Congress hasn’t funded the current operation of the program.

Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, concludes that people will be harmed if SNAP benefits are not provided, and Congress previously appropriated contingency funds for emergencies in the SNAP program, so there’s no need for current appropriations — the executive branch must use emergency and contingency funds to pay for current operations despite the absence of current appropriations.

[…]

Defendants — the Trump administration — are required to use contingency funds to pay for current operations, whether or not Congress has funded current operations. A court has just concluded that a federal program must operate in the absence of current appropriations. That’s … an interesting choice.

Update, 3 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 12, 2025

Noah Smith on how surprisingly well free market policies are working in Argentina

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the headline, you should read the unstated “surprising to far too many mainstream economists and political commentators”, but full credit to Noah Smith for admitting that Milei’s radical agenda has started to make life much better for ordinary Argentinians:

Javier Milei at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland 20 February, 2025.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

So to be clear, when I say that criticism of free markets has been overdone, I’m partly talking to myself. A couple of months ago, horrified by Trump’s tariff policies, I wrote an apology to libertarians, admitting that I had failed to see the political usefulness of their project in terms of maintaining economic sanity on the Right.

But it’s not just the political benefits of free markets that have been undersold; I think the purely economic advantages are also too often ignored.

Exhibit A is Javier Milei’s track record in Argentina. A year and a half ago, when Milei was elected President of Argentina, a bunch of left-wing economists warned darkly that his radical free-market program would lead to economic devastation:

    The election of the radical rightwing economist Javier Milei as president of Argentina would probably inflict further economic “devastation” and social chaos on the South American country, a group of more than 100 leading economists has warned … [S]ignatories include influential economists such as France’s Thomas Piketty, India’s Jayati Ghosh, the Serbian-American Branko Milanović and Colombia’s former finance minister José Antonio Ocampo …

    The letter said Milei’s proposals – while presented as “a radical departure from traditional economic thinking” – were actually “rooted in laissez-faire economics” and “fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people” … [T]he economists warned that “a major reduction in government spending would increase already high levels of poverty and inequality, and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict.”

    “Javier Milei’s dollarization and fiscal austerity proposals overlook the complexities of modern economies, ignore lessons from historical crises, and open the door for accentuating already severe inequalities,” they wrote.

Milei won anyway. His first big policy, and the one the lefty economists fretted about the most, was deep fiscal austerity. Argentina’s long-standing economic model, created by dictator Juan Peron in the 1950s, involved a large and complex array of public works projects and subsidies for various consumer goods like energy and transportation. Milei slashed many of these, as well as cutting pensions, civil service employment, and transfers to provinces. Overall, he cut public spending by about 31%, resulting in a near-total elimination of Argentina’s chronic budget deficit:

The point of all this cutting wasn’t just to remove state intervention in the economy — it was to stop inflation. Basically, macroeconomic theory says that if deficits are high and persistent enough, then they convince everyone that the government will eventually inflate its debt away by printing money (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy). And most or all countries that experience hyperinflation end up escaping it only when they get their fiscal house in order. Perpetual deficits were part of Argentina’s “Peronist” system, and it’s probably a good bet that this has been responsible for the periodic bouts of hyperinflation that it experiences.

[…]

But still, Milei’s success so far should make us somewhat more confident about free-market policies — especially when we evaluate them against the new socialist ideas that have been gaining currency in the U.S. In the past, socialists and other left-leaning economic thinkers advocated central planning and nationalization of industry; in recent years, they have taken to calling for expansion of the state through fiscal policy, mixing macroeconomic justifications with micro. At all times, they call for deficit-financed expansion of social programs; when fiscal hawks want to tame the deficits, the lefties warn of the short-term macroeconomic harms of austerity.

If you’re always more terrified of austerity than you are of deficits, expansion of the state — and of the deficit — becomes a one-way ratchet. This approach is very different than Keynesianism, which advocates stimulus to overcome recessions, followed by austerity during boom times. You’ll recognize it as bearing a distinct similarity to MMT; that pseudo-theory has largely fallen out of favor, but there are plenty of more respectable progressive types whose ideas nonetheless have a lot of this “macroleftist” flavor.

June 30, 2025

DOGE couldn’t address the structural problems with the US government

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Mohamed Moutii looks at the reasons DOGE was unable to come close to achieving the lofty goals it was launched with:

DOGE’s biggest failure was its inability to deliver its promised sweeping transformation. From the start, its $2 trillion savings target was unrealistic. Cutting nearly 30% from a $7 trillion budget was never feasible, especially with politically untouchable programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense off the table.

Musk’s claim that eliminating waste alone could close the gap didn’t hold up. While most budget experts support cutting inefficiencies, they agree that waste isn’t the main driver of the fiscal crisis. Even slashing all discretionary spending would save only $1.7 trillion. The real pressure comes from mandatory programs, which account for nearly two-thirds of the budget, leaving only a quarter of spending truly up for debate.

As reality set in, Musk’s savings claims shrank from $2 trillion to just $150 billion. While DOGE cites $170 billion saved, independent estimates suggest closer to $63 billion, less than 1% of federal spending, with many claims either inflated or unverifiable. Some savings were credited to long-canceled contracts. Though headline-grabbing layoffs and cuts were made, they were often botched, forcing agencies to rehire staff or reverse course. Meanwhile, federal spending rose by $166 billion, erasing any gains. Trump’s fiscal agenda worsens the outlook with the first-ever $1 trillion defense budget, sweeping tax cuts, and protected entitlements — all while annual deficits approach $2 trillion.

Yet DOGE’s failures ran deeper than mere fiscal naiveté. What began as Musk’s role as a “special government employee” quickly expanded into an unchecked exercise of executive power, raising constitutional alarms. His team reportedly accessed classified data, redirected funds, and sidelined entire agencies — actions taken without Senate confirmation, potentially in violation of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. Legal pushback swiftly followed, with fourteen states suing Trump and Musk over the constitutionality of Musk’s White House-granted authority.

Meanwhile, glaring conflicts of interest became impossible to ignore. Musk’s companies — X, SpaceX, and Tesla — hold $38 billion in federal contracts, loans, tax breaks, and subsidies while facing over 30 federal investigations. His push to dismantle regulatory agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — while X launches the “X Money Account“, a mobile payment service subject to CFPB oversight — only deepened concerns. Musk was legally obligated to separate his business dealings from government decisions. One major result has been the impact on Musk’s reputation. Once hailed as a visionary for his promotion of electric cars, he is now viewed unfavorably by many former fans.

June 26, 2025

NATO members “commit” to a new 5% defence spending target

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As many predicted, just as Canada finally gets around to at least pretending to meet the 2% defence spending target we agreed to over a decade ago, those goalposts get moved:

So today the leaders of Nato convene for a landmark summit:

NATO countries agree to increase defence spending to 5%

That headline isn’t strictly accurate. Member states have apparently agreed to commit to a target of 5% by 2035, to mark the start of the fourteenth anniversary of the Ukraine war. Which means that, as always with Nato, they’ll all look butch at the photo-op, and then they’ll do bugger all. Even the “commitment” to a “target” is too much for Spain, which has secured an opt-out.

But hang on a minute: Nato has been at war — or at proxy-war — with Russia for three-and-a-half years now. So it’s been on a war-footing, supposedly, for seven-eighths of the length of the First World War. How’s that war-footing going? Per Nato’s head honcho, Mark Rutte (the woeful former Dutch PM — ask our pal Eva Vlaardingerbroek), earlier this month:

    The Russian army is developing its war capabilities by multiple times more than that of NATO despite having an economy 25 times smaller, NATO’s secretary general has warned …

    “The Russians, as we speak are reconstituting themselves at a rapid pace and producing four times more ammunition in three months than the whole of NATO in a year,” said Rutte.

That’s a rather confusing way of putting it; what he means is: the Russians (who, as Mark Levin assures us, “scare nobody”) produce more ammunition in three weeks than the whole of Nato does in a year. Can even Nato be that worthless?

Taking the Secretary-General at his word, if you’re wondering why the Pentagon has to divert ammo marked for Israel to Ukraine and then divert it back from Ukraine to Israel … well, let’s do what everybody else does and dredge up the only historical analogy anybody knows — not the First World War, but the Second (see Levin’s “Iranian Nazi regime”): We’re asked to believe that Nato needs longer than the US was in the Second World War for to move to a war-production footing.

To be sure, supply chains are always difficult: Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz could have seriously impacted McDonald’s need to recall the hash browns it sent to Montenegro and divert them to Kiribati.

Trump gets something very basic: Flying the highest of high-tech weaponry seven thousand miles to drop down a ventilation shaft opening the size of a dishwasher is the kind of brilliant, dazzling one-off only the United States can do. But what next? Almost all geopolitical conflicts start with a bit of shock-&-awe (Pearl Harbor, even the assassination of the Archduke) and then dwindle down to old-school wars of attrition – as the United States should certainly know after taking twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser, and three years to lose to “a gas station masquerading as a country” (thank you, John McCain). In wars of attrition, old-fashioned unglamorous things become important, like the ability to manufacture bullets in a timely manner. The basic arithmetical calculations are not complex: Don’t get into a long war with an enemy whose stock of long-range ballistic missiles outnumbers your surface-to-air missiles.

So Trump had the narrowest window of opportunity, and used it.

On the other side, the last week-and-a-half mostly revealed the shallowness of the War Party. You’ll recall, for example, that Ted Cruz got into a spat with Tucker over the actual population of Iran. Last week, a UK podcast had a brief discussion on The US Army-Marine Corps Counter-Insurgency Field Manual, which notes the following (foot of page xxvi):

    The troop demands are significant. The manual’s recommendation is a minimum of twenty counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents.

That’s roughly what the British had in Malaya. Which they won, by the way. Twenty-two years ago, a couple of weeks after the fall of Saddam, I stopped on the shoulder of the main western highway from Jordan to Baghdad to fill up from an enterprising Iraqi who’d retrieved some supplies from a looted petrol station and was anxious to sell them to any passing Canadian tourists. As he was topping off, I asked him how agreeable he found the western soldiery. He grinned a big toothless grin and pointed to a chopper that had just come up over the horizon to hover above our heads. Then he said: “Americans only in the sky.”

We did not win that one, you’ll recall. Instead, we created an Iranian client-state.

That’s why Ted Cruz’s breezy indifference when Tucker asked him the population of Iran was so revealing. The senator told Tucker that it doesn’t matter whether the population of Iran is eighty million or a hundred million. Really?

Because, per the Pentagon’s own field manual, the latter figure would require finding an extra 400,000 troops. Oh, wait. If it’s a Nato mission, the other members could muster 127 guys between them, so it would only require 399,873 extra Americans.

Even if the public were minded to put one-and-a-half million pairs of boots on the ground, it couldn’t do it. “Americans only in the sky” equals what an Australian prime minister told me, after a flying visit to the troops in Afghanistan, was “the Crusader fort mentality”.

It doesn’t work. The political divide in America is between, crudely, Trumpians and neocons. The former are anti-war; the latter are pro-war … but a way of war that doesn’t work.

May 22, 2025

Trump, “the American Mussolini”, versus ever-so-democratic Mark Carney

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, John Robson contrasts the authoritarian dictator at the helm of the American ship of state with our peaceful, democratic, and fully accountable to the voters prime minister:

President Donald Trump greets Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at the West Wing entrance of the White House.
(Official White House Photo by Gabriel B Kotico)

It was the best of budgets, it was the worst of budgets, it was the age of restraint, it was the age of profligacy, it was the epoch of the legislature, it was the epoch of the executive, it was the season of open debate, it was the season of closed doors, it was the spring of Canada, it was the winter of America. Or possibly the other way around.

The confusion arises because as a patriotic Canadian I keep hearing how U.S. President Donald Trump is an American Mussolini who has abolished the last vestiges of the old Republic, so we should drink rye not bourbon or some other decisive action easily performed while sitting down. Yet the news media mysteriously insist that the Bad Orange Man is having trouble getting his budget through some quaint relic called the United States Congress while Green Mark Carney isn’t bothering to get his spending plans rubber-stamped by some quaint relic called the Canadian Parliament. How can it be?

Tuesday’s the Morning newsletter from the New York Times, which is no MAGA outlet, reads: “Speaker Mike Johnson has a math problem. He wants to pass a megabill before Memorial Day to deliver President Trump’s legislative agenda.” But with only three spare votes in the House, “there are way more than three G.O.P. dissenters, and they don’t agree on what the problem is. Some think the cuts to Medicaid are too large. Others think they’re too small. Some want to purge clean-energy tax breaks. Others want to preserve them because their constituents have used them.”

Likewise The Atlantic, part of the thundering herd of independent liberal American minds, says: “The struggle to pass Donald Trump’s second-term agenda in Congress has never been between Republicans and Democrats … it’s been a battle between the House and Senate GOP, between moderates and hard-liners, and, most salient, between Republicans and reality.”

Egad. What manner of rambunctious folly is this? Open debate within the Maximum Leader’s own party? Dictatorship! By contrast here in decorous Canada can someone remind me which inane or malicious measures from former prime minister Justin Trudeau were ever put at risk by the principled courage, truculence or mere pandering even of his NDP coalition non-partners, let alone the trained seals in red?

Periodically one would bark. But which ever bit? To be sure, as the Canadian Press noted on Sunday, “Prime Minister Mark Carney says the Liberal government will present a federal budget in the fall, allowing time for clarity on some key economic and fiscal issues to emerge”. But if there’s going to be a brawl, it will be inside his office, or head, with his finance minister promising to brush aside Parliament with an “economic statement” before Carney overrode him, saying the government would introduce “a much more comprehensive, effective, ambitious, prudent budget in the fall”.

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