I am routing for Chrystia Freeland. I am imagining Claudia Sheinbaum to the south and Freeland to the north making a fool of Trump every step of the way.
I think this likely plays into Trudeau's calculus. He knows his successor will preside over a crushing defeat. Not that the negative association attached to a Freeland or Carney will benefit him (Trudeau) or cleanse him from a lot of blame and ill-feeling. But it might at least tarnish the viability of one his rivals: How long will a Freeland or Carney be able to stay in the leadership post after leading the party to a massive defeat?
If he's anything like his dad, Justin Trudeau is already thinking about his political comeback.
Do not underestimate po's appeal, especially to morons. He's very good at picking on the things that hurt dumb people who make bad decisions. He gives them hope that they will somehow benefit from those decisions. That's his main appeal.
No, he's not good at politics, except to the extent that he's good at imitating Trump by spouting empty slogans that mean nothing and aren't tied to any reality. Also, no one likes him. He's Canada's answer to Ted Cruz. Also: I refuse to believe in the inevitability of his ascension. It's only inevitable if the rest of us fail to vote, and fail to vote for someone else. It might be a time for strategic voting. I still don't know how effective that is. But it is NOT a done deal unless we sit on our hands.
Actually, millions of Canadians like Pollievre, which is one of the reasons why the Conservatives are crushing the Liberals in the polls and why they will undoubtedly win massively in the next election. I met him randomly on a beach on Lake Superior while he was campaigning to become leader of the party (though that day he was just there with a friend to swim) and I was impressed the conversation we had.
I’d be curious to know what he said that impressed you. I’ve found him singularly unimpressive in public, but maybe he presents better one to one. (I still wouldn’t vote for him, however.)
If Canada were the 51st state, it would have the same clout as California in government (# of congressmen) and would be very much a democratic state. Trump should be careful of what he wishes for....
Another way of calculating: Canada's entire population is little more than California's so in Trumpland they'd get about the same number of House members, and the requisite 2 senators. All told, and with just enough magites, that might zero out California's influence at the national level (except of course that California pays more tax into the fed pot than any other state and Canada could not begin to match that.)
This all implies that the number of House Representatives increases which might not be the case and you still only have 435 in total just spread even more thinly than they are now at around 750K per representative.
The US has become the world superpower in part because of the safety afforded to us by having close economic and military allies as our only neighbors. Trampling on that now not only doesn't make any sense, it only makes us look extremely unreliable on the world stage
Trump is the pretend bully on the world’s playground. It’s his ONLY modus operandi. He knows nothing else and his act is old. The world is already laughing him (and the USA) off the stage this time around. It’s going to a long 4 years.
“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.
The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.
There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.
The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.
At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.
At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.
The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.
Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fuelled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.
Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.
We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”
Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.
All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.
All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.”
Written by Andrew Coyne.
Andrew Coyne is a highly respected Canadian columnist with the Globe and Mail and a regular panelist on CBC's The National, who has previously worked with Macleans Magazine (Senior Editor) and the National Post.
The former Liberal MP for Ottawa South from 1988 to 2004, who was then the president and CEO of the Business Council of Canada, and is now the Chairman of CIBC is "Diefenbaker caught in the wrong party"? WTF are you talking about? Only someone who knows very little about Diefenbaker could make such an absurd claim. Diefenbaker was a total outsider from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Manley is a consummate insider. They could not be more different.
From the political ideology section of Manley's Wikipedia page:
"Manley is regarded by some as being from the centre-right of the Liberal party, favouring fiscal conservatism, free trade, and friendly relations with the United States, although his budget included substantial program spending.
In an interview with Christopher Lim, a contributor for the British think-tank The Bruges Group [which is associated with the UK Tories: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruges_Group_(United_Kingdom)], Manley was critical of then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's economic spending priorities, saying ""I see commitments on spending programmes that will not necessarily add to Canada's productivity or support economic growth – so I'm one that's a bit worried about the trajectory that we are on", and was also wary of the calling of the 2021 federal election, saying that "There was a sense that this election was about Mr. Trudeau and it wasn't about the Canadian people".[20]"
Please do what you can to keep Trump’s emulators in the Tories out of power. Trump is what happens when a nation lets Rupert Murdoch take over its media and amplify its prejudices.
With Canada and Mexico sending firefighters to save a burning country, Americans seem ignorant of irony. From 911 to 2 WWs, when Canada reluctantly stood by a hysterical USA - having friends mean nothing to Americans, now.
The replacement houses need to be brick veneered with tile or metal roofs. I assume solar panels would be equivalent to metal. Those two things would make a hell of a difference.
They should insist on non flammable structural materials as much as possible but there will still be demand for some fire resistant wood structural timbers and especially wood finishes in interiors.
Could we be in for a worldwide economic shock with the Trump-Republican trifecta of US Government? POTUS-Congress-SCOTUS. And what is to keep us from catastrophe? Given how compliant an apparent plurality of US voters is with their propaganda.
By rewriting history and ignoring facts for so long, the GOP may usher in conditions similar to those that caused our Great Depression. There is too much talk of deregulation, nonsense hot air investments like bitcoin (might as well be trading Pokemon cards), and also talk of eroding our safety net.
Pure laissez-faire tends to bubble and bust and run off the rails whenever allowed to do so, like with a lack of adequate regulation in the Financial Crisis and the S&L crisis, The tariffs may cause a global recession to start us off followed by policies that make conditions far worse at home causing a domino effect with "trickle down" style nonsense.
The rich are cutting off their noses to spite their faces for tax cuts, since all that they are proposing to get there will shrink the economy (and even their own wallets).
One of the major reasons every Republican President has ushered in a recession or depression is tax cuts. And tariff's are just as harmful when done in a blanket fashion or tariff exemptions given out to companies that donated to Republicans. (Isn't that a quid pro quo?)
Trump Admin Gave Tariff Exemptions to Companies that Donated to Republicans: Study
Tariffs are like a sales tax. They hit heaviest on those who need to spend most of their income just to live. Reducing the income tax and replacing it with tariffs or sales taxes moved the cost of government off the rich and onto the poor.
EXCELLENT! This post is friggin great on so many levels. First, I’m glad to read someone who knows FRED and the St Louis Fed. I’m also glad to read someone who knows what Bretton Woods is (trivia: it’s a noun, but what kind?)… Anyway, your analysis is so spot on. I’d like to hear a little more about what economic levers Canada has available to pull, because I don’t fully get how their central banking system works on its own. (That’s just me, though). Thank you very much for the enlightening post with the supporting data! Much appreciated.
Canada also suffers from a major real estate bubble where housing prices have become unaffordable for those who wish to live in the most desirable cities (Toronto and Vancouver come to mind). The observation about oil and gas is a good one, and slapping tariffs on Canadian exports of energy to the US will only hurt the US consumer. BTW, between oil, gas, and power Canada is intimately linked to the US and disentangling the power system would be unwise, as well as the natural gas E&P and pipeline systems. They work as one large machine already.
America is energy dominant thanks to Putin’s asinine invasion of Ukraine…which is also why Canada is now focusing on LNG export infrastructure instead of oil infrastructure. We are now in the Age of Natural Gas…the Age of Oil effectively ended in 2010 when fracking was proven economical and America became effectively energy independent even though people didn’t realize it at the time.
Thank you, Mr. Krugman. While I generally enjoy reading his analyses, and respect his intellect, Noahopinion’s post was, to be charitable, less satisfying. As you point out, and he admitted, the divergence in real GDP per capita began with the decline in world oil prices. Mr. Trudeau can be accused of many missteps, but I rather doubt he is responsible for that. (In any event, he was elected after the divergence began.) The continuing divergence has continued, however, and that trend requires an explanation. Three possible hypotheses come to mind:
First, the pandemic. Canadians generally complied with public health recommendations regarding lockdowns and vaccines; that surely had an impact on economic activity. Could we have followed the US out of lockdown earlier? Undoubtedly. But the opportunity cost of that would have been higher excess deaths. As it was, Canadian excess deaths were significantly lower than those of the US. An interesting question to consider: How many US citizens would have survived if the US had Canada’s excess death rate? The long term impact of that on US growth should be considered.
Second, investment. Non-res investment has lagged the US. While the drought in oil and gas investment can be attributed to world prices, the dearth of investment in other sectors is harder to explain. One possibility is the option value of waiting. The Liberal government introduced a carbon tax, which successive Conservative Party leaders promised to reverse. The tax increases the relative attractiveness of “green” (low carbon) capital investment versus the status quo. But businesses, unsure which regime (“green transition” versus “status quo”) will prevail over the long term, may opt to defer investing, fearing that green capital would be rendered uneconomic by a subsequent reversal of the tax.
Third, immigration. Noahopinion correctly points to increased immigration as a key driver of the divergence. Like many Canadians, I think the government went too far, too fast given the pandemic related supply side constraints on housing. But let’s take a long view. Many recent immigrants are young people who came to Canada for higher education. If Mr. Musk believes that this demographic is good for US growth, why would it not be good for Canada? And if many of these young people are studying health sciences—nursing, dental and other technicians—they will on graduation fill critical shortages in the labour market and care for aging baby boomers. In time, the immigration boom may come to viewed as prescient policy.
Final point on immigration and per capita GDP comparisons: is the divergence partly a statistical artifact created by the way the two countries account for immigrants in the labour force? That is, if Canada has a much higher ratio of legal to illegal immigration than the US, as I suspect is the case, and only legal immigrants are included in the per capita GDP numbers (or the estimate of illegal immigrants is biased downward), the divergence of GDP per capita may be overstated. Frankly, I don’t know the answer to this question, but would appreciate learning more.
Canada wpul do well to take in Dem systes like CS, MN, NY, IL (might have to accept WI or MI to maintain a contiguous map), PA (??), maybe the New England states, New Jersey.
Let Trump have the Taker States. Meanwhile. the Giver-States can put the money they save on bailing out the inheritors of the Confederacy to participating in the Canadian health care system.
One of Canada’s minor parties leaders has already offered (jokingly) to add California, Oregon and Washington to its territory in response to the Felon. As a lifelong resident of the US West Coast, I wish she wasn’t just joking.
Frankly, I wish Elizabeth May would take one for the country and offer to run for leadership of the Liberal Party. She might just be the person to give PP a good shellacking in the polls! (For those of you who aren't familiar: she is the leader of the Green Party, which regularly gets between 1-2 seats in Parliament.)
You're delusional. There is absolutely no evidence that a May-led Liberal Party would have any chance of giving the Conservatives a shellacking in the upcoming election. If the Liberals were dumb enough to elect May as their leader, they would undoubtedly suffer an even more crushing defeat then they would under Carney or Freedland. Not only does May not speak French with any degree of fluency, thus ensuring the Liberals would lose most of their seats in their Quebec base, but she's only popular among a small clique of far-left environmentalists. Given the polls, it's quite likely the Greens won't even hold on to the seats they have in the next election. Pretend as much as you'd like, but the Conservatives are going to win a massive majority in the next election, so you might as well prepare for it rather than live in a political fantasyland.
I’m sorry you took my jokey comment so seriously. Of course May will not lead the Liberals, and of course there is no “evidence” that she would beat PP in the polls even if she did. However, I remain steadfast in my belief that there is nothing inevitable in politics (I’ve been around the block long enough to see a lot of surprises), and see no merit in being spineless enough to simply accept what others insist “must” happen, without trying to shift the tide in a better direction. It’s called Resistance. Look it up.
It's way too soon to predict what Trump will really do once he is in power. But it's probable that any talk of challenging Canadian sovereignty will die very quickly. It's a crude tool for extracting some lesser benefits from US-Canada trade; so crude in fact that it will incite such nationalism that no future Canadian government is going to yield very much. If it does, it will be defeated at the polls.
But there is a greater effect to be had from this confrontation, which will be to raise the level of distrust of the US by all its traditional allies to levels never experienced before. In fact, the more the US pressures Canada, its ally most prone to pressure which it can not avoid even in the long run, the more its European, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Australian, and others, will seek alternate arrangements to protect their own interests.
It will start with official reciprocal trade measures, assuming Trump goes ahead with threats already proclaimed. At a non-official level, it will spread to fewer high level immigrants deciding against US immigration, because they will not feel welcome. Then it will spread to intelligence networks, with allies restricting information to the US. Then it will spread to allies restricting US access to its military bases on their territories, and reducing joint exercises under US command: there won't be much joint military reaction planning related to Taiwan, for instance; the US will be on its own. The EU won't be able to do much about Ukraine in terms of replacing US assets, so Moscow will dictate the outcome of the conflict -- which given that it was primarily the US that backed the Ukrainian assertion of independent action, will mean basically an American defeat.
And an American defeat in Ukraine will raise the question of the utility of NATO. Europeans will look for a new and more dependable security arrangement -- which will probably involve Canada as a cross-Atlantic partner. Canadians will welcome this as a counter-weight to American power.
It won't be the end of the world, but it will certainly mean a noticeable reduction in American leverage around the world. It's the price of misguided isolationism.
I am routing for Chrystia Freeland. I am imagining Claudia Sheinbaum to the south and Freeland to the north making a fool of Trump every step of the way.
Would each of these dynamic women be chewing on one of his ankles? They may be smarter than Trump, but their economies are far smaller.
And in any case His MAGAsty is self-fooling – their contributions would be enablement and/or encouragement at best.
I was actually severely disappointed in AMLO on that front, though.
I think this likely plays into Trudeau's calculus. He knows his successor will preside over a crushing defeat. Not that the negative association attached to a Freeland or Carney will benefit him (Trudeau) or cleanse him from a lot of blame and ill-feeling. But it might at least tarnish the viability of one his rivals: How long will a Freeland or Carney be able to stay in the leadership post after leading the party to a massive defeat?
If he's anything like his dad, Justin Trudeau is already thinking about his political comeback.
Trudeau's problem is that he's not like his dad
20 points down and Conservatives are at the door. Sounds like Labor is going to suffer a shellacing. Sound familiar?
Don't forget our recently-minted dental care, which will also go poof!
Do not underestimate po's appeal, especially to morons. He's very good at picking on the things that hurt dumb people who make bad decisions. He gives them hope that they will somehow benefit from those decisions. That's his main appeal.
No, he's not good at politics, except to the extent that he's good at imitating Trump by spouting empty slogans that mean nothing and aren't tied to any reality. Also, no one likes him. He's Canada's answer to Ted Cruz. Also: I refuse to believe in the inevitability of his ascension. It's only inevitable if the rest of us fail to vote, and fail to vote for someone else. It might be a time for strategic voting. I still don't know how effective that is. But it is NOT a done deal unless we sit on our hands.
Actually, millions of Canadians like Pollievre, which is one of the reasons why the Conservatives are crushing the Liberals in the polls and why they will undoubtedly win massively in the next election. I met him randomly on a beach on Lake Superior while he was campaigning to become leader of the party (though that day he was just there with a friend to swim) and I was impressed the conversation we had.
I’d be curious to know what he said that impressed you. I’ve found him singularly unimpressive in public, but maybe he presents better one to one. (I still wouldn’t vote for him, however.)
Not saying that isn’t the case, Andy. Just saying nothing is inevitable unless we allow it to be.
If Canada were the 51st state, it would have the same clout as California in government (# of congressmen) and would be very much a democratic state. Trump should be careful of what he wishes for....
Practically speaking, each Province would come in as a separate State and the Republican Party would be entirely done in by this.
Another way of calculating: Canada's entire population is little more than California's so in Trumpland they'd get about the same number of House members, and the requisite 2 senators. All told, and with just enough magites, that might zero out California's influence at the national level (except of course that California pays more tax into the fed pot than any other state and Canada could not begin to match that.)
This all implies that the number of House Representatives increases which might not be the case and you still only have 435 in total just spread even more thinly than they are now at around 750K per representative.
The ultimate poison pill.
Forget it. Ain't gonna happen, so why even speculate about it?
Canadians would get no say in how they would be misruled. Just like Americans are finding out.
Yes, it seems unlikely we would have equal voting rights?
Even with the Conservatives?
The US has become the world superpower in part because of the safety afforded to us by having close economic and military allies as our only neighbors. Trampling on that now not only doesn't make any sense, it only makes us look extremely unreliable on the world stage
Trump is the pretend bully on the world’s playground. It’s his ONLY modus operandi. He knows nothing else and his act is old. The world is already laughing him (and the USA) off the stage this time around. It’s going to a long 4 years.
In Canada, a Loonie Bin is the box where you keep your spare change. In the U.S., it's the padded cell where Trump conspires with his cabinet choices.
Unlike the US, the Canadians have had about the world's most stable banking system. Much to learn from our neighbors to the north.
Interesting! somewhere where I can read the reasoning on this?
An explainer from January 2010: "What Toronto can teach New York and London" https://www.ft.com/content/db2b340a-0a1b-11df-8b23-00144feabdc0
Andrew Coyne in The Globe and Mail, Dec. 2024
“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.
The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.
There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.
The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.
At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.
At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.
The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.
Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fuelled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.
Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.
We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”
Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.
All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.
All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.”
Written by Andrew Coyne.
Andrew Coyne is a highly respected Canadian columnist with the Globe and Mail and a regular panelist on CBC's The National, who has previously worked with Macleans Magazine (Senior Editor) and the National Post.
Considering that the Globe and Mail is a conservative publication, that's significant.
What delusional nonsense. The National Post is conservative. The G&M, in contrast, defines liberal centrism in Canada.
"Liberal" like this fellow, who is the most conservative "Liberal" alive? He's Diefenbaker caught in the wrong party
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-dear-donald-trump-your-plan-to-create-the-united-states-of-canada-is/
The former Liberal MP for Ottawa South from 1988 to 2004, who was then the president and CEO of the Business Council of Canada, and is now the Chairman of CIBC is "Diefenbaker caught in the wrong party"? WTF are you talking about? Only someone who knows very little about Diefenbaker could make such an absurd claim. Diefenbaker was a total outsider from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Manley is a consummate insider. They could not be more different.
From the political ideology section of Manley's Wikipedia page:
"Manley is regarded by some as being from the centre-right of the Liberal party, favouring fiscal conservatism, free trade, and friendly relations with the United States, although his budget included substantial program spending.
In an interview with Christopher Lim, a contributor for the British think-tank The Bruges Group [which is associated with the UK Tories: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruges_Group_(United_Kingdom)], Manley was critical of then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's economic spending priorities, saying ""I see commitments on spending programmes that will not necessarily add to Canada's productivity or support economic growth – so I'm one that's a bit worried about the trajectory that we are on", and was also wary of the calling of the 2021 federal election, saying that "There was a sense that this election was about Mr. Trudeau and it wasn't about the Canadian people".[20]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Manley
Yes. And Coyne as well.
Please do what you can to keep Trump’s emulators in the Tories out of power. Trump is what happens when a nation lets Rupert Murdoch take over its media and amplify its prejudices.
Singer songwriters yes, but Canada has punched above everyone’s weight in producing great comedians too.
A critical question now is how much of the wood products needed to rebuild LA will come from Canada and at what cost?
Interesting time to put a 25% tariff on soft wood lumbar. Maybe Canada should add an export tax.
Oh. We will. We are not going gentle into that good night. Our rumoured politeness is superficial at best.
With Canada and Mexico sending firefighters to save a burning country, Americans seem ignorant of irony. From 911 to 2 WWs, when Canada reluctantly stood by a hysterical USA - having friends mean nothing to Americans, now.
The last material they should rebuild with is timber! Non-inflammables only, with much stricter fire-resistant building regulations.
The replacement houses need to be brick veneered with tile or metal roofs. I assume solar panels would be equivalent to metal. Those two things would make a hell of a difference.
They should insist on non flammable structural materials as much as possible but there will still be demand for some fire resistant wood structural timbers and especially wood finishes in interiors.
Could we be in for a worldwide economic shock with the Trump-Republican trifecta of US Government? POTUS-Congress-SCOTUS. And what is to keep us from catastrophe? Given how compliant an apparent plurality of US voters is with their propaganda.
By rewriting history and ignoring facts for so long, the GOP may usher in conditions similar to those that caused our Great Depression. There is too much talk of deregulation, nonsense hot air investments like bitcoin (might as well be trading Pokemon cards), and also talk of eroding our safety net.
Pure laissez-faire tends to bubble and bust and run off the rails whenever allowed to do so, like with a lack of adequate regulation in the Financial Crisis and the S&L crisis, The tariffs may cause a global recession to start us off followed by policies that make conditions far worse at home causing a domino effect with "trickle down" style nonsense.
The rich are cutting off their noses to spite their faces for tax cuts, since all that they are proposing to get there will shrink the economy (and even their own wallets).
Well put P&J.
One of the major reasons every Republican President has ushered in a recession or depression is tax cuts. And tariff's are just as harmful when done in a blanket fashion or tariff exemptions given out to companies that donated to Republicans. (Isn't that a quid pro quo?)
Trump Admin Gave Tariff Exemptions to Companies that Donated to Republicans: Study
https://www.ibtimes.com/trump-admin-gave-tariff-exemptions-companies-that-donated-republicans-study-3758027
Tariffs are like a sales tax. They hit heaviest on those who need to spend most of their income just to live. Reducing the income tax and replacing it with tariffs or sales taxes moved the cost of government off the rich and onto the poor.
EXCELLENT! This post is friggin great on so many levels. First, I’m glad to read someone who knows FRED and the St Louis Fed. I’m also glad to read someone who knows what Bretton Woods is (trivia: it’s a noun, but what kind?)… Anyway, your analysis is so spot on. I’d like to hear a little more about what economic levers Canada has available to pull, because I don’t fully get how their central banking system works on its own. (That’s just me, though). Thank you very much for the enlightening post with the supporting data! Much appreciated.
NY Times just had an article about how popular FRED is now.
Leonard Cohen was the best.
Again. Read to the very end. And for the musical coda. It doesn't get better than this.
Canada also suffers from a major real estate bubble where housing prices have become unaffordable for those who wish to live in the most desirable cities (Toronto and Vancouver come to mind). The observation about oil and gas is a good one, and slapping tariffs on Canadian exports of energy to the US will only hurt the US consumer. BTW, between oil, gas, and power Canada is intimately linked to the US and disentangling the power system would be unwise, as well as the natural gas E&P and pipeline systems. They work as one large machine already.
America is energy dominant thanks to Putin’s asinine invasion of Ukraine…which is also why Canada is now focusing on LNG export infrastructure instead of oil infrastructure. We are now in the Age of Natural Gas…the Age of Oil effectively ended in 2010 when fracking was proven economical and America became effectively energy independent even though people didn’t realize it at the time.
Thank you, Mr. Krugman. While I generally enjoy reading his analyses, and respect his intellect, Noahopinion’s post was, to be charitable, less satisfying. As you point out, and he admitted, the divergence in real GDP per capita began with the decline in world oil prices. Mr. Trudeau can be accused of many missteps, but I rather doubt he is responsible for that. (In any event, he was elected after the divergence began.) The continuing divergence has continued, however, and that trend requires an explanation. Three possible hypotheses come to mind:
First, the pandemic. Canadians generally complied with public health recommendations regarding lockdowns and vaccines; that surely had an impact on economic activity. Could we have followed the US out of lockdown earlier? Undoubtedly. But the opportunity cost of that would have been higher excess deaths. As it was, Canadian excess deaths were significantly lower than those of the US. An interesting question to consider: How many US citizens would have survived if the US had Canada’s excess death rate? The long term impact of that on US growth should be considered.
Second, investment. Non-res investment has lagged the US. While the drought in oil and gas investment can be attributed to world prices, the dearth of investment in other sectors is harder to explain. One possibility is the option value of waiting. The Liberal government introduced a carbon tax, which successive Conservative Party leaders promised to reverse. The tax increases the relative attractiveness of “green” (low carbon) capital investment versus the status quo. But businesses, unsure which regime (“green transition” versus “status quo”) will prevail over the long term, may opt to defer investing, fearing that green capital would be rendered uneconomic by a subsequent reversal of the tax.
Third, immigration. Noahopinion correctly points to increased immigration as a key driver of the divergence. Like many Canadians, I think the government went too far, too fast given the pandemic related supply side constraints on housing. But let’s take a long view. Many recent immigrants are young people who came to Canada for higher education. If Mr. Musk believes that this demographic is good for US growth, why would it not be good for Canada? And if many of these young people are studying health sciences—nursing, dental and other technicians—they will on graduation fill critical shortages in the labour market and care for aging baby boomers. In time, the immigration boom may come to viewed as prescient policy.
Final point on immigration and per capita GDP comparisons: is the divergence partly a statistical artifact created by the way the two countries account for immigrants in the labour force? That is, if Canada has a much higher ratio of legal to illegal immigration than the US, as I suspect is the case, and only legal immigrants are included in the per capita GDP numbers (or the estimate of illegal immigrants is biased downward), the divergence of GDP per capita may be overstated. Frankly, I don’t know the answer to this question, but would appreciate learning more.
Apologies for the length of this comment.
Why would Canada be only 1 state?
Because our Dear Leader (elect) said so. LOL.
He said it. It is thus so.
Canada wpul do well to take in Dem systes like CS, MN, NY, IL (might have to accept WI or MI to maintain a contiguous map), PA (??), maybe the New England states, New Jersey.
Let Trump have the Taker States. Meanwhile. the Giver-States can put the money they save on bailing out the inheritors of the Confederacy to participating in the Canadian health care system.
One of Canada’s minor parties leaders has already offered (jokingly) to add California, Oregon and Washington to its territory in response to the Felon. As a lifelong resident of the US West Coast, I wish she wasn’t just joking.
Frankly, I wish Elizabeth May would take one for the country and offer to run for leadership of the Liberal Party. She might just be the person to give PP a good shellacking in the polls! (For those of you who aren't familiar: she is the leader of the Green Party, which regularly gets between 1-2 seats in Parliament.)
You're delusional. There is absolutely no evidence that a May-led Liberal Party would have any chance of giving the Conservatives a shellacking in the upcoming election. If the Liberals were dumb enough to elect May as their leader, they would undoubtedly suffer an even more crushing defeat then they would under Carney or Freedland. Not only does May not speak French with any degree of fluency, thus ensuring the Liberals would lose most of their seats in their Quebec base, but she's only popular among a small clique of far-left environmentalists. Given the polls, it's quite likely the Greens won't even hold on to the seats they have in the next election. Pretend as much as you'd like, but the Conservatives are going to win a massive majority in the next election, so you might as well prepare for it rather than live in a political fantasyland.
I’m sorry you took my jokey comment so seriously. Of course May will not lead the Liberals, and of course there is no “evidence” that she would beat PP in the polls even if she did. However, I remain steadfast in my belief that there is nothing inevitable in politics (I’ve been around the block long enough to see a lot of surprises), and see no merit in being spineless enough to simply accept what others insist “must” happen, without trying to shift the tide in a better direction. It’s called Resistance. Look it up.
It's way too soon to predict what Trump will really do once he is in power. But it's probable that any talk of challenging Canadian sovereignty will die very quickly. It's a crude tool for extracting some lesser benefits from US-Canada trade; so crude in fact that it will incite such nationalism that no future Canadian government is going to yield very much. If it does, it will be defeated at the polls.
But there is a greater effect to be had from this confrontation, which will be to raise the level of distrust of the US by all its traditional allies to levels never experienced before. In fact, the more the US pressures Canada, its ally most prone to pressure which it can not avoid even in the long run, the more its European, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Australian, and others, will seek alternate arrangements to protect their own interests.
It will start with official reciprocal trade measures, assuming Trump goes ahead with threats already proclaimed. At a non-official level, it will spread to fewer high level immigrants deciding against US immigration, because they will not feel welcome. Then it will spread to intelligence networks, with allies restricting information to the US. Then it will spread to allies restricting US access to its military bases on their territories, and reducing joint exercises under US command: there won't be much joint military reaction planning related to Taiwan, for instance; the US will be on its own. The EU won't be able to do much about Ukraine in terms of replacing US assets, so Moscow will dictate the outcome of the conflict -- which given that it was primarily the US that backed the Ukrainian assertion of independent action, will mean basically an American defeat.
And an American defeat in Ukraine will raise the question of the utility of NATO. Europeans will look for a new and more dependable security arrangement -- which will probably involve Canada as a cross-Atlantic partner. Canadians will welcome this as a counter-weight to American power.
It won't be the end of the world, but it will certainly mean a noticeable reduction in American leverage around the world. It's the price of misguided isolationism.