Quote:
Originally Posted by Truenorth00
I wouldn't say the economy is absolutely terrible. It's still a lot better today than say the early 90s recession when my family first got to Canada. There were major layoffs announced in the newspaper weekly back then. What we have right now is growing inequality and economic stagnation for some with a really comfortable life for the rest. You're a tad upset by recent changes made to the tax code. It might cost you an extra year or two of work. Imagine how young people in major cities feel where saving for a downpayment will take 20-25 years. And during that time you have no certainty on housing. Your landlord can renovict you anytime. Bad as you have it, young people have it worse. And it's been that way for a very long time.
A lot of the problems we face here are somewhat common across the Western world. They come with an aging population and lower economic growth in general. Ironically, Trudeau has made this worse specifically because he made a choice to prioritized the interests of the wrinkled over the young and in doing so basically can kicked for a decade, only making it worse. The next government is going to have their work cut out for them. Are they willing to make the hard choices necessary?
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I agree with this take.
If there’s failings to the Trudeau government, debt and housing are them.
They’re both insidious ways to hurt the young at no cost to the old. It works in the short term.
We traded in economic complexity at the altar of free trade without the intangible defences employed by many other advanced economies that act as bulwarks. At least we still have an auto industry, unlike the Aussies, who are much farther down the ‘resources uber alles’ road. This was a late Chretien to today brainchild.
Housing disproportionately shot up in price relative to the rest of the economy. Great for the establishment, who had their retirement assets padded. Terrible for those on the ground who just needed shelter and had to pay dearly for that so-called ‘privilege’ that previous generations accepted as standard. This started under Martin, ramped up during Harper and went bananas under Trudeau.
Debt bloomed. What was anathema after the painful Chretien years became ‘acceptable during emergencies’ during the Harper years, then ‘standard operating procedure’ under Trudeau. Covid was the great absolute hurrah. Who pays for this? The grandkids, obviously, because we had to increase OAS handouts and spending on healthcare to keep the old happy. They’ll pay that debt with interest.
Someone once posted that societies that favour the old to exclusion of the young become grotesque vampire-like creatures, feeding on their young to keep themselves comfortable. This is what the Western world is evolving into, and Trudeau is just the enabler for Canada.
Play the game until it falls apart. Western decline isn’t going to be some catastrophic event. It’ll be a walking anemic corpse bled out by its own members. But they got theirs. Sorry kids (not really, because if they were, we would not be here now).
A government that would have my attention would be one that pushes back on all these fronts and puts out the message of sacrificing for a better tomorrow.
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