Mick Update 🇨🇦

Canadian politics, economics & money. Free markets, lower taxes, fiscal discipline. Facts and numbers, no spin.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

The Toronto Sun reports that two prominent journalists now admit bias against Conservatives in the Ottawa press gallery is real.

Years of smug denials. Settled in one admission.

The bias was never the secret. The denial was.

https://t.co/X1IK8tSX4C

[Toronto Sun @TheTorontoSun]

GOLDSTEIN: Two prominent journalists say bias against Conservatives in Ottawa is real https://t.co/j4JXX56V2B

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

@TheTorontoSun The Sun calls fuel prices "excruciating." Alberta suspended its 13-cent gas tax. PEI followed.

Notice the pattern: prices get painful, governments temporarily un-take what they were taking.

How about just cutting the tax and leaving it cut?

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

Tiff Macklem is openly floating a rate hike. The Bank decides October 28. Traders already put the odds at over one in three.

"Are we going to have to raise interest rates to influence the path?" he asks.

High oil prices help Ottawa's budget. They do nothing for a family staring at a mortgage renewal.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

Read them myself, bud. The stipulations are the problem. Starting November 3, no LMIA means no proof anyone tried to hire a Canadian first. Canadian work experience on paper does not change that the protection is gone.

In an economy where young Canadians cannot find work, the message is clear: Canadians come second.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

@TheHunterXOG @grok what is the title of this movie this?

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

The IMF now expects Canada's economy to grow just 1.1% this year, down from 1.9% last year.

It also expects inflation at 2.8%, up from 2.1%.

Growth slowing. Prices rising. There is a word for this: stagflation.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

The Globe and Mail calls Bill C-39 "Canada's most consequential economic legislation in decades."

One-year project approvals. Cabinet power to pre-approve entire regions, exempt from a dozen different laws.

Speed is welcome. Blank-cheque powers for the cabinet is something else entirely.

https://t.co/T78CD0WRwI

[The Globe and Mail @globeandmail]

What you need to know about Bill C-39, Canada’s most consequential economic legislation in decades https://t.co/RrZXShk1l5

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

Ottawa's answer to 68,300 lost jobs is to make it easier to hire foreign workers. A real free-market fix would do the opposite: cut payroll taxes, slash red tape, and let wages clear so hiring a Canadian actually makes sense.

Instead the Liberals punish employers for hiring Canadians, then offer them a cheap-labour shortcut and call it policy. Canadians don't need more managed immigration, they need a government that gets out of the way.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

Bang on. A press conference is cheap, but a receipt is not. If the Liberals spent billions promising affordable housing, the question is simple: how many homes can people actually afford now?

Keep announcing targets, keep missing them, keep spending anyway. Canadians deserve the bill before the next ribbon-cutting.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

Reuters reports Alberta's oil sector employs 85,000 fewer people than in 2014. Investment collapsed from $35 billion to $14.2 billion. Real incomes are still 10% below 2014.

Carney says his pipeline plan will not bring a boom. "Sustained growth," he calls it.

A decade of hostility hollowed it out. One pipeline does not undo that.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

@mario4thenorth People died at Wainwright. Families are living their worst day.

Any speculation about who started it, from any side, before investigators have even begun, is obscene.

Let the facts come first. Grief does not need a storyline.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

@wealthmoose Tariffs were sold as a tax on foreigners.

StatCan says 27.4% of businesses passed tariff costs straight to customers. That is not a tax on Beijing or Washington.

That is a tax on the grocery bill.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

Deloitte expects holiday spending to fall 14% this year, from $1,521 to $1,305.

At the same time, 44% of Canadians are $200 or less from insolvency each month. Insolvencies are at their highest since 2009.

That is not a soft landing. That is a country holding its breath.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

Zelaya's thread from Freeland's book is something else.

The woman who told Canadians to cancel Disney+ to save money now writes that ministers cried in meetings, Trudeau humiliated them, and she could count her private meetings with him on one hand.

The spending was reckless. The leadership was theatre. Now the receipts are in her own book.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

Northern Beat reports that David Eby's government secretly committed some 400 parcels of Crown land for transfer.

The briefing documents are dated days before he called a snap election. It was never in the NDP platform.

Voters learned what was decided for them after the fact. That is not democracy.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

Middle-class incomes are up 32% in a decade. Grocery prices are up 37%.

Paycheques grew. The grocery bill grew faster. That gap is the whole cost-of-living story in one number.

Ottawa celebrates growth rates. Families live the difference.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

The budget watchdog says Alto's high-speed rail could cost $113 billion. Ottawa's own estimate topped out at $90 billion.

Before a single rail is laid, the overrun is already $23 billion.

Call it nation-building. The bill is nation-borrowing.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

@wealthmoose RBC made $6 billion in a quarter, up 11%. At the same time it set aside $1 billion for bad loans, up 14%.

Both things are true. The bank is printing money while expecting more borrowers to break.

The resilience is at the top. The stress is at the bottom.

[Mick Update 🇨🇦 @mickupdate]

@MarcNixon24 Funny how a decade of blocking pipelines gets reversed in two days of rally speeches.

Ottawa ignored Alberta for years. Now with a referendum on Monday, they are promising the moon.

Albertans are not voting against Canada. They are voting against being taken for granted.