mark navackas

Owner / Operator, SMB advocate, adjunct instructor - entrepreneurship, SMB incubator, Trying to survive running small business...

[Melanie In Saskatchewan @saskatchewan_in]

When my husband died in late summer last year, my daughter and I didn't just lose him.

We lost more than half our household income overnight.
Suddenly, every dollar had a job. Every bill became a math problem.

Because my income dropped so dramatically, I became eligible for a GST rebate of about $435.

To some people, that might sound like a nice little bonus.
To people like me, trying to live on less than $27,000 a year, it's not spending money. It's survival money.

Where I live, water, garbage, and recycling cost me $520 every three months. Coincidentally, those bills arrive around the same time as the GST rebate.

So the GST cheque doesn't buy treats. It doesn't fund vacations. It doesn't even make life easier.

It mostly disappears into a utility bill before I can blink.

Today I'm sharing screenshots from my CRA account to demonstrate the federal government's latest affordability miracle with their renamed GST benefit masquerading as the Groceries and Essentials Benefit.

My GST rebate went up.
By six dollars.
Not sixty.
Not six hundred.
Six.

Apparently somewhere in Ottawa, somebody looked at the affordability crisis facing Canadians and thought:

"Hmm, needs more half sandwich."🤔

What makes this worse is knowing there are millions of Canadians out there who need help just as badly as I do, but don't qualify for a penny of it.

People working two jobs.
People trying to raise families.
Seniors watching every grocery bill climb higher.
People doing everything right and still falling behind.

So to @MarkJCarney, I have a simple question.

Why are you celebrating the existence of a Grocery and Essentials Benefit instead of asking why Canadians need one in the first place? How much did it cost taxpayers for the photo-op? Do you not see the hypocrisy in it?

Because that is the part I can't understand. A government should not be standing in a grocery store congratulating itself for handing back a few dollars of taxpayers' own money.

A government should be creating the conditions where people can afford groceries without government assistance.

The goal should be fewer Canadians needing benefits, not more!

I'm not proud to qualify for this.
👉🏻 I don't want to qualify for a government cheque.
👉🏻 I don't want to qualify for a renamed GST rebate.
👉🏻 I don't want my kid to qualify for a school lunch program because parents can no longer afford lunches.

I want an economy where ordinary Canadians can stand on their own feet and keep more of what they earn and be proud about it.

The fact that Ottawa felt the need to rename the GST rebate to include the words "Groceries and Essentials" should have set off alarm bells in every cabinet office in the country.

Because groceries and essentials are not luxuries. If Canadians need government assistance to afford the basics of life, that is not evidence of success.

It's evidence that something has gone very badly wrong.

What makes it even harder to stomach is watching a government talk about borrowing billions for new projects and sovereign wealth funds while ordinary Canadians are being told to celebrate an extra six dollars.

Six dollars!
That's not economic leadership.
That's a receipt. Perhaps the question Canadians should be asking is this:

If #MarkCarney's resume is as impressive as advertised, why do the results look like this?

At some point, Canadians stop listening to credentials and start looking at outcomes. And the outcomes are speaking for themselves!

[Martin Pelletier @MPelletierCIO]

The problem with Canada is that we elected a government that says they will fix the economy the exact same way they destroyed it. Top down management of instead of opening it up by encouraging free enterprise to do it. And we expect a different outcome when in reality it will mean billions in misallocations again and more terrible investment decisions. Yes, it’s that simple. Zero accountability. Zero.

[wastedcanadian @melissacare01]

I am a licensed Canadian Veterinarian with 30 years of relevant knowledge, skill set and experience.
In my professional opinion, there is no humane way to cull these birds due to their inherent behaviour:
Heavy mass.
Spindly legs that fracture easily. Prone to running without self preservation.
Very resistant to ammunition. Almost impossible to herd. Highly sensitive.
Poor target zones- size and location.
Easily triggered by noise and movement.
So, to humanely cull them in group numbers is virtually impossible. Meaning it would take high level skill to euthanize one humanely, let alone 396!
Again, in my opinion, there is no reason to cull at this point and every reason not to. Really good reasons not to.
Furthermore, the types of folks they have brought in to perform the cull are not animal welfare trained.
From an outside perspective, the current situation seems to be a case of injured ego at the individual management level (can’t back down mindset) and governmental loss of control to a non-Canadian oversight organization. Little to no sovereignty. (Zero SOE reason at present). Literally the CFIA should not be governed by a non-sovereign organization, who truly does not care about these birds’ welfare.
Those who could speak out are fearful to do so bc of potential loss of employ, licensure, livelihood and personal security- with good reason considering the unfairness we have seen and experienced throughout the past few years. Namely, severe penalties and incarceration for peaceful assembly and free speech rallying.
Canada is not the free and dependable country it once proudly was.
At some point someone has to point this out despite the personal risk. (There shouldn’t be any risk to do so, in a democracy.)

I, personally, am appalled and deeply negatively affected by these proceedings and can see the clear necessity to stop this unnecessary, traumatic cull from an ethical animal welfare perspective.

Public safety can be achieved through individual testing, observation for symptomology, isolation of any unwell individuals and possibly euthanasia of those that develop symptoms.
Certainly a widespread cull is only going to cause mass injury, mass panic, massive suffering.
The challenge is the species and its inherent behaviour. There are very few humane options for culling a large number of ratites at once.
Therefore management and individual testing is only humane option.
I would use a humane chute or gated graduated channel system to move them safely and calmly. Collect sample and release to sorting pens. The process should be as quick as possible.
My personal professional opinion is:
Humane treatment is paramount.
The cull is unnecessary at this point.
The governance needs to reconsider their position and see current shift away from necessity to cull. To understand that it is more beneficial to work with the natural immminity and preserve it for future use from a global health benefit perspective. The urgency to cull has long gone as the herd has self maintained its health.

“Transmission without symptoms is largely a fallacy”-Dr. Byram Bridle.

The birds are now geographically well contained and asymptomatic.
They contain recovered natural immunity antibodies -the best and most robustly protective type.
They could be an important reservoir of genetics and immunity for the prevention of an avian influenza pandemic. It is in the public protection interest to preserve this reservoir of antibodies.

Continued in comments

[John Thomson @JohnThomsonSK]

Canadians are morons, and we 100% deserve the hardships we’re about to endure.

We just went through an election where the @CPC_HQ was offering this very thing.

Many commentators, myself included, pointed out that the problems facing our country (economy, housing, healthcare, crime) all pre-dated Trump’s first and second presidency.

Was he a threat, sure, but not to the extent the Liberals and their propaganda arm, the CBC, blew it up to be.

But Canadians (or a large segment of them at least) decided to check their common sense before going into the ballot box.

They decided to reward a government that over saw a decade of decline mostly because the new leader effectively appealed to their juvenile ideas of patriotism with… (checks notes) hockey cliches.

Fucking Cringe.

[Stephen Punwasi 🏚️📉🐈☃️ @StephenPunwasi]

🇨🇦: Fun fact! In Ontario, 1 car was stolen for every 28 new vehicles registered last year.

Car theft generated ~3.6% of demand—about $1.6 billion in sales, and $215 million in sales tax revenue.

Car theft as an industry is equivalent to all the live events & sports in ON. 😬😂

[Made In Canada @MadelnCanada]

Household debt as share of GDP.

🇨🇦 Canada: 103%
🇬🇧 UK: 80%
🇺🇸 US: 73%
🇫🇷 France: 63%
🇨🇳 China: 62%
🇩🇪 Germany: 52%
🇪🇸 Spain: 48%
🇮🇹 Italy: 39%
🇮🇳 India: 37%
🇿🇦 South Africa: 34%
🇧🇷 Brazil: 34%
🇸🇦 Saudi: 32%
🇷🇺 Russia: 22%
🇮🇩 Indonesia: 16%
🇲🇽 Mexico: 16%
🇹🇷 Turkey: 11%

[Mortimer @mortimer_1]

The Canadian and BC gov’t lecture Canadians about climate change… then they proceed to give over a billion dollar ferry contract to China… a country with the largest global carbon emissions of any country and human right abuses, … let that sink in… 🤷‍♂️

[Stephen Punwasi 🏚️📉🐈☃️ @StephenPunwasi]

🤣🤣🤣

Iykyk. The rest of 🇨🇦 will find this really funny when someone explains it in a few years.

[The Food Professor @FoodProfessor]

Who misled Canadians about the impact of the carbon tax on inflation?

➡️The Bank of Canada.
➡️Statistics Canada.
➡️The Canadian Climate Institute.
➡️The Prosperity Institute.
➡️And literally hundreds of economists.

One of the most misleading campaigns Canada has seen in decades. Shameful.

[Tristin Hopper @TristinHopper]

It really is remarkable how easy it is to find charts that show Canada dramatically worsening almost at the precise moment the Liberals came to power. Violent crime severity and investment per worker both have noticeable hinge points right around 2015.

[The Food Professor @FoodProfessor]

"Scrapping the C-Tax would cause a one-time drop in inflation — it wouldn't be sustained."

— T. Macklem, 2022.

"Removing the C-Tax will lower inflation for a full year by 0.7 percentage points."

— T. Macklem, 2025.

Funny, the pro-tax intellectual mob suddenly got quiet.

[Vincent Geloso @VincentGeloso]

"Canada’s publicly provided health care system actually requires rationing in order to contain costs. Because services are offered at no monetary price, demand exceeds the available supply of doctors, equipment, and facilities. If the different provinces (which operate most health care services) wanted to meet the full demand, each would have to raise taxes significantly to fund services. To keep expenditures down (managing the imbalance from public provision) and thus taxes as well, the system relies on rationing through wait times rather than prices (…) To illustrate the magnitude of rationing (and the trend), one can examine the evolution of the median number of weeks between referral by a general practitioner and receipt of treatment from 1993 to 2024. In most provinces (except one), the median wait time in 1993 was less than 12 weeks. Today, all provinces are close or exceed 30 weeks. In two provinces, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, the median wait times exceed 69 weeks. For some procedures, such as neurosurgery, the wait time (for all provinces) exceeds 46 weeks.  "

[Kaz Nejatian @nejatian]

I would almost certainly be dead if Canada had not become a place of refuge for me and my family. I love this country. For generations, Canada has been a place where you could come from anywhere in the world, work hard, and make a difference.

But the Canada that I love is on the verge of collapse. We are being divided. We are being told that our friends are all racists and bigots and that our ancestors and history are evil.

We are killing our small businesses, harming our future growth, and burdening future generations with an ungodly amount of debt that will for certain ensure that they will live a worse, less healthy, and more lonely life than our parents did.

Young Canadians can’t afford to buy homes and have kids. People go to sleep afraid of criminals. Gone are the days when we all used to leave our doors unlocked at night.

We have a choice to make. We can continue to watch our country decline or we can choose change. We can choose to build a future of hope.

I’m choosing hope. That’s why today, I voted for @PierrePoilievre.

If you are a young Canadian, I urge you to choose hope for your future. Elections matter. Let’s turn our country around.

[Martin Pelletier @MPelletierCIO]

I’m going to blow this up along with the per capita GDP chart and put it on my front lawn.

[Stephen Punwasi 🏚️📉🐈☃️ @StephenPunwasi]

🇨🇦 just busted 3 fentanyl labs in 2 days.

All well equipped, industrial scale facilities within a short-drive of each other in BC. All to produce the fentanyl 🇨🇦 totally doesn’t have.

Tragically I’m not your fentanyl czar, but here’s what I’d notice if I were. 😉

<thread>🧵👇

[Derek. 🇺🇸 @SuitablePolitic]

Bessent was hired to strengthen the dollar by doing the opposite of all the warning signs he saw in the British Pound.

Inflated housing markets, treasury yields, etc. all pointed to the big short that the Soros fund pulled off.

Bessent's obsession with the prices of homes and the interest rates on treasury bonds isn't just rank populism.

He's looking to strengthen the leading indicators of a currency.

This is what I mean by "white hat hacking" the dollar.

Mapping out its vulnerabilities to protect it against future exploitation.

One of the most glaring vulnerabilities was a heavily overinflated trading market. Wall Street was on a sugar high.

Hedge funds were leveraged to the gills, and if that bubble popped, it would have created an 08 style financial crisis.

The tariff roll out... volatility and all... was a way of creating controlled detonation.

Wall Street FREAKED OUT and deleveraged themselves.

Now, there won't be any banks or hedge funds who can't afford to pay off their loans because they overlevered.

The extreme tariffs are also coming at a time when Bessent sees a recession or depression happening in China. He emphasized this several times with Tucker.

By boxing in China and shutting down their exports, he's creating the same conditions that led to the big short of the British Pound.

If the Chinese Yuan collapses, then it'll cause a global flight into US Treasury bonds.

Driving down interest rates even further for when they go to refinance the $9T of expiring debt.

[Ben Rabidoux @BenRabidoux]

Isolate just the temporary resident component and it’s even clearer.

This was the policy failure of all policy failures.

@SeanFraserMP and @MarcMillerVM gaslit Canadians even after being warned repeatedly since 2021 until finally public pressure was impossible to ignore

[realNickKouvalis @NickKouvalis]

3 weeks ago, I wrote the post below and I wanted to update it with my thoughts today: 🤓

Thank God, Pierre/CPC has recalibrated re: Trump/ Tariffs and that Garbage. **I already see improvement in the numbers in Ontario**. ✅

Again, I will reiterate that Trudeau is gone and everyone is relieved. 🙏
I would add that it is clear the public does not believe Carney is the same as Trudeau - this line of attack DOES NOT work and actually helps Carney. 🤔🤔

Today, *just under* 4 out of 10 people intend to vote CPC. With the new framing, increasing enthusiasm and more than 3 weeks to go - Pierre/CPC can grow to 40+.👍👍

The Carney Liberals now have 4 out of 10 voters committed to them - because Pierre/CPC wasted January-March not doing anything to establish a solid frame against Trump. This cost us seniors. Even some 'hard-Conservative' seniors. But, we can get many of them back. Their concerns re Trump remain, but now add on top, their concerns about retirement - their investments are taking a beating - TRUMP! 🤔🤔

3 weeks ago I said that the NDP would have to be under 15% and the Greens would have to be under 3% for the LPC to be at 40%... Well, that is the case *today*.

We must breathe life into the NDP. My advice remains the same - stop dreaming of seats in Quebec - and get on the fucking obvious wedge: Oil Pipelines thru Quebec. This is how you help the NDP off the mat and also wedge the Liberals and stop them in BC, Alberta, Ontario and Atlantic Canada. 💥💥💥Trump's worst nightmare are oil pipelines to the all the coasts.

3 weeks ago I said: Carney will be vetted over the next 6 weeks by the Canadian public. He's got problems.... Well with more than 3 weeks to go - Carney's double-talk, his word salads and his arrogance are all on display - lots of time to penetrate the market with doubts about him.🤢🤢🤢

But, rightly or wrongly, the super-majority believe Carney is head-and-shoulders better than Trudeau, so STOP comparing him to Trudeau - that doesn't help shake swing voters loose. Compare him to Pierre/CPC/ and the PLATFORM.🤌🤌

Here's a way to consider the problem:

If we know
Pierre > Trudeau (by a lot)

... AND the public believes

Carney>Trudeau (by a lot)

YOU WILL MAKE UP GROUND IF YOU PUSH

Pierre is > Carney

AND YOU WILL MAKE UP GROUND IF PEOPLE BELIEVE

Pierre is at least = Carney

YOU GO BACKWARDS PUSHING

Carney = Trudeau
🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

Some other thoughts:

Trump's sychophants who are also top BANKERS want Carney to win.... Because they are afraid of Pierre. Pierre will not back down to Trump. Pierre will defend Canada by actually Building Canada and the fucking pipelines. Carney will deal and they know it. You can't trust Carney after BROOKFIELD experience. 👎👎

The CPC has changed the podium visuals and Pierre looks and sounds like a Strong Leader - great! 💪💪

The Boots Not Suits shit is too Trumpian. But for the love of God STOP talking about the size of your rallies by antagonizing media about the size of your rallies - it's fucking TRUMP ALL OVER AGAIN - from the perspective of seniors....this ain't helping.👎👎

Pierre is not Trump. Many of us know this. But the 55+ crowd needs to know this. They want a strong leader who will fight Trump and solve these problems. ✊✊

More than 3 weeks to go is a lifetime in politics and in this campaign - anything can still happen because the crazy Fucker down south is volatile and in-turn, the electorate is volatile. 🙏

Keep working. Keep campaigning at the doors. Every vote counts.💪💪💪

If you don't like my post, my analysis or me, I don't give any fucks. 🤷🤷🤷

[Ray Dalio @RayDalio]

https://t.co/3axXP2mPHg

[David Algonquin @surplustakes]

There is a Nobel Prize on offer for the economist who can crack the conundrum of why adding huge numbers of low-wage migrant workers from low-skill, low-trust countries does not result in higher aggregate productivity