Business
Canada’s loyalty to globalism is bleeding our economy dry
This article supplied by Troy Media.
Trump’s controversial trade policies are delivering results. Canada keeps playing by global rules and losing
U.S. President Donald Trump’s brash trade agenda, though widely condemned, is delivering short-term economic results for the U.S. It’s also revealing the high cost of Canada’s blind loyalty to globalism.
While our leaders scold Trump and posture on the world stage, our economy is faltering, especially in sectors like food and farming, which have been sacrificed to international agendas that don’t serve Canadian interests.
The uncomfortable truth is that Trump’s unapologetic nationalism is working. Canada needs to take note.
Despite near-universal criticism, the U.S. economy is outperforming expectations. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta projects 3.8 per cent second-quarter GDP growth.
Inflation remains tame, job creation is ahead of forecasts, and the trade deficit is shrinking fast, cut nearly in half. These results suggest that, at least in the short term, Trump’s economic nationalism is doing more than just stirring headlines.
Canada, by contrast, is slipping behind. The economy is contracting, manufacturing is under pressure from shifting U.S. trade priorities, and food
inflation is running higher than general inflation. One of our most essential sectors—agriculture and food production—is being squeezed by rising costs, policy burdens and vanishing market access. The contrast with the U.S. is striking and damning.
Worse, Canada had been pushed to the periphery. The Trump administration had paused trade negotiations with Ottawa over Canada’s proposed digital services tax. Talks have since resumed after Ottawa backed away from implementing it, but the episode underscored how little strategic value
Washington currently places on its relationship with Canada, especially under a Carney-led government more focused on courting Europe than securing stable access to our largest export market. But Europe, with its own protectionist agricultural policies and slower growth, is no substitute for the scale and proximity of the U.S. market. This drift has real consequences, particularly for
Canadian farmers and food producers.
The problem isn’t a trade war; it’s a global realignment. And while Canada clings to old assumptions, Trump is redrawing the map. He’s pulling back from institutions like the World Health Organization, threatening to sever ties with NATO, and defunding UN agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the global body responsible for coordinating efforts to improve food security and support agricultural development worldwide. The message is blunt: global institutions will no longer enjoy U.S. support without measurable benefit.
To some, this sounds reckless. But it’s forcing accountability. A senior FAO official recently admitted that donors are now asking hard questions: why fund these agencies at all? What do they deliver at home? That scrutiny is spreading. Countries are quietly realigning their own policies in response, reconsidering the cost-benefit of multilateralism. It’s a shift long in the making and long resisted in Canada.
Nowhere is this resistance more damaging than in agriculture. Canada’s food producers have become casualties of global climate symbolism. The carbon tax, pushed in the name of international leadership, penalizes food producers for feeding people. Policies that should support the food and farming sector instead frame it as a problem. This is globalism at work: a one-size-fits-all policy that punishes the local for the sake of the international.
Trump’s rhetoric may be provocative, but his core point stands: national interest matters. Countries have different economic structures, priorities and vulnerabilities.
Pretending that a uniform global policy can serve them all equally is not just naïve, it’s harmful. America First may grate on Canadian ears, but it reflects a reality: effective policy begins at home.
Canada doesn’t need to mimic Trump. But we do need to wake up. The globalist consensus we’ve followed for decades is eroding. Multilateralism is no longer a guarantee of prosperity, especially for sectors like food and farming. We must stop anchoring ourselves to frameworks we can’t influence and start defining what works for Canadians: secure trade access, competitive food production, and policy that recognizes agriculture not as a liability but as a national asset.
If this moment of disruption spurs us to rethink how we balance international cooperation with domestic priorities, we’ll emerge stronger. But if we continue down our current path, governed by symbolism, not strategy, we’ll have no one to blame for our decline but ourselves.
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Canadian professor and researcher in food distribution and policy. He is senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University and co-host of The Food Professor Podcast. He is frequently cited in the media for his insights on food prices, agricultural trends, and the global food supply chain
Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country
From Conservative Part Communications
Last month, Carney’s Minister responsible for the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) debuted their new slogan: “It can’t get much worse than it is now.” Today, the Auditor General reported that under the Liberals, it has.
Over the 2024/25 period, only 18 per cent of callers were able to reach a CRA agent within 15 minutes, a far cry from the target of 65 per cent of callers. In June, the numbers plunged to just 5 per cent of callers able to get through within the service standard of 15 minutes.
The average wait time took over half an hour, double what it was the year prior. And that was if you were even given the option of getting help. Nearly nine million calls were “deflected” by an automated voice telling Canadians to figure it out themselves, with no option to speak with an agent.
Wait times are so bad that over 7.6 million calls were disconnected before callers were able to reach an agent or be provided automated service. As wait times continue to get worse and worse, Canadians have just given up, evidenced by 2.4 million more abandoned calls over the previous year.
Even when Canadians manage to get hold of an agent, employees regularly fail to provide correct information about personal and business taxes. Auditors found the call centre gave incorrect information 83 per cent of the time when asked general individual tax questions.
Non-specific questions about benefits, including about eligibility, were wrong 44 per cent of the time. Meanwhile, the CRA’s automated chatbot “Charlie”, meant to relieve the call centre, answered only two of six tax-related questions correctly.
“How is it that an organization so important to the smooth functioning of the country is failing to serve Canadians and, as the Auditor General notes, places greater importance on adhering to shift schedules and breaks than on the accuracy and completeness of the information provided?” asked Gérard Deltell, Conservative Shadow Minister for Revenue.
It’s no surprise that complaints about the CRA’s contact centre increased 145 per cent from 2021/22 to 2024/25. Despite this, the Liberals announced they will begin auto-filing taxes for 5.5 million Canadians, automatically enrolling people in benefits the CRA is regularly unable to provide accurate information about.
Worse of all, the cost of the CRA’s call centre has ballooned from $50 million over 10 years in 2015 to $190 million. The total cost is projected to continue rising to $214 million over the next two years, a more than 320 per cent increase from the original contracted amount.
Meanwhile, Auditors found “there was no process documented or followed to ensure that amounts invoiced … were accurate and reflected the services received,” and that there was “little evidence that invoice details were appropriately reviewed and approved by … the Canada Revenue Agency prior to issuing payment.”
The Liberals have delivered higher taxes and higher costs with worse service for Canadians. We deserve better than continued Liberal failures. Conservatives will continue holding Carney accountable and fight to cut taxes and waste so Canadians keep more of what they earn.
Business
Canada has fewer doctors, hospital beds, MRI machines—and longer wait times—than most other countries with universal health care
From the Fraser Institute
Despite a relatively high level of spending, Canada has significantly fewer doctors, hospital beds, MRI machines and CT scanners compared to other countries with universal health care, finds a new study released today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.
“There’s a clear imbalance between the high cost of Canada’s health-care system and the actual care Canadians receive in return,” said Mackenzie Moir, senior policy
analyst at the Fraser Institute and author of Comparing Performance of Universal Health-Care Countries, 2025.
In 2023, the latest year of available comparable data, Canada spent more on health care (as a percentage of the economy/GDP, after adjusting for population age) than
most other high-income countries with universal health care (ranking 3rd out of 31 countries, which include the United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands).
And yet, Canada ranked 27th (of 30 countries) for the availability of doctors and 25th (of 30) for the availability of hospital beds.
In 2022, the latest year of diagnostic technology data, Canada ranked 27th (of 31 countries) for the availability of MRI machines and 28th (of 31) for CT scanners.
And in 2023, among the nine countries with universal health-care systems included in the Commonwealth Fund’s International Health Policy Survey, Canada ranked last for the percentage of patients able to make same- or next-day appointments when sick (22 per cent) and had the highest percentage of patients (58 per cent) who waited two months or more for non-emergency surgery. For comparison, the Netherlands had much higher rates of same- or next-day appointments (47 per cent) and much lower waits of two months or more for non-emergency surgery (20 per cent).
“To improve health care for Canadians, our policymakers should learn from other countries around the world with higher-performing universal health-care systems,”
said Nadeem Esmail, director of health policy at the Fraser Institute.
Comparing Performance of Universal Health Care Countries, 2025
- Of the 31 high-income universal health-care countries, Canada ranks among the highest spenders, but ranks poorly on both the availability of most resources and access to services.
- After adjustments for differences in the age of the population of these 31 countries, Canada ranked third highest for spending as a percentage of GDP in 2023 (the most recent year of comparable data).
- Across 13 indictors measured, the availability of medical resources and timely access to medical services in Canada was generally below that of the average OECD country.
- In 2023, Canada ranked 27th (of 30) for the relative availability of doctors and 25th (of 30) for hospital beds dedicated to physical care. In 2022, Canada ranked 27th (of 31) for the relative availability of Magnetic Resonance Im-aging (MRI) machines, and 28th (of 31) for CT scanners.
- Canada ranked last (or close to last) on three of four indicators of timeliness of care.
- Notably, among the nine countries for which comparable wait times measures are available, Canada ranked last for the percentage of patients reporting they were able to make a same- or next-day appointment when sick (22%).
- Canada also ranked eighth worst for the percentage of patients who waited more than one month to see a specialist (65%), and reported the highest percentage of patients (58%) who waited two months or more for non-emergency surgery.
- Clearly, there is an imbalance between what Canadians get in exchange for the money they spend on their health-care system.
Mackenzie Moir
Senior Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute
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