Investing In A Pandemic World

Launching an investment column in the midst of the biggest economic meltdown in investment history is a peculiar thing to do, and yet, here we are. Actually, the timing may be excellent: given the parameters and objectives of this column – how not to invest, as much as how to invest – what better time to wade in? If you’re a seasoned investor, the past few months most likely have you huddled in the basement under the stairs, sucking your thumb and rocking back and forth. The market has been pounded, and justifiably so – the strategy of governments to contain COVID-19 involves essentially shutting down large sectors of the economy. One can easily surmise that industries like tourism, air travel, etc. will be in big trouble; the problem is determining how far the rot goes – if an airline fails, or many of them, what industries does it take down with it? In a highly interconnected world, the answers are not clear.

Rather than panic and throw in the towel though (as some investors appear to have done), it is wise to stop hyperventilating if you can and consider the landscape without the lens of panic. First, the pounding in the stock market simply erased the extraordinary gains made in the past several years. As of writing, the S&P 500 Index ETF (exchange traded fund, which invests in a basket of stocks that mirrors the S&P 500 companies on behalf of individuals) is now back at a level of two years ago. Today’s data point might look like a disaster relative to the value of the portfolio 4 months ago, but that paper gain to the end of 2019 was a bit suspect anyway and most expected a market correction of some kind. Not quite like this one of course, but of some kind.

Second, governments around the world now have an arsenal of tools with which to stabilize economies. Or, more like they have a variety of smaller tools and one really big one: a great big freaking printing press to crank out money and shovel into the economy’s engines. There are many arguments as to why this is a bad idea in the long run, and they may all be right, but over the past few decades these strategies have become the norm. Government-led monetary tinkering, on ever-larger scales, saved the financial world in the 2008-9 Great Recession by flooding the world with bank-stabilizing money, and that success convinced those central bankers that this tool has no practical limits. The world is now so interlinked and dependent on central bankers’ policies that shouting about how they will destroy the financial world eventually is like a dog barking at a car. We need to think and act as though these policies aren’t going away. Because they’re not.

Governments, in this consumption-based world, can see the perils of allowing huge swathes of the global economy to perish. We may sneer = at a consumer-based culture, but we wet our pants when we consider the alternative. We need to learn to do things as cleanly as possible, but nowhere in the world does anyone want to see tourism grind to a halt, or people stop buying automobiles, or cosmetics, or any other mainstay of our economy.

As a result, those central banks and governments won’t let it happen. They will pump in money, and they will ease restrictions as soon as possible to get things back to work. It is a challenging time to consider putting money in the stock market (if you’re lucky enough to have some, and a job to boot), but some great companies are on sale in a huge way now. We can see, for example, that anything to do with the food/medicine/distribution systems is of critical importance. Given the fact that governments will print money to shove at anything the general population can’t live without, it is safe to assume those sectors will pull through. Same as natural gas and other industrially-critical materials – the whole climate change narrative has been stuffed in a trunk for the time being. No one wants to face next winter with a natural gas industry that’s gone out of business.

There is of course risk that the markets would continue to fall, based on the fact that there is so much uncertainty in the world with respect to demand erosion and recovery timing. But if the big blue-chip companies that provide our industrial lifelines go defunct and irreparably damage your portfolio, well, we’ll all have much bigger problems to worry about.

For more stories, visit Todayville Calgary

Terry Etam

Terry Etam is a twenty-five-year veteran of Canada’s energy business. He has worked at a number of occupations spanning the finance, accounting, communications, and trading aspects of energy, and has written for several years on his own website Public Energy Number One and the widely-read industry site the BOE Report. In 2019, his first book, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity, was published. Mr. Etam has been called an industry thought leader and the most influential voice in the oil patch. He lives in Calgary, Alberta.

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The big quiet bail out – Euro/Japan central banks propping up stock markets, is the US next?

Business / 5 years ago

Investing In A Pandemic World

Business

Massive government child-care plan wreaking havoc across Ontario

Published on June 30, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

It’s now more than four years since the federal Liberal government pledged $30 billion in spending over five years for $10-per-day national child care, and more than three years since Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government signed a $13.2 billion deal with the federal government to deliver this child-care plan.

Not surprisingly, with massive government funding came massive government control. While demand for child care has increased due to the government subsidies and lower out-of-pocket costs for parents, the plan significantly restricts how child-care centres operate (including what items participating centres may purchase), and crucially, caps the proportion of government funds available to private for-profit providers.

What have families and taxpayers got for this enormous government effort? Widespread child-care shortages across Ontario.

For example, according to the City of Ottawa, the number of children (aged 0 to 5 years) on child-care waitlists has ballooned by more than 300 per cent since 2019, there are significant disparities in affordable child-care access “with nearly half of neighbourhoods underserved, and limited access in suburban and rural areas,” and families face “significantly higher” costs for before-and-after-school care for school-age children.

In addition, Ottawa families find the system “complex and difficult to navigate” and “fewer child care options exist for children with special needs.” And while 42 per cent of surveyed parents need flexible child care (weekends, evenings, part-time care), only one per cent of child-care centres offer these flexible options. These are clearly not encouraging statistics, and show that a government-knows-best approach does not properly anticipate the diverse needs of diverse families.

Moreover, according to the Peel Region’s 2025 pre-budget submission to the federal government (essentially, a list of asks and recommendations), it “has maximized its for-profit allocation, leaving 1,460 for-profit spaces on a waitlist.” In other words, families can’t access $10-per-day child care—the central promise of the plan—because the government has capped the number of for-profit centres.

Similarly, according to Halton Region’s pre-budget submission to the provincial government, “no additional families can be supported with affordable child care” because, under current provincial rules, government funding can only be used to reduce child-care fees for families already in the program.

And according to a March 2025 Oxford County report, the municipality is experiencing a shortage of child-care staff and access challenges for low-income families and children with special needs. The report includes a grim bureaucratic predication that “provincial expansion targets do not reflect anticipated child care demand.”

Child-care access is also a problem provincewide. In Stratford, which has a population of roughly 33,000, the municipal government reports that more than 1,000 children are on a child-care waitlist. Similarly in Port Colborne (population 20,000), the city’s chief administrative officer told city council in April 2025 there were almost 500 children on daycare waitlists at the beginning of the school term. As of the end of last year, Guelph and Wellington County reportedly had a total of 2,569 full-day child-care spaces for children up to age four, versus a waitlist of 4,559 children—in other words, nearly two times as many children on a waitlist compared to the number of child-care spaces.

More examples. In Prince Edward County, population around 26,000, there are more than 400 children waitlisted for licensed daycare. In Kawartha Lakes and Haliburton County, the child-care waitlist is about 1,500 children long and the average wait time is four years. And in St. Mary’s, there are more than 600 children waitlisted for child care, but in recent years town staff have only been able to move 25 to 30 children off the wait list annually.

The numbers speak for themselves. Massive government spending and control over child care has created havoc for Ontario families and made child-care access worse. This cannot be a surprise. Quebec’s child-care system has been largely government controlled for decades, with poor results. Why would Ontario be any different? And how long will Premier Ford allow this debacle to continue before he asks the new prime minister to rethink the child-care policy of his predecessor?

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute

Business

Canada Caves: Carney ditches digital services tax after criticism from Trump

Published on June 30, 2025

Todayville

From The Center Square

By Brett Rowland

Canada caved to President Donald Trump demands by pulling its digital services tax hours before it was to go into effect on Monday.

Trump said Friday that he was ending all trade talks with Canada over the digital services tax, which he called a direct attack on the U.S. and American tech firms. The DST required foreign and domestic businesses to pay taxes on some revenue earned from engaging with online users in Canada.

“Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” the president said. “We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.”

By Sunday, Canada relented in an effort to resume trade talks with the U.S., it’s largest trading partner.

“To support those negotiations, the Minister of Finance and National Revenue, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, announced today that Canada would rescind the Digital Services Tax (DST) in anticipation of a mutually beneficial comprehensive trade arrangement with the United States,” according to a statement from Canada’s Department of Finance.

Canada’s Department of Finance said that Prime Minister Mark Carney and Trump agreed to resume negotiations, aiming to reach a deal by July 21.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Monday that the digital services tax would hurt the U.S.

“Thank you Canada for removing your Digital Services Tax which was intended to stifle American innovation and would have been a deal breaker for any trade deal with America,” he wrote on X.

Earlier this month, the two nations seemed close to striking a deal.

Trump said he and Carney had different concepts for trade between the two neighboring countries during a meeting at the G7 Summit in Kananaskis, in the Canadian Rockies.

Asked what was holding up a trade deal between the two nations at that time, Trump said they had different concepts for what that would look like.

“It’s not so much holding up, I think we have different concepts, I have a tariff concept, Mark has a different concept, which is something that some people like, but we’re going to see if we can get to the bottom of it today.”

Shortly after taking office in January, Trump hit Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs for allowing fentanyl and migrants to cross their borders into the U.S. Trump later applied those 25% tariffs only to goods that fall outside the free-trade agreement between the three nations, called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Trump put a 10% tariff on non-USMCA compliant potash and energy products. A 50% tariff on aluminum and steel imports from all countries into the U.S. has been in effect since June 4. Trump also put a 25% tariff on all cars and trucks not built in the U.S.

Economists, businesses and some publicly traded companies have warned that tariffs could raise prices on a wide range of consumer products.

Trump has said he wants to use tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs lost to lower-wage countries in decades past, shift the tax burden away from U.S. families, and pay down the national debt.

A tariff is a tax on imported goods paid by the person or company that imports them. The importer can absorb the cost of the tariffs or try to pass the cost on to consumers through higher prices.

Trump’s tariffs give U.S.-produced goods a price advantage over imported goods, generating revenue for the federal government.