Economy
The wall of death for western economies

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
This is an easy fix – you just have to demand it
When I drove 20,000 miles through rural America a few years back, I was struck by the dilapidated nature of, well, just about everything. The towns were rundown, there were thousands of abandoned farms and ranches and family houses.Ā Sidewalks broken, every other shop was abandoned. Fields ran untended, forests filled with brush and fire ladders, hangers-on in trailers with a junkyard dog and rifle racks on trucks. Hunting was a necessity, not a sport.
In sharp contrast I grew up in a country village of 500 surrounded by tidy productive prosperous farms, and we were a going concern with stone and brick buildings, and beautifulĀ craftedĀ family houses, lawns and weirs, a village pond with ducks, mature trees.Ā Some estates, but not vulgar monstrosities like today. Everyone adult chipped in. It was vivid, active, close-connected, multi-generational and I never wanted to leave.
What the hell happened?
I didnāt fully understand until a hydrologist in Denver, retired from a career at the Department of Interior, told me at lunch in an Olive Garden, that in the mid-70ās, the blanket instructions coming down from DC switched from enabling business and development to preventing it. He, in his retirement, had a small ranch and on his wells, four meters from four different federal and state bureaucracies, indicating just how closely he was being surveilled. Over the years, regulations had come down so thick and punitive, near everyone operated in a catch-22 situation. You might hurdle one set of regs, only to discover that your success meant another set of regs cancelled you. It was so irrational it was fiendish, I thought to myself. Now of course, I see it as actually fiendish, the work of evil. The government was deliberately ruining peoplesā lives, drawing them down, impoverishing them, with malice.
The only prosperity to be seen was in the rather splendid buildings of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the palatial āfarmhousesā owned by what I came to recognize as government farmers, the ones who had lobbied hard and got all the subsidies. Oh yes, and ethanol plants, one of the first green scams. They ate money.
Last week I was in the provincial capital near me, picking up something in Oak Bay Village, ultra-posh in a villagy Englishy way, half-timbered buildings, human-scaled, friendly. And found it to be in the same state, everything covered in a wash of grey, empty shops, abandoned stores, people shriveled and tired. I used to take my mother shopping there, and since she died, hadnāt had the heart to go back. Therefore I was disturbed, even shocked at the change. If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dyingā¦.Iām sorry, Leading Indicator.
If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dyingā¦.Iām sorry, Leading Indicator.
In fact, in Canada, even the food banks are running out of food. Bodies are piling up in mortuaries because people canāt afford to bury their dead. Chronically injured soldiers are offered Medically Assisted Dying in lieu of treatment. MAID has saved the āfreeā health system $90 million in end-of-life care, since it began. So we have to expect more of that.
A recent report showed the MAID drugs mean you drown to death, but are paralyzed so canāt communicate your distress. That means you can drown for 45 minutes before you actually dieĀ ā autopsies have proved it. That is how careless our health bureaucracy is. I cannot watch another single mother weeping on TikTok because she cannot feed her children and is always sick. Another once athletic mountain climber sit in a wheelchair detailing her story of neurological pain so intense after vaccine, her husband had to sit with her so she wouldnāt kill herself. Every bureaucracy is killing us.
The U.S. still has the healthiest economy in the world. The thirteen other less rich countries are in per capita recession, which means GDP per person is shrinking: Canada, France, Germany, UK, Australia. Japan just registered a -2% growth rate, but it is already a zombie economy with families living paycheck to paycheck. Like addicts.
It may be that all I have is a hammer but, to me, this is due to impossible green mandates, the choking of energy supplies, the insane expense of green energy infrastructure which doesnāt produce and doesnāt āsave moneyā and above all regulation that means that every job in a small cap public company labors under $50,000 of government ESG mandates. For every $1 you pay your average employee, you pay the government $1.50. Thatās before taxes. Not that you have any income to tax. Government is literally eating us alive.
The U.S., according to Bloomberg, is facing a Wall of Death. Or Debt. Bloomberg says 42% of small public companies are losing money; not only that they face a $832 billion wall of debt, $600 billion of which comes due at much much higher interest rates in the next two years.
Letās be really clear about where that debt came from. It came from people like our Fed Chair who asset stripped all these companies, loaded them with debt, mis-stated their value and sold them on. This is how Jerome Powell made his $50,000,000. He ruined a widget manufacturer. That debt is his dirty-but-not illegal play; his fortune, his I got mine and now Iām in āpublic serviceā.Ā Suffer you peons, suffer more. And the dirty profoundly unethical play of all his associates. When Warren Buffet says he has $180 billion in cash because the market is over-valued, that is down to him and his pals loading up every small and medium manufacturer in the U.S. with debt, selling them on, whereupon another pirate buys the company, mis-states its value, borrows a bunch of money against it,Ā raises the price, and sells it on. ALL small cap street profits in the fifteen years come from that criminal activity by our financial elites. Of course the market is over-valued. They over-valued it to steal from it.
The big companies only carry 50% of the debt of small caps. For small caps, the absolute heroes in this story, in the first quarter of 2024, their sales rose .3%, but inflation for that quarter was 1.1%. Bank of America says that small cap earnings will drop by one-third in the next year. Thanks to the miracle of Bidenomics, sales are dead other than the doom spending of hopeless millennials.
In contrast, big companies have gained 14% and big tech stocks earn 90% of all the gains. Where do you think the next play might be? Thatās right, tech.
Median priced houses are now worth 7.8 times median income, twice the normal level, that ratio even above the housing bubble of 08.Ā Housing prices are slated to rise 20% in the next year. One in five renters are either skipping meals or selling personal belongings to make rent.Ā Rents will rise double digits in the coming year according to the New York Fed. Millennials have given up, reverting to a nihilistic hand-to-mouth existence.
According to economist Peter St. Onge, who aggregated many of the above states,Ā the first twenty rungs of the ladder have been knocked out.
This is due entirely to the gutting of the heartland, the shipping of manufacturing to the CCP slave state, and the subsequent financialization of the economy. Value is now calculated on the future labor of people whose jobs are being killed off.Ā They are financializing something that is dying. They know it, you know it, the government knows it.
The core reason for the invasion at the border is for immigrants they can pay dirt wages to keep the whole thing going for a few more years. Your kids, your future? Forget about it.
Of course the bankers have a solution. You know they do. Itās not a sensible, compassionate, creative and exciting solution whereby your life and mine is going to get much much better. It is a solution that means your kids and grandkids are going to live in a world wrought with poverty-driven crime, and dying cities and towns. But never mind! The market will make out like a bandit.Ā The secret lies in the fact that 90% of all gains are currently being made by the digital aristocracy.
That will continue and this is how. To make up for destroying production,Ā the government and markets will list you, your house, yard, cars, boats etc., as a federal asset. As well as national parks, conservation areas, wildlife areas, all ecological study zones, and so on. Then they will borrow against it. Everything you own, because of our federal debt, will be theirs.
The secret, obviously lies in the fact that currently 90% of all gains being made by the digital aristocracy,
Itās the only way. We are de-developing; correction, we are being forced to de-develop. We are de-industrializing, and our hard assets, our water, land and mineral resources are being sequestered from use. We cannot use anything to build anything. We wonāt even own our houses, our gardens. We will have a senior partner in our financial lives who tells us what we may do and how much oxygen and water and power we may use. We are finished. We are future peasants.
The Play
Earlier this year, AmericanĀ Stewards, a few state governors and a handful of Congress people managed to stop the SEC from installing a rule allowing for theĀ financializationĀ of Americaās national parks. But under the radar, because no media does any work whatsoever on this file, the Biden administration has reworked the proposal. Herewith is what is happening in the U.S.
The 2030 Agenda means that 30% of Americaās lands have to be turned into a nature preserve by 2030. All those withdrawals from use hold incredible natural wealth and beauty never to be used or seen by Americans. TheĀ April 22, 2024, Fact SheetĀ notes some of the significant land and mineral withdrawals made to help reach 30Ć30. That wealth could be used by Americans to build cities and companies and full-on effulgent family and community lives. But it is to be locked away. How much is being locked away? The Biden administration estimates that land held privately, one-third of the U.S. to be worth $32 Trillion. So 2030 lands are worth $32 trillion.
So the idea is to lock away at least $32 trillion worth of resources. While people canāt make their rent. While single mothers weep and beg on socials. While people are electing to die because it is too expensive to live. While an entire generation has no hope and is descending into nihilism.
American StewardsĀ reportedĀ the two significant Earth Day announcements released from the White House
āThe Administration has already protected more than 41 million acres of lands and waters, and President Biden is on track to conserve more lands and waters than any President in history. This includes establishingĀ five new national monumentsĀ andĀ restoring protections for three more; creatingĀ four new national wildlife refugesĀ andĀ expanding five more; protecting theĀ Boundary Waters of Minnesota, the nationās most visited wilderness area; safeguardingĀ Bristol BayĀ in southwest Alaska; and withdrawingĀ Chaco CanyonĀ in New Mexico andĀ Thompson DivideĀ in Colorado from further oil and gas leasing to protect thousands of sacred sites and pristine lands.ā
Next, they unveiled a new website,Ā conservation.govĀ that houses the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas mapping tool. The Atlas was created to track the progress of 30Ć30 including the protected status of the landsĀ as well as quantifying natural processes such as photosynthesis and pollination used to manufacture an arbitrary ecosystem service value.ā
This is where the digital comes in. All those lands have to be surveilled. All those assets, including you and your house and your car, have to be surveilled. The money that will require installing these surveillance tools will be made by the digital titans, because thatās where the money is, now that lands, resources, labor have been destroyed.
As American Stewards reports: in January of 2023, the White House announced the āNational Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental ā Economic Statistics.ā Since then, they have been working to establish a methodology to value the ecosystem services.
There are four accounts: Land, Water, Air Emissions and Economic Activity.
The Pilot Land Account measures the economic activity and total market value for all the land in the United States, 2.3 billion acres. They estimate that at around $100 trillion, which includes the 30% owned by humans.
In essence, the administration is conscripting private citizensā land to secure the national debt, unbeknown to the American people and Congress. And using common land as well. Common land is owned by the people of the country, not the government and not the Nature Conservancy. It is yours. But, they are developing mechanisms to make it theirs. This is the first step.
The Pilot National Air Emissions Account āmeasures greenhouse gas emissions associated with specific industries on a national scale.ā And you. Your CO2 emissions will be tracked and your allowance measured.
Ten years ago I sat in a rancherās house deep in Wyoming and he told me that his land would be used as collateral for the National Debt that China holds. I felt dread in the pit of my stomach because I felt instinctively he was right. Subsequently, I donāt know how many people told me that was impossible, I was wrong, he was wrong, crazy.
No baby, we werenāt wrong. They are monetizing all public and private land to pay or support the national debt. And the way they are doing it, is by shutting down economic activity, across the board. We will be a resource to be played, monetized, surveilled and restricted for the profits of the market, and the destructive machinations of the bureaucracy.
And all the money to be made from it is digital. And that money, those resources they are stealing? They belong to us.
In my next article, I will describe in detail the players in this game, how the National Security State, Mossad, the PayPal Mafia, Drexel Burnam heirs, President Trumpās economic advisers, are working to destroy the hope of South and Central America. It is complex, fiendish and fascinating. This series starting today, points out that the Green takeover, mostly surreptitious, is driving the worldās economy into the dirt. It is based on falsified science, and convoluted financial ideas that fail repeatedly. Fix this, and we will be living in a Golden Age.
Elizabeth NicksonĀ is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Her studies and commentaries at the Frontier Centre can be accessedĀ here.Ā Ā Follow her on SubstackĀ here.Ā Her best-selling book Eco-Fascists can be purchasedĀ here.
Business
Major Projects Office Another Case Of Liberal Political Theatre

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
Ottawaās Major Projects Office is a fix for a mess the Liberals createdāwhere approval now hinges on politics, not merit.
They are repeating their same old tricks, dressing up political favouritism as progress instead of cutting barriers for everyone
On Sept. 11, the Prime Ministerās Office announced five projects being examined by its Major Projects Office, all with the potential to be fast-tracked for approval and to get financial help. However, no one should get too excited. This is only a bad effort at fixing what government wrecked.
During the Trudeau years, and since, the Liberals have created a regulatory environment so daunting that companies need a trump card to get anything done. Thatās why the Major Projects Office (MPO) exists.
āThe MPO will work to fast-track nation-building projects by streamlining regulatory assessment and approvals and helping to structure financing, in close partnership with provinces, territories, Indigenous Peoples and private investors,ā explains a government press release.
Canadians must not be fooled. A better solution would be to create a regulatory and tax environment where these projects can meet market demand through private investment. We donāt have that in Canada, which is why money has fled the country and our GDP growth per capita is near zero.
Instead of this less politicized and more even-handed approach, the Liberals have found a way to make their cabinet the only gatekeepers able to usher someone past the impossible process they created. Then, having done so, they can brag about what ātheyā got done.
The Fraser Institute has called out this system for its potential to incentivize bribes and kickbacks. The Liberals have such a track record of handing out projects and even judicial positions to their friends that such scenarios become easier to believe. Innumerable business groups will be kissing up to the Liberals just to get anything major done.
The government has created the need for more of itself, and it is following up in every way it can. Already, the federal government has set up offices across Canada for people to apply for such projects. Really? Anyone with enough dollars to pursue a major project can fly to Ottawa to make their pitch.
No, this is as much about the show as it is about resultsāand probably much more. It is all too reminiscent of another big-sounding, mostly ineffective program the Liberal government rolled out in 2017. They announced a $950-million Innovation Superclusters Initiative ādesigned to help strengthen Canadaās most promising clusters ⦠while positioning Canadian firms for global leadership.ā
That program allowed any company in the world to participate, with winners getting matching dollars from taxpayers for their proposals. (But all for the good of Canada, we were told.) More than 50 applications were made for these sweepstakes, which included more than 1,000 businesses and 350 other participants. In Trudeau Liberal fashion, every applicant had to articulate how their proposal would increase female jobs and leadership and encourage diversity in the long term.
The entire process was like one big Dragonās Den series. The Liberals trotted out a list of contestants full of nice-sounding possibilities, with maximum hype and minimal reality. Late in the process, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Navdeep Bains picked the nine finalists himself (all based in cities with a Liberal MP), from which five would be chosen.
The alleged premise was to leverage local and regional commercial clusters, but that soon proved ridiculous. The āClean, Low-energy, Effective and Remediated Superclusterā purported to power clean growth in mining in Ontario, Quebec and Vancouver. Not to be outdone, the āMobility Systems and Technologies for the 21st Century Superclusterā included all three of these locations, plus Atlantic Canada. They were only clustered by their tendency to vote Liberal.
Today, the MPO repeats this virtue-signalling, politicking, drawn-out, tax-dollar-spending drama. The Red Chris Mine expansion in northwest British Columbia is one of the proposals under consideration. It would be done in conjunction with the Indigenous Tahltan Nation and is supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 per cent. Thatās right up the Liberal alley.
Meanwhile, the project is somehow part of a proposed Northwest Critical Conservation Corridor that would cordon off an area the size of Greece from development. Is this economic growth or economic prohibition? This approach is more like the United Nationsā Agenda 2030 than it is nation-building. And it is more like the World Economic Forumās āstakeholder capitalismā approach than it is free enterprise.
At least there are two gems among the five proposals. One is to expand capacity at the Port of Montreal, and another is to expand the Canada LNG facility in Kitimat, B.C. Both have a market case and clear economic benefits.
Even here, Canadians must ask themselves, why must the government use a bulldozer to get past the red tape it created? Why not cut the tape for everyone? The Liberals deserve little credit for knocking down a door they barred themselves.
Lee HardingĀ is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Business
āNation Building,ā Liberal Style: We’re Fixing a Sewer, Youāre Welcome, Canada

Ottawa held a full-blown press conference to announce they unclogged a pipe in Toronto and called it a generational housing strategy.
You probably didnāt hear much about it unless you were watching Canadian state media but this morning, the Liberal government held a press conference in Toronto. It was billed as a āgenerational investmentā in housing. Thatās the phrase they used. In reality, it was a sewer project.
Gregor Robertson, the former mayor of Vancouver and now the federal minister of housing and infrastructure, stood beside Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and a cluster of Liberal MPs to announce that Ottawa is spending $283 million to upgrade the Black Creek trunk sewer line. Thatās a pipe. A very old pipe. And according to Robertson, that investment will āunlockā the construction of up to 63,000 new homes in the Downsview area.
If that sounds suspiciously like taking credit for doing your job,Ā maintaining the basic infrastructure cities rely on, thatās because it is. No one has ever accused the Liberals of missing an opportunity to repackage civic maintenance as a national moral crusade. The sewer line is 65 years old. It overflows during storms. Itās been a known problem for decades. Fixing it is not bold housing policy. Itās plumbing.
But the political optics are irresistible. The Trudeau Liberals, now under the leadership of Mark Carney are desperate for a win on housing. Their record is catastrophic. Home prices have doubled. Rents have soared. Entire generations of Canadians have been priced out of ownership and locked into permanent renter status. And the architects of that disaster are now flying around the country handing out ribbon-cutting ceremonies and calling it reform.
Todayās announcement also included the unveiling of the first project under a brand-new federal housing agency, Build Canada Homes. Never heard of it? Thatās because it didnāt exist until a few weeks ago. And whoās running it? None other than Ana BailĆ£o a Liberal operative and former Toronto city councillor who spent years helping make the city unaffordable in the first place. Now sheās being rewarded with a cushy federal appointment, tasked with building modular housing and handing out contracts on public land.
And what exactly is Build Canada Homes building? Today, theyāre launching 540 homes. Not 63,000⦠540. Factory-built units that will be delivered at some undefined point in the future. Thatās the big federal breakthrough. A housing crisis affecting millions of Canadians, and Ottawaās answer is five hundred and forty modular homes in Downsview.
This is the pattern every time. The government breaks something, calls it a crisis, and then demands credit for fixing a fraction of it with your money. The numbers are staggering. According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, Canada needs 3.1 million more homes by 2030 to restore affordability. That means building over 430,000 units per year. Right now, weāre building maybe half that. The backlog gets worse every year. But today, weāre supposed to celebrate because theyāre unclogging a sewer and firing up a couple prefab builds on federal land.
No one in the press asked the obvious question: why arenāt private builders constructing the 300,000 units that Toronto has already zoned and approved? Because they canāt. The financing doesnāt work. The cost of materials is too high. Interest rates have crippled developers. And cities like Toronto still impose hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, development charges, and bureaucratic red tape. Thatās the real bottleneck. Not the sewer. And hereās what they definitely wonāt say out loud: Canadaās housing disaster is not just about supply. Itās about demand, turbocharged by one of the fastest immigration intakes in the Western world. The Bank of Canada has warned repeatedly that immigration targets, set without any link to housing capacity ā have blown demand wide open and put relentless upward pressure on rents and home prices.
Mayor Chow admitted it herself, sort of. She said the city has thousands of units ready to build but no takers. And instead of confronting the root causes, monetary policy, taxes, regulatory insanity, the government announces a pilot project and tells you to be grateful. Thatās how disconnected they are from reality. Theyāve regulated housing out of reach and now theyāre posing for photos on a construction site, pretending to be the solution.
And just in case there was any lingering doubt about how deep this failure runs, Statistics Canada released its latest building permit numbers this morning and the trend is exactly what youād expect in a country where the government makes building homes all but impossible.
The total value of building permits dropped again in August down $139 million to $11.6 billion. Residential permits alone fell 2.4%, driven by steep declines in Ontario and Alberta, the very provinces with the most acute housing needs. Single-family permits fell off a cliff ā down more than 10% year-over-year. Thatās not a slowdown. Thatās a stall.
Meanwhile, British Columbia and Quebec where government intervention is particularly heavy barely managed to offset the damage. The number of new dwellings authorized actually shrank month over month. And this is happening in the middle of a so-called national housing push.
StatsCan didnāt sugarcoat it. They didnāt blame foreign investors or greedy landlords or some phantom market force. They just showed the raw data: Permits are falling. Housing starts are lagging. Builders are retreating.
So letās just pause here and appreciate the sheer absurdity of what we witnessed. A parade of officials, flanked by branded podiums and tax-funded media handlers, standing in front of a construction site to announce, with straight faces, that they are upgrading a sewer line. And for this, we are told we are ābuilding Canada strong.ā Really? Thatās the pitch? Fixing basic municipal plumbing is now a nation-building moment?
No! Letās be clear,Ā youāre not building Canada strong. Youāre doing your job.Ā A sewer upgrade in Toronto is not some heroic act of visionary leadership. Itās literally maintenance. Itās what functioning governments are supposed to do, quietly, competently, without a six-camera press choreography and a round of applause from party MPs.
But in Liberal Carney Canada the bar has been lowered so dramatically that simply clearing a permit backlog and patching old infrastructure is treated like a moon landing. They break the system, congratulate themselves for patching one pipe, and expect gratitude.
If you want praise for fixing aging civic infrastructure, something cities used to handle without a national press event, then that tells us everything. It tells us the Liberal government has become so hollow, so addicted to performance politics, that maintenance is now treated as achievement. Thatās how far weāve fallen in just ten years.
They didnāt rebuild a nation. They didnāt launch a housing renaissance. They unclogged a sewer, and are now demanded a standing ovation. And that, in a single image, is modern Liberal Canada: the total collapse of standards, repackaged as progress and sold back to you at full price.
Canadians donāt need more press conferences. They need homes, dignity, and a government that works without constant applause. And if unclogging a pipe is what passes for leadership now ā then God help the country.
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