Canadians are still as worried about COVID “anxiety” as they are about how wonderful the economy is, Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan said in a recent speech to business leaders in Toronto.
“We will not be able to cope with any of the enormous demanding situations we face as a country until we are faced with an undeniable fact. We’re not done with COVID,” O’Regan said in a social media post promoting his Nov. 1 message. 30 speech at the Empire Club of Canada.
The speech was advertised as an “economic update” and a discussion with business leaders about the “state of labour relations” in Canada.
But O’Regan’s main theme is that the country’s economic fundamentals are sound, but that discontent – and social unrest – remains significant because of a mixture of “anxiety” and “populism. “
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“I don’t know about you, but I’m tired, already, about populism.… It demonizes. It destabilizes. It takes energy away from the things that we really should be doing,” said O’Regan in the talk’s introduction.
O’Regan did not mention any populists by name, but the discussion unfolded amid a general collapse in Liberal electoral support, largely to gain advantage from the Conservatives led by leader Pierre Poilievre. According to maximum projections, the Conservatives are now expected to win a landslide victory over the O’Regan government in the next general election.
According to polls, this progress for the Conservatives is due in large part to the challenge posed by deteriorating affordability, especially in the area of housing.
O’Regan briefly discussed emerging incomes and emerging lending rates, but also argued that Canada’s economic scenario is nothing short of a national triumph. The minister cited an unemployment rate of 5. 7 percent, which he called “an all-time low. “” as well as the “largest economic expansion of the G7 in 2024, according to the IMF”.
“It is; Nobody feels it,” he said.
Unemployment is well below the peaks it reached in the early weeks of the pandemic. But according to Statistics Canada, the unemployment rate is now roughly equivalent to the pre-pandemic unemployment average in Canada, and has been rising for much of the past six months.
On the IMF point, O’Regan is likely citing a report from April in which Canada was projected to have real GDP growth of 1.5 per cent for 2024 — this would indeed be the best showing among the G7, but roughly on par with the 1.4 per cent average projected for the world’s “advanced economies.”
Like the Trudeau government’s recent Autumn Economic Statement, O’Regan’s comments have also avoided mentioning a statistic increasingly cited by economists to describe most Canadians’ direct experience with the economy, especially as the country enjoys record immigration rates.
That would be a GDP consistent with the capita; a figure that has been declining markedly for just two years – and the extent to which analysts at TD and Desjardins, among others, expect Canada to be on the verge of a long-term decline in living standards.
But O’Regan suggested that Canada’s chief economic affliction was a lingering “angst” and “anxiety” from COVID-19 that had become “fertile ground for people in powerful positions who want to make people more anxious and angry about the world.”
Despite what he called “the most remarkable economic recovery I’ve ever imagined,” O’Regan said Canadians remain pessimistic because “we don’t know what we went through. “
“I don’t think any of us are over COVID. I don’t think we’ve dealt with it; as a country, as a world, we’ve just moved on … but we’ve been jarred. We’ve changed. And as a result, as we say in Newfoundland, the nerves are rubbed raw,” he said.
O’Regan described his own 14-month isolation and was forced to run the Department of Natural Resources “alone at home,” he said.
“If you told me, on my fourteenth Zoom call of the day in my fourteenth month of isolation . . . that this country would not only recover from the ravages of a global pandemic, but would be the world leader in task growth. . . “I would never do it. You,” he says.
O’Regan added, “And we can’t do that. “
Canada’s assisted suicide regime has reached another dark milestone. A suffering veteran made the decision to receive medical assistance in dying after being advised to do so by the Department of Veterans Affairs. We found that hospital staff sought to force patients to get medical assistance in dying. to save money. We celebrate a patient who was granted medical assistance to die in an advertisement for a mass-market clothing store, even though she only asked for medical assistance to die out of desperation, after years of not being able to get the right remedy for a rare disease. And now it appears that B. C. man Dan Quayle was medically assisted to die after repeated delays in his cancer treatment left him devastated by grief and unable to eat or walk.
The Conservatives are threatening to ruin Parliament’s Christmas recess if they don’t give in to a bill to exempt fuels used for agricultural heating from carbon tax. The personal bill introduced two years ago and passed by the House of Commons earlier this year, still on Tuesday introduced a Senate amendment that would delay its passage until 2024. To this end, the conservatives threatened to surely flood everyone. It is the last law before the House of Commons with “thousands” of amendments, resulting in endless procedural procedures. paintings that would keep Parliament in consultation over Christmas. By the way, the word ‘ruin Christmas’ isn’t a liberal insult, it’s literally what conservatives say. ” You ruined Christmas for Canadians. Common-sense conservatives are also going to ruin your vacation,” Poilievre said.
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