At every city or provincial meeting, you hear the same phrases repeated – that we have an issue with inflation, housing, immigration and traffic.
But we are beginning to look out of touch with what is going on if this is our primary focus. Because as we are beginning to be hit with tariffs from the United States our economic and political strategies will need to change immensely.
We will soon have a positive outflow of people from Canada. This is because unemployment will go up to over 10%. New immigrants will go back home as opportunity in Canada for them fades as tariffs rise. Canada’s population will shrink.
This means we won’t face as many issues related to immigration because our programs will be cancelled as the tax base decreases at each level of government. Those who were on government assistance will leave as no money will be available. We also will not need low rental housing as much.
We already have thousands of vacant condos on the market that no one can afford and we cannot pretend that building low rental units will be a good idea – governments should not keep funding companies to build them. So with decreasing tax bases each city and province will need to redo their budgets and all of the increases for new programs will have to be removed. This is also the case for all new programs, plan, developments and social initiatives – we simply will not be able to afford them with a lower tax base.
The lesson we learned during Covid was how to pivot by spending government monies. This is not a pandemic so we cannot treat it as such. Advice to the wise: Stop, pivot, re-forecast and develop new strategies. We do not need to spend money on the wrong programs as the world economic story is being rewritten due to actions undertaken by the United States.
