Ten Months of Carney and No Results!

When Economic Indicators Don’t Matter

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By James Pew

Ten months in and no results. Carney promised economic growth and “to build big things,” but his only accomplishment thus far is alienation and acrimony from our biggest trading partner, ensuring nothing but economic contraction and pain — a deep soul-crushing, anxiety-inducing pain. Not felt by wealthy elites like Carney, who pursues politics as if it were a hobby to distract from boredom, but by working class Canadians who can’t afford homes, nor increasingly things like butter or roast beef.

The Liberal’s excuse for not just the lack of progress and productivity, but for Canada’s downright economic and political regression, has been to blame climate change, and point their bony leftist fingers at the inefficiencies of the public service bureaucracy. A bureaucracy I might add, that ballooned in size by over 40% during the lost decade of Trudeau government foibles — when Carney was a top advisor. Carney could pledge to reduce the administrative bloat in government, but so far, he hasn’t.

Insufferably, the mainstream media is entirely hagiographic when it comes to all things Mark Carney. And since it appears a large enough majority remain satisfied with taking their cues from CBC, it should come as no surprise that Carney is still popular even as his missteps seem to culminate into an ominous looming billow of imminent disaster hanging low just over our powerless heads.

The mismanagement and general disorder concerning economic matters, coupled with Carney’s abysmal and devastating U.S. trade negotiation failures, have swept Canada rudderless far out into unknown and hostile waters. We have no anchor, no bearings, no life boats. The captain and his crew are cowards and incompetents, not sailors, but imposters who have no business at the helm. We are utterly at the mercy of the sea, if there happen to be some jagged rocks in the vicinity, our vessel may stove and flounder against them.

Even though Canada is the fifth largest producer of natural gas, with natural reserves ranking between ninth and sixteenth in the world, we recently purchased 78,000 tons of liquid natural gas (LNG) from Australia. When the latter shipped the product to the former, it traveled by tanker 25,750 KM across the pacific ocean, looped around South America, and emerged on the Atlantic side before arriving at Canada’s east coast. This is over five times the distance between the West coast, where natural gas reserves and the new LNG industry are located, and the East coast, where they have not much natural gas of their own to speak of. Despite this, no one in Canada is optimistic about a pipeline being approved and constructed to solve the problem.

Even though Canada’s West coast energy industry is unable to capitalize on the energy needs of the nation’s eastern portion, our leaders are now turning their attention to India, a country over 11,000 KM away. On the surface it may seem like a positive thing that the third largest economy in Asia, a nation with a population of 1.4 billion, wants to procure Canada’s energy. But there are a couple pressing concerns which betray this seemingly rosy picture. Firstly, there are serious political issues with India which impact Canada’s immediate domestic security. And secondly, how, and at what cost, do we transport the energy we sell to India? Carney’s trip there was presumably to discuss these things.

Despite what senior government officials have recently claimed, according to CSIS, foreign interference, espionage and transnational repression from India continues to pose an imminent threat to Canada. CSIS spokesperson Eric Balsam confirmed this to be the case in an email to the National Post “marking the first time a Canadian security agency has contradicted the controversial statement by a senior government official to reporters last week.”¹

Also reported in the National Post: “As recently as Feb. 3, CSIS Director Dan Rogers cited ‘China, Russia, India and others’ as countries the agency has called out for being the most active perpetrators of foreign interference targeting Canada.”

Canadians don’t seem to care about Carney’s dangerous embrace of China and India. He is seen as sticking it to Trump and the Americans so elbows are flapped in approval as he continues to soar in public opinion polls. But in the real world where Trump Derangement Syndrome does not translate into productivity or growth, Canada was last year’s worst performing G7 country — the fourth quarter Canadian economy contracted by 0.6%.

The carbon tax was a big issue during the election. Carney said at the time that he would end it. He did phase out the consumer portion of the unpopular tax, but he kept the industrial portion. This is one of the reasons Canada is outpacing other developed nations in food inflation. Sylvain Charlebois, a Canadian professor and researcher of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, forecasts a 4-6% increase, double the world average, in the cost of food for Canadians in 2026. By comparison, U.S. prices are projected to rise by 2.7%. It’s not rocket science. The industrial carbon tax creates an input cost into the production of food, which in turn, inflates the price of that food. We need to eliminate the industrial carbon tax, end supply management, and open up the Canadian food market to competition from other countries — these things will drive the price of groceries down.

But Carney and his Liberal government are too busy scrambling to look like they are accomplishing something after they completely dropped the ball on a U.S. trade deal. They are desperate. They know they screwed up. And they must realize, even in a hazy sort of way, that what is popular with the elbows brigade who dominate the Liberal base, is actually bad for the country. They must realize that Trump Derangement Syndrome is a get nowhere enterprise for sulking losers. They must know all of this and more, but the question remains, do they care enough, and if so, are they capable enough, to do what is best for Canada? I am supremely doubtful.

In addition, The C.D. Howe Institute reports that “labour growth stagnated in December and the unemployment rate increased to 6.8 per cent, up from from 6.6 per cent,” and further, “Canada now has the highest rate of food price growth of the G7 countries.”

The industrial carbon price increased in 2026 to $110 from $95 per ton in 2025. The government’s target is $170 by 2030. According to C.D. Howe, “This will affect costs at all stages of the production process, from sowing and harvesting to transportation, storage and retail.” Sylvain Charlebois claims that Canada’s runaway food inflation is policy-induced, blaming “regulatory drag, interprovincial trade barriers, poor logistics, rising compliance costs, carbon pricing embedded throughout the supply chain, and a sluggish macroeconomic environment all compound one another. These are not temporary shocks; they are structural weaknesses.”

While the government south of the border is making history and leading the charge of an entirely new era of global relations, our leaders can’t get anything right. They have muddled trade and set back relations with our American friends, are now making half-hearted, obsequious gestures to corrupt regimes, and they are not cut-out, or even interested in addressing the “structural weaknesses” exacerbated by 10-years of inept Liberal economic policy.

I don’t know if Canada has hit rock bottom yet, but I pray to God it’s close.

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1. India still one of main perpetrators of foreign interference: CSIS | National Post