Big handouts to buy votes
Ian Madsen
If You Want a Smaller Pension Invest in ESG Funds
Part of the original pitch for an Environmental, Social and Environmental, ‘ESG’, investment strategy – i.e., putting your money into a basket of socially aware green, diversity and pseudo-woke social justice friendly investments - is that it would benefit the world...
Ottawa’s Policies Defeat Its Critical Minerals Push
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a recent rush visit to the Saskatchewan Research Council’s experimental rare earth refining facility in Saskatoon. He touted his government’s efforts to promote rare earth discovery, development, and extraction, along with the...
ESG: A Formula for Slower Growth, Lower Living Standards and Smaller Pensions
A recently formed group called the ‘Coalition for a Better Future’ has outlined a plan to re-order and re-orient Canada’s economy from its current largely-free-market basis to one that is a more guided, government-directed venture. Its focus expands beyond such...
Featured News
Our Health Ministers Need to Take a Lesson from Hockey Coaches
Those of you who are tired of my rants about the demise of our once great health system will be pleased to know that this is my last editorial. I am retiring from the BCMJ Editorial Board; currently, I am the longest-serving member (more than 20 years). I have been a...
Zinchuk: Oilpatch Only Spending Half What It Spent in 2014
Back in the lofty, pre-Justin Trudeau government days of 2014, back when oil was booming, pipelines were planned to east and west coasts, and Alberta and Saskatchewan were swimming in money, around $81 billion was spent in capital expenditures (CAPEX) in the Canadian...
Crown Corporations Can Evade Disaster If They Are Sold Off
The recent unhappy news that Canadian taxpayers will soon be at least partially bailing out the government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the owners of Nalcor, which is completing the massively over-budget and behind-schedule Muskrat Falls power plant, may be the least...
New-ish LNG Project has Nisga’a First Nation Backing, Aiding its Launch, but Will Not Guarantee It
Recently, a previously-mooted huge, estimated $55 billion Liquefied Natural Gas, ‘LNG’, project taking natural gas from Northeastern British Columbia to its northwest coast at Pearse Island received the blessing and explicit financial and political backing from the...
China’s Intensifying Estrangement and Nativism may Make its Scientific Progress Stagnate
One of the most notable features of Nazi regime in Germany was its anti-intellectualism. While it claimed to be in the forefront of scientific and technical advances, its ideology and totalitarian rule made free enquiry and interchange between scientists and other...
Interest Rates do not Merely Parallel Inflation Upward—the Inflation Risk Premium can Escalate too
It is not entirely clear whether the Canadian and the global economies are heading for a new inflationary era. It may turn out that inflation is not only elevated from recent negligible levels, but escalates, steadily at first, and then dramatically, as it did in the...
Wealth Taxes Are a Non-New, Pernicious and Invidious Proposal From the Usual Greedy Suspects
Recently, there has been an increasing clamour from some circles for imposing a wealth tax upon Canadians. The usual government-expanding social ‘democratic’ pressure and interest groups are especially enthused by the idea and also claim it is ‘popular’ among the...
Rapidly Evolving Energy Innovation Makes Eco-Extremists’ Apocalyptic Predictions Suspect
A recent Globe and Mail story about a firm developing garbage-to-biodiesel technology shows how continuing progress makes the global warming extremists’ most hysterically apocalyptic predictions, and their extreme absolutist ‘solutions’, not only grossly wrong but...
Copper is Signaling Expansion and Rising Inflation; Gold and Silver are Confirming Those Trends
The price of copper has long been a bellwether for economic conditions. The price is strongly correlated to economic activity, industrial production and economic growth in general. It is also highly correlated with the Canadian dollar and economy. The red metal’s...
Energy Storage, Key to Making Renewable Energy and Green Infrastructure Viable, is Expensive
Big infrastructure spending plans in both Canada, the United States, and the European Union, all place a lot of emphasis on renewable energy displacing coal, gas and petroleum burning generating stations and motor vehicles. Yet little attention is given to the one...
Alberta Government Ignores, Expensively, the Axiom That Government Should Stay Out of Business
The conservative or free market foundational principle that government should stay out of business was ignored by the United Conservative Party of Alberta and the premier of the provincial government. Their regime ‘invested’ what has come to be revealed as $1.3...