I am Groot

Most of the cost of a house is for the land. Plot sizes have shrunk since the 1970s. Used to be 50-foot wide plots were common. Now it's more like 30-40. I would also say the quality of the builds was higher then, as well. So we're paying much more for less land, and shittier houses that are taxed much more.

Notice what happened to Canada's growth once we started to adopt mass immigration from the third world?

According to Google, $10k in 1970 is worth about $81k today. Does that mean we're ahead? Nope. The average family home was less than 2.5 times annual family income in 1970. Today it is more than SIX times the average family income. Average tuition for undergraduate university for a year was $410. Want to continue with this, genius? I haven't even gotten into the huge increase in income and other taxes between 1970 and now.

No one has threatened 'our existence'. I think you're cutting and pasting from your trans support page. And there's a difference between standing up for Canada and deliberately poking the bear for now benefit to Canada. The only way Canada could strike an independent path would be if we were economically powerful, had lots of stuff to export that people wanted (and that we had the ability to export) and were militarily strong enough to discourage adventurism. But Canada is economically weaker than it has been in a hundred years. With a hollowed-out economy, industries driven overseas by heavy taxes and energy costs, no military to speak of, and a massive debt load and out-of-control yearly deficits. We don't have the pipelines or ports to expand our exports more than 4-5%. Which means it would be a really good idea to strike a deal with the US.

There's less of it than there is in Europe, but it is growing fast as the Liberals continue to pour in great masses of third-world people, many with few skills and with social values completely opposed to our own. We are no longer a rich country. And the huge masses of foreigners are making it hard to live here given the strain they put on our infrastructure, and the way they increase housing costs and decrease wages.

Uhm, EVERYONE else has managed to negotiate with him and get a deal. There's no reason for us to not try to diversify. But there's every reason to stabilize our trade relationship with the US at the same time. And increasing our exports by any significant amount would require major improvements and expansions to our port facilities as well as new pipelines. And none of that is even in the planning stages.

Also from X James E Thorne. Carney Can’t Have It Both Ways. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” In Davos, Mark Carney invoked the Melian Dialogue to warn that middle powers risk ending up on the menu. Yet the irony of his own performance was hard to miss: he spoke like Athens while presiding over something much closer to Melos. Canada must drop Davos theatre. Confronted with Trump’s Greenland gambit, a 100 per cent tariff threat, and a new National Security Strategy that weaponises trade, Ottawa cannot afford one more round of slogan‑heavy multilateralism and moral posturing. The age of performative politics and virtue signalling is over; this is the era of the Trump doctrine. Carney, more than most, should recognise the shift. As Trudeau’s economic adviser, he was present at the creation of a model that traded hard leverage for international applause while Canadians faced stagnating productivity, unaffordable housing, and eroding clout in Washington. His Davos talk of “rupture” and middle‑power coalitions risks sounding like a refined version of that same globalist script. While his speech aroused nationalism in many parts of Canada, it did the country a disservice by implying that Ottawa enjoys far more power and room for manoeuvre than it actually does in a harsher Realpolitik world. Canada is not Athens; it is, uncomfortably, closer to Melos. He now needs to be honest with Canadians: the relationship with the United States is priority number one. Carney must come clean, drop the happy talk, and start implementing a serious strategy of economic sovereignty with the US as its main driver. If he wants to lead Canada through this storm, he cannot have it both ways. He must move from panels to power politics: build a tough, explicitly transactional relationship with Washington; ensure any deal with China clearly satisfies Trump’s stated national security concerns; and accept that on defence and intelligence Canada is a junior partner that must bargain accordingly. At home, he needs to stop hiding behind an overgrown bureaucracy, abandon the illusion that climate policy can double as industrial strategy, and confront the depth of alienation in Alberta, which increasingly sees Confederation as a mechanism for enriching eastern elites while treating the West as a carbon colony. The choice is stark. Either Carney abandons his globalist reflexes and defends Canadian sovereignty with hard instruments of statecraft, or he becomes Trudeau with better lines – a Melian orator in an Athenian world that has run out of patience for beautiful speeches from the weak.

Another good post from X. No, it's not all crazy people. From Sandra Watson Parcels Carney’s proposed “strategic partnership” with China represents a fundamental misreading of the current security environment. This isn’t about trade protectionism; it’s about recognising asymmetric competition that’s been underway for decades. At Davos, Carney framed this as a trade diversification issue without acknowledging that China has been the primary revisionist actor actively eroding the liberal international order (LIO) That omission is telling. China’s soft power strategy (economic coercion, elite capture, infrastructure dependencies) has systematically undermined this order while Western states pursued engagement policies based on false assumptions of convergence. The Biden admin and allies finally began countermeasures: reshoring critical supply chains, technology controls, alliance reinforcement. But they’re playing catch-up against decades of Chinese strategic positioning. Time asymmetry matters in great power competition. Trump’s more confrontational approach, whatever its flaws, reflects the urgency of this moment. The window for preserving Western strategic advantage is narrowing. US hegemonic stability, for all its imperfections, underwrites Canadian security and prosperity. Carney’s positioning reads like reactive spite rather than strategic calculation. Alienating your primary security guarantor over a trade dispute isn’t statecraft. It’s dangerous and short-sighted, conflating economic opportunity with strategic alignment. To be clear: selective economic engagement with China, with robust safeguards (tech transfer controls, critical infrastructure exclusions, supply chain resilience) is rational policy. A “strategic partnership”? That’s something entirely different. The question isn’t whether Canada trades with China. It’s whether we understand the difference between transactional commerce and strategic partnership with a revisionist power.

But with government carbon taxes, both industrial and residential users now pay higher rates than in the US. On average. Overregulated, to put it mildly. When it takes 14 years from application to permit to start a major natural resources project investers go elsewhere. If by 'the capacity remains' you mean we could build factories to do this, yes, but we couldn't do them as cheaply as China, so we would have to put tariffs on Chinese goods to keep them alive. It's productivity, which sucks, and is largely because employers see no need to invest in high tech equipment or train new employees when they can just import cheap foreign labour. To a degree, this is because of mass immigration and foreign workers. Islam needs to be challenged and forced back into its box. But I see no likelihood of that happening under a cowardly Liberal government. Carney is Trudeau v2 on most 'woke' subjects.

We are upset that China sends spies and people to influence and bribe our politicians, and threatens their expatriates China is upset that we criticize it for genocide. The Americans have considerably better morals than China.

That was before Carney dissed him in public before their peers and got applause for it.

There is no such path when you sit next to the US, not for a country with a massively overregulated, hollowed-out economy, already deep in debt. You would need to start rebuilding our industry, our manufacturing capacity, and with our tax burden, our expensive energy, our regulatory burden and bureaucracy, nothing we naje us kujekt going to be able to compete with the same thing made in China, Japan, the US, or the EU. Not a lot of options there As for India, India's trade agreements all seem to have a major requirement to allow more Indians to work in your country. India makes something like $135 billion in remittances from its overseas workers and expatriates every year.

It should be the buyer who is in the drivers seat. Bu we've focused so much on China that they can, if they choose, cut off a massive chunk of our medicine overnight, if they chose. Plus, applying any kind of tariff to them draws retaliation which makes us squeal and give in. Even if it's just on canola.

Third-world countries don't have a lot of money. We export 4% to China and about 4.5% to the whole EU. The UK is 3.74% and Japan is 2%. There aren't a whole lot of other destinations for anything other than raw materials and agricultural products. And the EU, China, Japan and UK and make things a lot cheaper than us. That's the problem we have with diversifying trade for anything other than raw materials and agriculture. And aren't going to as long as business and industry face massive bureaucratic roadblocks and a hugely expensive regulatory environment. No, but none of it has started. No one is even planning a pipeline or a major port expansion in BC or the Atlantic coast.

This was, I assumed, what Carney and the government wanted. It is and was utterly predictable. Taunt Trump in public in front of your and his peers, and he'll get you for it. Everyone knows that. The question is, why did Carney decide to taunt him in public like that when he knew there would inevitably be retaliation.

Neither are the Americans. We will be at their whims or China's whims. China can cut our imports in a second for any reason, for us doing or saying anything they don't like. They have done so in the past to us and others. Even a full free trade agreement, as Australia had with them, didn't matter when Australia questioned how Covid had started and wanted an investigation.

We are permitted under international trade rules, to do sole source contracts in cases of national security. I don't think we'd have a difficult time justifying doing a bunch of them right now to buy subs, helicopters, tanks, anti-aircraft and antiarmor missiles, armored vehicles, etc. Given the international situation, that is exactly what we should be doing, should have already done.

Explain how China is a better trade partner than the US.

34% of our economy is based on exports, and 77% of that goes to the US. Our port facilities are small and antiquated, and can't handle a lot more exports, nor do we have the pipelines to carry more than 16% of our oil to anyone but the US. Further, no one else has any interest in our exports other than raw materials, which, as I pointed out, we can't increase without changes to our ports and new pipelines. China buys raw materials, and very little else. Same with Japan. You think we're going to export cars to either of them!? Or to the EU?!

"Carney's speech was a call to double-down on globalism while affecting a tone of skepticism about globalism. And globalists loved it, which I think reveals something about the degree everyone wants their preferred ideology to have an air of contrarian rebelliousness about it." JJ McCullough.

How about an IG-11?

Maybe we should make a deal with the US, then, instead of flexing and strutting about how much better and nicer we are than they are. But then, Carney doesn't really have any reason to want such a deal. His party can run against Trump forever. And every economic problem we have, including his massive budgets, can be blamed on Trump. Why would he want a trade deal?

Canada, the lost decade of opportunity and growth. And despite that, we're continuing with the same policies under the same government.

Carney pretends to care about stuff all the time. The people at the WEF are very good at doing this, also. It's all performative. None of it means a thing.

And every second name on the crime reports now is 'Singh'. We ARE bringing over a lot of Muslims, especially with the Liberals' new priority for bringing in French speakers to repopulate small French-speaking parts of English Canada. Most of these people are coming from North Africa. Needless to say, there is no similar program to import English speakers to support small, English-speaking parts of Quebec. China never supported the rules-based system. It joined the WTO and then completely ignored all the rules. It has been flouting international law for many years. Russia also ignored it, of course. Nor Iran. Nor North Korea. So it seemed this 'rules-based' system was only to be used to hold Western countries in check, not anyone else.