blueblood

Prices are rising because of cheap money govt policy that has resulted in massive endebtedness and people being too stupid to save their money. The other reason prices are rising is because of real demand from overseas. They finally have adequate money to buy things including food. Canada is one of the worlds largest food exporters, high food prices are a good thing. Lots of employment opportunity in the food/agribusiness. Wages have to come down to increase competitiveness from overseas. Yes that means that factory workers may not afford carribean vacations or new cars every year or 300 000 K homes when the wages come down, but its either lower wages or ship the jobs overseas. Not only does that have to happen, but the average person needs to pay off debt which will put a dent in prices by cutting demand. The system got broken when people and government became idiots concerning debt. The only way to fix this mess is to pay off the debt and bring our production costs in line with the rest of the world, and unfortunately that medicine tastes awful.

Chavez tried that and his country is the laughingstock of the western hemisphere. If the manufacturing workers want jobs so damn bad they can take a paycut and produce goods at a less of a cost than the chinese. Apple is the largest company in north america by market capitalization, last I checked apple was started in a garage.

Because even though the "rich" have an obscene amount of money, living standards have also been improving for ordinary people. The gap is irrelevant. At the end of the day, ordinary people in developing countries have more than they had before. The same goes here. In the 1970s hardly anyone had computers, now people classified as poor these days have one. Its not rich people making a boatload of cash that's the problem, its "poor" people and their jealousy that is.

Wrong, the rest of the world is getting richer while most of the western world is acting like spoiled children when the allowance is cut off.

Out west, we are decoupled from eastern canada and sell what we produce for world prices. An auto industry/manufacturing in the tank doesn't affect western canada. Western canadians compete with other places around the world in our respected industries, why can't the manufacturing sector? The invisible hand at work.

Perhaps you need to get out more, the free market has made the world a richer place. Those who are in sustainable industries and are smart with their money do well. I personally prefer the canadian way of doing business. Lower taxes, streamlining regulations, seems to be working here.

its not the fed's fault, its people abusing cheap money. If it wasn't for credit, we'd still be living in the dark ages. People should quit looking for scapegoats and look at themselves. People need to be smarter when borrowing money.

Us folks are in the commodity production industry which exports overseas so that results in labor costs coming down. Like it or not the high wage party is over. the market corrects all the time, just not at the rate some people want. What happens is the economy corrects and liquidates the bad parts ie housing and auto industry out and things that are doing well such as ag, energy, and finance get the resources needed to grow. The auto industry in the early 2000s was a house of cards.

Sometimes medicine tastes bad... No, that would be government policy of easy money providing incentive for some bankers to lend money to fools and at the same time provided incentive for deadbeats to spend their money on whatever instead of saving and spending their money wisely. I'm saying everyones hands are dirty concerining this and everyone will be taking a haircut. If your in the business of providing raw materials to places overseas which are currently growing, its good time charlie right now. Perhaps manufacturing doesn't make sense in north america right now under these conditions. I don't see what the big deal if wages drop. If people aren't making enough money, then demand for goods drop and as a result prices for goods drop. Easy money policy throws a wrench into that by creating an unsustainable demand. I think its a person not understanding how debt works and abusing it that caused the mess. By bailing out everything and racking up more debt, it makes the problem worse.

That's a fair point. There is one reason why oil is different than manufactured goods and that is oil costs the consumer the same whether it comes from the middle east or alberta. I don't think its an "ethical" issue as it is a national security issue. Manufactured goods from overseas cost the consumer less than goods produced over here for the time being. I am quite certain if manufactured goods cost the same produced here as in overseas, there would be a bigger kerfuffle about "shopping at home" because it would finally be cost effective to manufacture in north america. Right now at this point in history, the middle east and their allies are perceived as a threat to the west, hence all the ethical oil marketing.

And where is the money going to come to keep that house of cards called the auto industry afloat. North americans are already indebted heavily. Perhaps buying trinkets called cars every year or so with borrowed money that people can't afford to pay back isn't a good idea. I don't think you get it, various governments and many people in the western world are broke because they took on too much debt and can't create enough wealth to pay it back. Bailing out the auto industrty would be as pointless as paying people to dig holes and fill them in the next day.

And I would also like to point out that without corporate investment the canola industry would have gone nowhere. Without the capitalist form of funding canola would not be a cash crop it is today. There isn't enough dollars in the public sector to research and develop crop varieties on the magnitude the big boys can, and the big boys can get results. The private sector research has produced far better canola plants far faster than the old method of public investment. The canola industry is one of the most capitalistic aspects of canadian agriculture and its little wonder that its the fastest growing and most successful part of it.

A company cannot pay people not to work on the level you want and expect to remain profitable. The big 3 tried that and had their car prices jacked up for years, then consumers had enough and bought foreign cars. This caused 2 of 3 companies to be bailed out and ford had to mortgage every asset it had. If you are elderly and wasted your money when you were younger, that's your fault your retirement sucks. Lots of people save for retirement and make sacrifices. The days of retirees getting million dollar retirement packages from employers is over, there isn't enough wealth generated to pay for it.

That's interesting. From what I heard there was some foreign money going into van city, but with your stats it looks like people were looking for a scapegoat. If you want to see results of a property bubble popping in canada, I recommend doing some reading up on the prairie farmland values of the late 1970s vs. The 1980's and the aftermath. Oh and it wasn't pretty. Your situation in BC is worse because a typical city dweller doesn't have as much assets as those folks in the prairies did.

Hudak and mcfadyen I think were focusing too much on harper's scripted message in all his elections. What they didn't realize was that when harper unseated martin, harper actually had ideas that were easily achievable. Running a mcguinty sucks campaign isn't going to win anything. My prediction mcguinty minority.

Those kings of england back in the day who enacted those reforms were pretty clever. They downloaded all the "boring" work onto parliament and still get to be the head of state and live a pretty swanky lifestyle. As far as I'm concerned royalty made out like bandits. Your right, it will exist for a very long time because it is literally pointless to change it. The cost benefit isn't there for change, and any royal with half a brain in their head just has to be mr. Nice guy and let parliamentarians take the fall for things that go south.

No change at all. A few ridings up in the air stayed orange. There were some issues that could have been used, but weren't. If the pcs couldn't expand on those issues, I think the ndp might even get a 5th term. Apparently the pcs only ran on change, but I didn't see anything for alternatives. It looked like the pcs tried to out ndp the ndp this time around. Apparently the ndp had plans to balance the budget faster than the tories. The tories need a better communicator about fiscal conservatism. They should have looked at the sask party for ideas. It was a hard election to go in with the low unemployment, improving economy, and the return of the jets. The sask party pulled it off in 07 with a similar circumstances. If manitoba is an indicator of things, hudak is going to have a long night. Well done smallc, bubbermiley and punked, you guys guessed right.

This story is still in early stages. If the disclosure rules are similar to charities, I would have to wonder if the access to information act applies. If it does the feds won't need to hire revenue canada staff, the minions at sun news network will be more than happy to do it. I think the bill is fair, if unions don't want to pay taxes just like charities (according to the article), they can play by the same rules. Unions, the charity that a worker is forced to donate to. Publically traded companies have to post finances if they want to trade on the stock market. The pissing and moaning by union supporters over this is similar to wheat board supporters when the feds tried to implement the regulation that only those growers with sales of 40 tonnes or more of board grains could vote in cwb elections. To put that into perspective, that amounts to gross sales of about 12000 dollars, not enough to make a living off of. If there's smoke there's fire...

Tell that to someone in the primary industry sector in western canada. The better china does, the better we do. Seen commodity prices for the last 5 yrs, seen the trend for the last 20?

Corporations do open their books, if you want to be publically traded the books have to be open. Since almost all the biggies are publically traded, that's a non starter. Here's a fun fact, if investors looked at lehman brother's books (which were open), a lot of people wouldn't have taken such a kick in the ass by looking at the cash flow instead of income. Do you think the cbc and the canadian wheat board should open their books yes or no?

Its wouldn't be 3 dollars per day, your forgetting about the cost of frieght from china. Also your forgetting about the purchasing power of 3 dollars per day in china vs 3 dollars in the usa. Prices have to come down, but it won't be at that level because industries in the usa have to compete with each other. You couldn't get away with that in canada because there would be an exodus to the oil patch.

Point taken, if they weren't pegging their currency, the yuan would have far more purchasing power and thus the chinese would be better off. They flipped when the usa did QE2 because it drops the dollar vs the yuan. However, at the end of the day is an average chinese person better off now or when chairman mao was in charge?

SNN is going to have a field day with this. I smell a week long campaign on this.

Would that apply to the canadian wheat board and the cbc?

No they're not, they are getting a bigger and bigger percentage of revenues overseas in sales and production from people who are willing to do the same work for less. Those people's standard of living is catching up to ours. As a result agricultural, mining commodities, and oil are going gangbusters, things canada happens to have an abundance of. Its not the western world declining, its the rest of the world catching up.