HANNAFORD: That was the week, that was... from fold, to fail, to fall apart

Well, you read it here first. On April 10, David Knight-Legg, a guest on the Hannaford show, commented on the likely outcome of the tariff war between Canada and the US: "There's no chance after this election is over, that Canada will do anything but fold." And on retaliatory tariffs, they just folded..HANNAFORD: 'Canada will fold...' and they know it, tough talk just for election.According to Oxford Economics, Mr. Carney has dropped a number of retaliatory tariffs. That's a fold. There is of course, an obvious and fortunate aspect to this. If the Government of Canada imposes a tariff on American food, it only hurts Canadian buyers. Our tariffs mean nothing to the Yanks. Sure, there may be a loss of business to an American enterprise. However, the US economy is so huge that the modest Canadian market is easily replaced. Meanwhile in Canada, as Food Professor Dr. Sylvain Charlebois explained, also on Hannaford, finding a non-American supplier inevitably means higher transportation costs, and therefore more expensive food. (For more, go to the 10:25 mark on the video below.).HANNAFORD: The Food Professor says buy beef, stockpile coffee, and do it now.So, no surprise there. Also no surprise, nobody in the Liberal cabinet has had much to say about US President Donald Trump, once the election was settled. (If it is, in fact, settled; in pursuit of a majority, the recounts continue.) We were told we needed Carney to stand up to Trump. But once all the old ladies in Ontario had voted against Trump by voting for Carney, no more need of the bad, orange, bogeyman..Three federal ridings await final recount results after razor-thin election margins .Meanwhile, fold is followed by fail which is followed by fall apart.It is for example, an outrageous fail that cabinet ministers are out of control. Despite Mr. Carney having gone to the polls with the strong insinuation — if not an outright pledge — that there would be major infrastructure approvals, the same old scolds continue to tell us the opposite: there'll be no pipelines. Steven Guilbeault should now be busy over at Canada's Ministry of Propaganda. (It is properly styled Canadian Identity and Culture, but this man is now in charge of the Canadian Internet... MinProp, then.) He remains however, very much a creature of Environment and Climate Change Canada..UPDATED: Smith, indigenous energy experts call out Guilbeault for Canadian oil sector comments .From that bully pulpit he did all he could do to trash the Western energy industry for years. His replacement in that post, Julie Dabrusin, is just one more earnest climate zealot from central casting.So far, there has been no rebuke from Mr. Carney. This is a failure of truth, honesty and frankly of trust..As for the rest of the cabinet, we have Anita Anand in Global Affairs pandering to Hamas, new housing minister Gregor Robertson telling would-be homebuyers that he wants a 'stable market,' not cheaper houses and Mr. Carney himself issuing Trump-style decrees.Frankly, when even the Globe and Mail writes them off as 'Carney’s cabinet: a familiar mix of quotas, duplication and pork-barrel politics,' there is little necessity for me to go into detail. (Although I did, see below.) .HANNAFORD: The group that sets the agenda.Perhaps let this stand as a sample of the whole: There's something about the prime minister claiming 'gender parity' as an achievement to be proud of, that for all the hype about his superior central banker intellect, you just can't take him seriously.(Although as my wife suggests, perhaps the achievement was finding enough smart Liberal men...)By the way, it was Andrew Coyne who wrote the Globe article cited. He tweeted it out, 'Ladies and gentlemen, we have been had.' Mr. Coyne was fooled, perhaps. At the Western Standard, we remain in grief, but the shock has long past. We saw it coming.And so, to things falling apart.The bedrock principle of government in Canada has always been that the government is accountable to the people. Nowhere is this more so, than in its handling of the people's money.Yet, we have now learned that for the first time in more than a hundred years, there will be no budget presented in 2025. This is not illegal. The official government Our Commons site, says, "The Budget (is) the government’s statement of its fiscal, economic and social policies. It is usually presented once a year, although there is no requirement for an annual presentation.".However, even during the Second World War, the Mackenzie King government presented a budget. What changed this year that public accountability no longer matters?Perhaps it was what changed last year. For most of 2024, the Trudeau government was in a flat spin. In its fall economic statement, the one that then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland wouldn't deliver, it conceded a $60 billion overrun. Then during the election campaign, Mr. Carney announced he would need to borrow four times that amount — nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars. Conclusion, the Government of Canada is beyond broke. The people we've just re-elected under a new leader have, in their impregnable incompetence, made such an enormous bollocks of the books, that they dare not open them to our scrutiny.And so, Mr. Carney governs by fiat, ministers reveal the feelings they hid during the election and even the Laurentian elite stares in horror at what (mostly) Eastern Canadians have just done.At least we will once more have cheaper grapes from California. But talk about buyers' remorse...

HANNAFORD: That was the week, that was... from fold, to fail, to fall apart

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