Olivier Rancourt and Gabriel Giguere
Troy Media
 
The Canadian softwood lumber dispute with the United States, which has been dragging on for some 40 years now, is long overdue for a resolution. Despite setbacks before WTO and NAFTA tribunals, accusations of subsidized production from American decision-makers and producers continue.
 
The accusations have notably led to the imposition of duties on Canadian softwood lumber, which has hurt the forestry industry in regions like Quebec’s Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean or B.C.’s Vancouver Island, for instance. These measures have sizable impacts on regional economies, given that the number of jobs connected to the forestry sector was more than 302,500 in 2019.
 
More broadly, these tariffs are counterproductive, as they hurt both countries’ economies. On the Canadian side, it’s producers who suffer, while in the United States, it’s consumers who pay the price.
 
In Canada, and more precisely in those regions where the forestry sector represents a significant slice of the economy, these measures impact softwood lumber producers’ exports. One study suggests that, with import duties of 20.83 per cent, there was a 18 times the wood contained in the framework of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
 
Our projections show that from 2017 to 2027, these tariffs will have reduced Canadian producers’ exports to the tune of over US$3 billion. And this loss – in addition to hurting entrepreneurs in all producing Canadian provinces – will not even be fully offset by the increased activity of producers south of the border.
 
Unsurprisingly, American producers have benefited from these duties by increasing their local production of the resource. Moreover, the duties imposed cost Canadian producers around $5.6 billion between 2017 and 2021 to export the resource. It must also be noted that our southern neighbours depend on Canadian softwood lumber, with 84 per cent of our exports of this resource heading to the United States in 2021.
 
What’s more, this protectionist measure put in place by former U.S. President Donald Trump – and reduced, but still maintained, by President Biden – has a direct negative impact on American consumers.
 
Despite the increased domestic production of American softwood lumber, the big losers from this tariff are, without a doubt, American consumers, who have to pay inflated prices for this resource. Indeed, American consumers are hurt 26 times more than Canadian producers, who succeed well enough in finding takers for their softwood lumber. Consumers south of the border lost $1.5 billion in well-being in 2017 due to the tariffs imposed by their political leaders.
 
In other words, Americans who pay more for softwood lumber products are subsidizing, in a way, the American producers who pocket the profits. Since there is a net loss of production, with increased U.S. softwood lumber production not fully offsetting lower Canadian production, the quantity of the resource falls, and prices are pushed higher.
 
U.S. politicians must address this situation and eliminate the duties on this resource, which are a heavy burden on their own population. With surging inflation hitting 8.6 per cent for the month of May, a 40-year peak, households urgently need access to top-quality materials at low prices. The cost of living is rising, and removing these tariffs would reduce pressure on construction costs, giving some much-needed respite to American families.
 
Olivier Rancourt is an Economist and Gabriel Giguère a Public Policy Analyst at the Montreal Economic Institute. They are the authors of Canadian Softwood Lumber: A Costly Dispute for Consumers and Companies.

Consider this: for every minute that Toronto and Vancouver host World Cup games, taxpayers will be on the hook for $644,000.
Last week, Canadians learned that Toronto and Vancouver had been tapped to host five World Cup games each as part of North America’s bid for the 2026 World Cup.
Politicians in both cities have been trying to sell taxpayers on their plan to spend an absolute fortune to host just 17 per cent of the 2026 World Cup games.
Toronto Mayor John Tory is trying to convince taxpayers that this is a huge boon for the city.
“I think it’s going to be one of the greatest sporting occasions in the history of the city,” said Tory.
Toronto taxpayers aren’t so convinced. The estimated cost for Canada to host 10 World Cup games is approximately $600 million. And that’s before the cost overruns that everyone knows will be coming. What do politicians claim will be the benefit?
According to the city of Toronto’s own projections, local businesses will see an influx of $307 million from hosting the games. That includes a “boost” of 3,300 jobs, most of which will likely be temporary.
But a report prepared for Toronto city council this spring indicated that the cost to taxpayers for hosting the five Toronto games will be $290 million.
In other words, the economic gains the city expects to make are only $17 million larger than the cost coming out of taxpayers’ wallets. Does that sound like a huge boon for the city?
The city is also understating the costs and overstating the benefits.
First, there’s a trade-off cost. With $290 million, 63,000 Torontonians with homes valued at $750,000 could have a one-year property tax holiday.
Second, the economic benefits are also tenuous at best. Research in the United States found that hosting Super Bowl games only leads to roughly 10 per cent of the economic benefit the NFL advertises.
And then there are the cost overruns. The 2010 Vancouver Olympics saw cost overruns of 17 per cent of the total budget, while the 1988 Calgary Olympics saw a cost overrun of 59 per cent.
Even if the cost of hosting World Cup games in Toronto comes in just six per cent over budget, the cost of hosting the games will be higher than any indirect economic benefits the city expects to gain. Does that sound like a prudent economic plan?
There’s another question: why should taxpayers be on the hook for any money if only a fraction of the expected economic gains will lead to more tax revenue? Not only will hosting the World Cup games likely be a net money loser, but losses for taxpayers will be even more lopsided.
Agreeing to host World Cup games because of potential gains for businesses without regard to taxpayer costs is the very definition of corporate welfare.
Taxpayers in Toronto and Vancouver should be outraged. Neither city can run operating deficits, meaning the bill for hosting the World Cup games will be paid for through higher taxes or reduced government services.
But taxpayers outside of Toronto and Vancouver should be outraged as well. The federal government will be on the hook for approximately $200 million for Canada to host the 10 World Cup games, meaning taxpayers all across the country will be financing this fiscal boondoggle.
Should taxpayers in Saskatchewan be on the hook for a handful of World Cup games in two cities thousands of kilometres away? The obvious answer is no.
While Canada’s governments have been “awarded” World Cup games, no money is yet out the door. Taxpayers should tell Canada’s politicians that the country shouldn’t be wasting tax dollars on their political vanity project.
Canada should rip up the deal and let taxpayers in the United States and Mexico get stuck with the bill.
Jay Goldberg is the Ontario & Interim Atlantic Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Sylvain Charlebois
Troy Media
It wasn’t a good week if you’re a consumer on a tight budget – and that means most of us. Consumers are under attack.
We’ve just learned that Canada’s food inflation rate was at a record 9.7 per cent in May. Everyone is noticing higher food prices and no section of the grocery store is immune.
What’s hitting Canada is a global phenomenon; food prices aren’t coming down anytime soon. The world will see a shortfall in commodity production this fall, which could push prices even higher worldwide. Supply chain issues, coupled with a new inflationary cycle triggered by the Ukrainian conflict, are impacting the food industry’s ability to fill shelves.
The shift is so incredibly sharp that many vendors can’t agree with grocers on pricing, pushing them to put their business on hold, as we saw with the Frito-Lay dispute with Loblaws earlier this year. There are many stop-sells out there.
The macroeconomic picture is one thing. But some policies in Canada are just making things worse.
The Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC), a Crown corporation, believed a second milk price increase was necessary for dairy farmers. Last week, we learned that milk prices paid to farmers will rise again by 2.5 per cent, after a record increase of 8.4 per cent in February. Last winter’s increase was so severe that most dairy alternatives are now priced the same as milk or lower.
The Dairy Farmers of Canada, one of the most powerful lobby groups in the country, requested another mid-year increase due to “exceptional circumstances” without telling us where the data is coming from.
To add insult to injury, the commission’s decision to raise milk prices was made by a federal public body operating for several months without a full complement on its board. The board only has two members and both are in dairy farming.
Conflicts of interest are rampant at the commission, just as in politics and academia. Many Canadian university scholars aren’t just researchers – they’re essentially advocates for their funding agencies representing the dairy industry. The dairy boards have power and influence beyond belief. If only Canadians realized. The fact that Dairy Farmers of Canada and the Canadian Dairy Commission work as one is deeply disturbing. Canadian consumers need to be heard.
Many Canadians would empathize with dairy farmers – who face higher production costs – if only the commission would share more data.
The lack of disclosure is very much about asking Canadians to support an inefficient dairy sector more than properly compensating farmers. And by fall, this new increase will price the dairy section at the grocery store out of the market for many consumers.
Ultimately, we stand to lose many more dairy farms as their sales decline.
The federal government is also coming forward with new labelling rules for saturated fats, sodium and sugar. Health Canada’s front-of-package labelling was long overdue, and it will make our food healthier. But the new policy also aims at a key single-ingredient product that many Canadians enjoy: ground meat.
Ground beef and pork are among the most affordable sources of animal protein we have. Based on the plans we’ve seen, only extra-lean ground meats are exempt from the new labelling. If this goes ahead, grocers will stop carrying more affordable ground meat, making the meat counter even more expensive. It’s just ridiculous.
The federal government is the consumer’s worst enemy right now. It needs to think through some of these ill-timed policies that will make food even more expensive.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s so-called anti-inflation plan presented recently won’t do much for Canadians at the grocery store. Many of us hoped for tax breaks, anything to ease our fiscal burden, as many countries have done in recent months. But Freeland opted to make a ‘microwave’ announcement, basically reheating programs already in place – it’s like clapping with one hand.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently said the war in Ukraine could last years. However regrettable this may be, this is what the Canadian government needs to focus on for the foreseeable future.
Farmers need help with inputs to prepare for fall, winter and next spring. The government should also become one of the world’s most influential trade advocates and prevent other countries from hoarding food. More nationalistic protectionism can only make things worse.
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.

Franco Terrazzano and Kris Sims

Troy Media

How do you scare a polar bear?

You don’t. They are apex predators and could eat you whenever they want.

But that didn’t stop the government of Manitoba from spending $150,000 replacing diesel tundra buggies with whisper-quiet electric vehicles so tourists wouldn’t frighten the bears away.

Too bad they hadn’t seen YouTube videos of the big white bruins sleeping soundly as the old buggies rumbled by.

That roaring waste of money was one of the heavyweight contenders for the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation’s 24th annual Teddy Waste Awards.

The Teddy, a pig-shaped golden trophy the CTF annually awards to governments’ worst waste offenders, is named after Ted Weatherill, a former federal appointee fired in 1999 for submitting a raft of dubious expense claims, including a $700 lunch for two.

When one can laugh or cry, it’s better to laugh and mock the pigs at the trough.

This year, the CTF handed out the trophies during a spoof black-tie gala ceremony held in Calgary and in a parody news report posted online.

A former bureaucrat in Kamloops, B.C., owned the podium in the municipal category for living the bureaucratic version of a rockstar lifestyle.

As reporter Jessica Wallace at Kamloops This Week found through freedom of information requests, former Thompson-Nicola Regional District CAO Sukh Gill spent about $100,000 per year for five years on the taxpayer credit card.

He spent taxpayers’ money on alcohol, fancy meals, gift cards and jewelry for staff. He spent more than $7,000 on a champagne room in Whistler during a conference. When Gill left the job, he got a form of severance for $500,000.

The provincial champion this year is the Government of Quebec for spending $380 million on the Airbus A220.

Turns out, the Airbus A220 was just another name for the Bombardier C-Series jet.

The Quebec government had already blown $1.3 billion on that jet, too.

The National Capital Commission won this year’s federal trophy.

The parks and rec board that tends the Rideau Canal and makes sure Ottawa’s tulips bloom on time spent almost $11 million renovating the prime minister’s cottage at Harrington Lake.

For the cost of that reno, taxpayers could have bought rockstar couple Chad Kroeger and Avril Lavigne’s mansion in Los Angeles, Halle Berry’s Laurentian getaway and a Muskoka cottage near Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russel’s place.

The NCC’s runaway reno bill includes about $2.5 million for a backup cottage the prime minister can use while work is happening on the main mansion cottage at Harrington Lake.

Finally, the Lifetime Achievement Award is for the Top Gun class of government waste. We use the big golden pig statue for that one, and it weighs about 10 pounds.

This year, Canada’s Climate Delegation won the lifetime achievement award for sending 276 people to the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, spending more than $1 million.

In contrast, the Americans sent 133 and the Germans sent 120. Germany has double the population of Canada, yet the Trudeau government sent double the delegation.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland stayed in Edinburgh instead of the host city and opted for a chauffeur service to get to the conference every day instead of the high-speed train that links the two cities. The car and driver service cost taxpayers $3,000.

This followed the pattern set during the 2015 Paris summit, where the Trudeau government sent more than 300 delegates – double the American contingent – and blew more than $1 million.

While the Teddy Waste Awards are meant to be funny, it’s a way of smiling through the pain.

Canada is more than $1 trillion in debt. Maybe it’s time to stop spending taxpayers’ money to make sure a polar bear sleeps soundly.Franco Terrazzano is the Federal Director and Kris Sims is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

In early June, the economics team at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) published a revised forecast for Canada and the 10 provinces. The good news is that notwithstanding slowing global growth, soaring inflation and escalating geopolitical tensions, Canada seems reasonably well positioned to navigate its way through the rest of 2022 and into next year.
 
While a recession is possible, RBC sees little likelihood of one occurring. An important reason for this can be found by looking at the composition of Canada’s exports. It turns out that our strong orientation toward commodity production and exports is partially shielding Canada from the storms buffeting the global economy.
 
Pre-COVID-19, natural resource industries accounted for roughly half of Canada’s merchandise exports – and for more than two-fifths of total exports of goods and services combined. For 2022, I estimate that natural resource products will comprise closer to 55 per cent of Canada’s merchandise exports in dollar terms. Energy (particularly oil and natural gas), minerals and metals, agri-food, and forest products are industries where Canada has long been a major exporter and typically enjoyed sizable trade surpluses.
 
For any trade-dependent economy, the health of its principal export industries warrants careful attention from policy-makers. The pattern of exports holds vital information about where a country (or a province) possesses comparative advantage. Many of the industries in which Canada is globally competitive serve the world’s energy and other commodity consumers or are energy- and raw materials-intensive. That’s generating substantial economic gains for Canada today – when global commodity markets are generally buoyant.
 
Most forecasters believe Western Canada will lead the country in economic growth in 2022-23, largely due to the region’s commodity-based export basket. “Strong global demand and prices for commodities are significantly boosting Western Canada’s prospects,” concludes the RBC analysts. The near-term outlook is especially positive for the energy and agricultural sectors.
 
Canada is a net economic winner from robust worldwide demand and higher prices for energy and other commodities. All major categories of internationally-traded natural resources saw significant price increases through most of 2021. So far in 2022, rising prices for oil, natural gas and many agricultural products have lifted Canada’s national income and kept the merchandise trade balance in hefty surplus.
 
As the RBC report notes, “[t]he explosion in global commodity prices is pushing up costs for consumers globally – and increasing economy-wide revenues among producers like Canada.” High energy and other commodity prices are making a much-needed contribution to economic growth in Canada, amid mounting global turbulence and uncertainty.
 
The central place of natural resource industries in Canada’s economy and export base is often downplayed. Notably, very few members of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet have roots in or much knowledge of the natural resource economy, with most hailing from the country’s largest metropolitan areas. Even so, federal ministers (and their counterparts in the provinces) need to understand that the high value-added and unmatched export earnings produced by Canada’s natural resource sectors not only benefit commodity-producing regions directly but cascade through the rest of the economy – bolstering domestic demand for non-traded goods and services and providing the financial means to pay for imports and public services.
 
An important message for Canadian policy-makers at all levels is to avoid undermining Canada’s role as a trusted supplier of energy, minerals/metals, foodstuffs, forest products and other raw materials.
 
The world consumes vast quantities of these commodities. And it will certainly keep buying them, hopefully from producing jurisdictions that also happen to be law-governed democracies with high environmental and social standards – like Canada.
 
Jock Finlayson is senior policy advisor at the Business Council of B.C.

It looks like we will see different symbols on food packaging soon, telling us whether a food product at the grocery store has too much fat, sugar or sodium.
 
Health Canada is likely going forward with a policy requiring front-of-package nutrition symbols on foods high in saturated fat, sugars and sodium. It will provide clear, easy-to-read labels.
 
But one part of Health Canada’s plan is a head-scratcher.
 
The threshold that Health Canada intends to apply is quite simple. For prepared or processed foods and those intended solely for children one to four years of age, it’s 15 per cent of daily values (DV). This means that if a product’s serving exceeds 15 per cent of the maximum daily allowance for saturated fat, sugar or sodium, a label will be prominently placed on the package for consumers to see right away. For prepackaged meals and dishes, the threshold is 30 per cent.
 
The policy appears to make sense. It’s hard to argue against more clarity, more transparency and, as a result, better consumer health.
 
But things get murky when we start looking at the list of exemptions. Many products will be exempt from this policy. For example, products at a farmers’ market, products not sold directly to consumers, non-processed raw single-ingredient meat and fish products, all dairy products, and eggs. The list includes technical, practical and health-related exemptions, with 16 categories in total.
 
What’s surprising is that ground beef and pork aren’t exempt. This means that, in a few months, ground beef and pork, two unprocessed, natural and affordable animal protein sources that many consumers eat daily, will be labelled as having too much saturated fat. Meanwhile, dairy products, which arguably contain at least as much saturated fat, are exempt.
 
Some sources believe the incredibly powerful dairy lobby provided enough evidence and scientific data to Health Canada to suggest that saturated fats found in dairy products are different, and healthier. That may be the case, but Health Canada certainly has some explaining to do, considering how it butchered dairy products with the latest food guide, released a few years ago.
 
The lack of consistency is mind-blowing.
 
Beef and pork do exceed thresholds set by Health Canada – when products are raw, not cooked. However, few people will eat these products raw. When cooked, saturated fat levels are normally below the Health Canada threshold.
 
What’s critical here is protein affordability. While retail prices for beef and pork specialty cuts have skyrocketed in recent years, ground beef and pork have been relatively affordable. Almost 50 per cent of beef consumed in Canada is ground beef. Still, Health Canada intends to slap warning labels on these products consumed by more than 90 per cent of Canadians just as our food inflation rate hits about 10 per cent.
 
Discriminating against these two products despite other exemptions is likely driven by elitist nutritional ideologies fostered by some out-of-touch bureaucrats. It often feels as though the federal government wants to save consumers from themselves. Such a theoretical narrative might go over well in Ottawa, but not so much at the average Canadian kitchen table.
 
The beef and pork industries are not only important to our economy, they are also part of many Canadian traditions and are embedded in our culinary DNA. As we try to figure out how to lead healthier lifestyles, warning Canadians that these unprocessed food staples are now dangerous to their health doesn’t make sense. Dietary recommendations, like most things, should be applied in moderation.
 
Canada will become one of the first countries in the world to have a front-of-package policy targeting single-ingredient products. Many other countries with this type of labelling haven’t required single-ingredient products to have warning labels.
 
At the core of the policy is the intent to help consumers make better, healthier choices at the grocery store, particularly when processed foods are involved. Requiring ground beef and pork to be labelled suggests that the spirit of the policy got lost despite the several meetings Health Canada had with stakeholders.
 
Health Canada is purposefully aiming at two very important food staples that Canadians have been consuming for centuries. It makes no sense. These products need to be exempt from new front-of-package labelling rules.
 
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.

Events unfolding around the world are creating the perfect playbook for a global food security crisis: climate change, a pandemic, war and nationalistic hoarding are all factors.

Climate has been affecting agriculture for a very long time. And the unpredictable nature of severe weather patterns is making the lives of our farmers more difficult. Growing conditions have become anything but predictable in Canada and elsewhere.

The COVID-19 pandemic has weakened supply chains, making logistics more expensive when transporting food. Delays and how the virus has desynchronized the global economy have also impacted costs.

Commodity prices were rising before the invasion of Ukraine in late February, but Russia’s assault has pushed all prices to record levels. Corn is up almost 20 per cent, and wheat is up more than 30 per cent since the invasion. Soybeans, oats and canola are all more expensive than just a few months ago.

The conflict is impacting one of the world’s most significant agri-food production regions. Ukraine produces enough to feed almost 400 million people yearly. That’s greater than the population of the United States.

So idling an economy like Ukraine’s will have consequences. Some experts believe the world has 10 weeks of wheat supplies left due to the Russian invasion. Almost 40 nations get at least 50 per cent of their grain supplies from Ukraine.

For the longest time, global food security was very much a food distribution problem: how to get enough food to every region. We produced enough food but making it available in some regions was a challenge. Now, we won’t have enough food for everyone on Earth.

Early reports suggested that the number of hungry and malnourished people could increase by 100 million due to food shortages following the Ukrainian crisis. But according to the United Nation’s World Food Programme, that number has risen to 220 million in 43 countries.

And some countries are halting trade – as Indonesia did temporarily with palm oil and India did with wheat – which will only lead to more famine.

Russia, affected by many sanctions, now blames the world for the planet’s heightened food crisis. That’s like blaming the fire department for a burning building. But sanctions against Russia undoubtedly have an impact on global food security.

North America, however, is in a food security bubble. It’s not easy for us to appreciate what’s going on around the world. We find most shelves at our grocery stores full of food. Few of us can understand what other parts of the world are experiencing. But the world isn’t in a good place.

While food security is everyone’s business, the Canadian government appears to be living in a vacuum when it comes to agricultural productivity. Canadian farmers face the most expensive seeding season in history, and reports suggest that some farmers have opted not to plant this year due to extremely high input costs. Some tax relief or additional assistance with crop insurance would have been helpful.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., President Joe Biden has asked Congress to approve US$500 million in aid for the farm sector in a bid to encourage U.S. wheat producers to double-crop their fields.

But the Biden administration also temporarily allowed E15 gasoline, which uses 15 per cent ethanol blend, to be sold this summer. It usually can’t be sold from June to September – a measure intended to help reduce gas prices. So food appears to be less of a priority than fuel.

Food plays a central part in our democracies. Hungry societies will eventually break down. World order relies on highly functioning, democratic food systems.

Canada must address the issue of farming productivity to increase yields to help the rest of the world. With our many protectionist measures, Canada lacks the vision needed at a time when the world needs Canadian farming more than ever. Fertilizer affordability is one component.

The planet is coming to realize how capable Russian President Vladimir Putin is at hurting as many people as possible. By invading Ukraine, Putin is weaponizing food. The conflict is crippling the port of Odesa, so Ukraine can’t get its food out of the country. Allowing food to flow out of that region should be a priority.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.

What is becoming clear is that the energy economy and the carbon tech sector have also become a “new
buffalo” for Indigenous communities

ties are becoming heavily involved in carbon capture and storage projects in Alberta, capitalizing on developments that would see carbon emissions from industrial sites get buried deep underground.
Indigenous groups have obtained ownership stakes for two proposed carbon removal projects, the Open Access Wabamun Carbon Hub and Wolf Midstream Sequestration Hub, thus giving these communities more of a financial interest in projects and potential for reliable new revenue sources.
This is a positive development as it demonstrates how the private sector can drive down carbon emissions through technological innovation.
The involvement of many Indigenous groups demonstrates that First Nations and Metis want to get involved in the game and to re-build their economies. Indigenous individuals and communities are just as ambitious, enterprising, and entrepreneurial as any. The problem is how the federal government historically intervened in Indigenous economies and stifled initiative on reserves.
Negative stereotypes about Indigenous people and their work ethic have always existed, showing a lack of awareness of how past Canadian governments limited Indigenous engagement in the economy.
For many Indigenous peoples, it is not as simple as just “pulling up their bootstraps” and getting to work because there are real systemic barriers to economic development on reserves. Especially land ownership restrictions imposed by the Indian Act that limit Indigenous access to capital or policies that necessitate the excessive involvement of the Indigenous Affairs bureaucracy in economic projects.
There are few jobs in these communities and little opportunity for entrepreneurial and job-creating activity.
In 1993, Helen Buckley – a Canadian economist who worked in the Department of Finance – released a scholarly book called From Wooden Ploughs to Welfare: Why Indian Policy Failed in the Prairie Provinces.
She documented how Indigenous communities went from being self-reliant and interdependent to compliant and dependent on the government in the 1870s through deliberate government neglect and policy design.
Their economies went from being based on casual wage work and reliable trapping income towards reliance on social assistance, with the government encouraging people to remain on reserves lacking viable economies.
The Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation (AIOC) was created in 2019 to provide loan guarantees for natural resource projects. According to Alberta Indigenous Relations, this corporation has backstopped more than $160 million in Indigenous investments. And the AIOC recently expanded the projects they back to include major agriculture, transportation, telecommunications, and proposed carbon capture and storage facilities.
Backstopping loans for First Nations to engage in energy and carbon capture projects across the West and beyond represents one big way Indigenous communities can express their innate but repressed ambition and entrepreneurial drive.
In 2011, Indigenous scholar Blair Stonechild referred to post-secondary education as the “new buffalo” for Indigenous peoples. He meant, of course, that with the decline of the bison herds on the Prairies, education now symbolized the new hope for Indigenous prosperity and livelihood.
He is certainly right, but what is becoming clear for Canada is that the energy economy and the carbon tech sector have also become a “new buffalo” for Indigenous communities.
Carbon capture and storage hubs located close to First Nations and Metis communities like the Open Access Wabamun Carbon Hub and Wolf Midstream Sequestration Hub could become tickets out of manufactured poverty, creating wealth for these communities while reducing the emissions impact for Canada.

Joseph Quesnel is a Nova Scotia-based consultant with the Canadian Energy Centre. Joseph is Quebec Metis by heritage.

There was a clash between reality and the federal Liberal Twitter account last week.
The self-congratulatory tweet claimed Liberals have been “making life more affordable” since 2015.
When Canadians look at gas prices, grocery store receipts and mortgage payments, that claim might raise eyebrows.
Does life feel more affordable now than it did seven years ago?
Here’s what the numbers say.
The price of food jumped by nine per cent over the year, the cost of homes skyrocketed, and many people can’t afford to fill their cars to get to work.
In 2015, the price of gasoline in Vancouver was $1.02 per litre. Now it’s more than doubled, costing $2.20 per litre. That’s more than $240 to fill a pickup.
Taxes are a huge factor in gas prices. While global unrest increases the price of oil and a lack of pipelines chokes supply, taxes make it worse.
In Vancouver, 75 cents per litre of the pump price is taxes, including two carbon taxes.
In 2015, there was no federal carbon tax. Now, it’s 11 cents per litre of gasoline. People pay the carbon tax on home heating and the carbon tax is also on diesel. That means we pay more for groceries and everything else delivered to us on a truck.
The feds try to explain away that reality by pointing to rebates, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer has concluded the carbon tax is a “net loss” for most families.
That analysis doesn’t include a second federal carbon tax embedded in fuel standards that’ll be in place by Christmas this year. It’s estimated to add 11 cents to the price of a litre of gas by 2030.
Within the next eight years, the two carbon taxes will cost about 50 cents per litre of gasoline.
Taxes are making life less affordable now, but Canadians should be worried about future affordability because today’s deficits are tomorrow’s taxes.
In 2015, the federal debt was $616 billion. By the end of this year, the debt will have doubled to $1.2 trillion.
Every month, taxpayers are paying more than $2 billion in interest on the debt. By 2025, the PBO expects interest charges to exceed $40 billion per year, more than double the cost at the onset of COVID-19.
The cost to buy a home has jumped since 2015.
Back then, the cost of a detached home in London, Ont. was $282,229. Today, those same homes cost more than $793,000.
Deficit spending has made inflation worse, which in turn has prompted domestic investor groups to park their money in real estate to hedge against inflation, adding to the rising cost of homes.
And the feds have been slow to demand good results in exchange for taxpayers’ money transferred to city halls that are strangling new home builds.
Simon Fraser University research shows a Vancouver home requires 18 inspections and five more for the garage. The city’s building permit fees are also twice the average rate of U.S. cities.
Why did Ottawa hand more than $3.9 million to the City of Vancouver in 2021-22 through the Community Building Fund when that city hall is making it nearly impossible to build homes?
Then there’s inflation.
In 2015, inflation was 1.1 per cent. That means things like new tires or a pound of apples cost about one per cent more than they had a year before.
Today, inflation is at 6.7 per cent. The Trudeau government is making inflation worse with big deficits because the Bank of Canada prints money to buy government debt, creating more dollars chasing fewer goods, which intensifies inflation.
A 6.7 per cent inflation rate is the highest since 1991.
Interestingly, it was about a year after that high inflation that Bill Clinton won the White House with the slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The top issue in Canada today is resoundingly: “Affordability, stupid.”
Franco Terrazzano is the Federal Director and Kris Sims is the B.C. Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.