Canada spends more on health care than just about any other country in the world, and with abysmal results. Yet when it comes to fixing the problem, most politicians and policy-makers are immune to common sense. As business leader Gwyn Morgan writes, allowing private options alongside government-funded health care has been proven to help patients in both systems – around the world and here in Canada, too. Yet the courts continued to uphold restrictions on private care while the Mark Carney government simply promises to throw still more money at the problem – showing itself to be as deluded and dogmatic as those who went before.

For anyone who still bought into Mark Carney’s self-declared image as the great global banker who would responsibly manage Canada’s finances, his recent promise to juice defence spending to 5 percent of GDP – $155 billion per year in today’s dollars – must surely be the final straw. The Liberal Prime Minister had already announced massive spending hikes and a huge deficit, with interest on the federal debt to hit $70 billion by 2029. All this will spell doom for a country already struggling with declining productivity, zero growth and a falling standard of living, concludes Gwyn Morgan. The veteran business leader charts Canada’s path to budgetary disaster and places the blame squarely where it belongs – on Canada’s profligate Prime Minister.

“Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss,” The Who’s Pete Townshend wrote back in 1971. Words that today might well apply to Mark Carney. Canada’s new Liberal Prime Minister says he wants to make Canada a “conventional and clean energy superpower”, and suddenly seems to support new oil and natural gas pipelines. But Gwyn Morgan, who devoted years as a CEO to defending Canada’s oil and natural gas industry, doesn’t buy it. Carney, he notes, spent years abroad on an ever-more-strident net-zero quest, and recently said he’s keeping his predecessor’s oil and gas emissions cap in place. In this incisive critique, Morgan takes the measure of the new PM and finds that the prospects of restoring the Canadian economy have dimmed further.

With a blunt and determined president south of the border and an election in the offing, Canada is at a crisis point – one that has come after a decade of disastrous policies from Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government that have transformed Canada into an economic weakling. In this devastating critique, Gwyn Morgan lays out the main reasons for Canada’s self-inflicted economic decline and the steps that must be taken to get serious in this new reality. And Morgan offers a stark warning: Mark Carney may seem more sophisticated and competent than Trudeau, but he has spent much of his career as a champion of the same destructive agenda. It’s time for real change.

For years the Justin Trudeau government was hostile to the very idea of new oil or natural gas pipelines – right up until U.S. President Donald Trump threatened tariffs on Canadian exports and an all-out trade war loomed. Now Ottawa suddenly thinks west-east pipelines enabling Canadian crude to access global markets are a good idea. Or claims to. Industry veteran Gwyn Morgan, for one, is skeptical. First of all, it’s unlikely that pipeline companies would even want to invest in a country that has become incapable of getting anything done. And the Liberals’ record of quashing development and forcing Canadian oil to be sold at a discount to the U.S. shows they lack basic economic intelligence. Even with Trudeau soon gone, why would they do the sensible thing now?

“It’s hard to imagine a more stupid or dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” Such was Thomas Sowell’s withering critique of bureaucracy – more relevant today than ever. The legendary economist was born to poor sharecroppers and began his career as an avowed Marxist before transforming himself into an insightful and influential critic of the left and all its smug self-regard. In this concise tribute, Gwyn Morgan shares some of Sowell’s sharpest thinking and explains what Canadians can learn from one of America’s greatest minds.

Canada’s beleaguered economy has become beset with strikes called by unions demanding double-digit wage hikes in an era of constrained budgets and slim profit margins. The latest one, by Canada Post, is already inflicting great damage and threatens to drag on, perhaps right up to Christmas. Yet recent legislation passed by the Liberal government (pushed by the NDP) has made it more likely that major strikes will occur, and even more difficult for employers to try to continue functioning. This, writes Gwyn Morgan, is increasingly dividing Canada into a nation of “haves” – overpaid unionized workers – and “have nots” – everyone else. It is time, says Morgan, that someone stood up for the millions of Canadians victimized by power-wielding union bosses and the governments that enable them.

The recent collapse of the power grid in Cuba, plunging the island nation into darkness and grinding its meagre economy to a halt, served as a reminder of electricity’s centrality to modern civilization. That dependency is only expected to increase as more electric vehicles take to the road – and, writes Gwyn Morgan, as the tech sector’s voracious appetite for electrons expands unabated. Morgan pours a pail of cold water on the much-mooted “nuclear revival” that has yet to deliver any actual new electricity. He argues instead that what’s needed is clear-eyed recognition that the most reliable, most abundant, most flexible and most affordable energy source is a fossil fuel located in vast quantities right beneath North Americans’ feet.

If one were to rank contenders in the global trade wars, Canada would likely sit somewhere between pint-sized and pipsqueak. Then why would such a nation’s government choose frontal assault against the world’s biggest and most ruthless economic combatant, one wielding a range of weapons and tactics to organize a counter-attack? Yet this is just what the Justin Trudeau government has done in imposing massive import taxes on electric vehicles from China, writes Gwyn Morgan. And worse, Morgan notes, Trudeau & Co. are sacrificing farmers from western Canada on an altar dedicated to eastern auto workers – while taxing those farmers to help pay for the vast subsidies needed to keep the auto workers employed.

Amidst Canada’s acute productivity crisis, declining per capita income and crushing public debts, one might think governments would at last refocus on opportunities to grow our economy – or at least not shrink it deliberately. But on the West Coast, activists and decision-makers remain fixated on coddling a few dozen iconic members of a non-endangered species even at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in foregone revenue. And the federal government has proved all-too willing to facilitate the devastation. In the second instalment of C2C’s series on Canada’s troubled Pacific Province, Vancouver Island resident Gwyn Morgan explains how environmental politics are creating a biological pecking order in which whales are at the top, salmon in the middle – and humans at the bottom.