TORONTO – Not all the votes have been tallied and verified, but the election is done! All candidates who participated deserve a vote of thanks for having offered to be a part of a process that, in the final analysis, is an examination of what works and an assessment of how to improve what does not. They should ‘be at the ready’ because the results suggest a return match in short order… say twelve to eighteen months.
In the interim, someone will have to bring together the dynamics of a functioning Federal apparatus of government and governance. Parliament has been – to put it mildly – “a mess” since the Budget for 2024-25 was tabled a year ago. In fact, it has been on stand-by mode since former Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland, resigned before last Christmas, setting off a chain reaction leading to a prorogation of Parliament and resignation of the former Prime Minister as PM and Party Leader.
He, Justin Trudeau, was in a political death spiral that threatened to take down the rest of the Party with him. The outcome of the election provided only a partial salvation for his Party. Unfortunately, the burden of “delivery on expectations” may now rest exclusively on the shoulders of his successor, Mark Carney, who has the added challenge of fashioning a “vision statement” (speech from the throne), a Budget, “a coalition of Parliamentarians and a Cabinet to put the plans in place.
All of this is complicated by the fear of the Trumpian Menace, which, frankly, breeds chaos as businesses and provincial authorities scramble to mitigate. But mitigation is only a partial, short-term solution to our collective economic ills – we must reach a consensus on which direction to row our boat.
It is not news. Canada is a wealthy nation with many geographically defined economies (local and provincial) given the reliance on natural resources. For instance, despite the country’s immense size, only about 6% of its terrain is arable (suitable for traditional agricultural exploitation). The forest cover virtually dictates a lumber industry and the development of its downstream products. The ores in our earth are varied and plentiful so the establishment of metallurgical productions and plants would seem to make eminent sense, but the distance from points of extraction to markets requires a transportation network only a well-functioning political infrastructure can guarantee.
Moreover, we in Canada operate in a Continental economy, North-South. According to Statistics Canada (2023), our business enterprises source no more than 24.9% of their supplies from entities in other provinces and sell no more than 22% of their out put in other provinces and territories. What is their marketplace? In a word… the USA.
What does a province like Alberta do when 90% of its Oil and Gas goes to the American market? Alberta’s premier, partisan politics aside, may be correct in trying to set the national agenda when she says that Canada is more than hockey and nostalgia for days gone by.
Our new MPs may have more work than they expected.
