Canadians have heard plenty about the Gordie Howe International Bridge, but largely from one perspective. Much of the public debate has focused on allegations that the owner of the Ambassador Bridge, a prominent Republican donor, has been lobbying the White House to delay the bridge’s opening to protect his commercial interests. That narrative has dominated headlines in Canada.

After speaking with U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra on my podcast, however, one thing became clear: Washington believes there is much more to the story.

While Ambassador Hoekstra did not directly assign blame for the current impasse, he implicitly argued that anti-American political rhetoric from Canadian leaders, including remarks made by Ontario Premier Doug Ford during last fall’s trade tensions, helped erode the trust needed for productive negotiations between Canada and the United States.

If that assessment reflects the thinking in Washington, it also helps explain why discussions surrounding both the bridge and the upcoming review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) have become far more complicated than many Canadians realize.

The Gordie Howe International Bridge, built to provide a publicly owned alternative to the privately owned Ambassador Bridge at one of North America’s busiest trade crossings, is far more than another infrastructure project. It is one of the continent’s most important trade corridors, particularly for agri-food. The Detroit-Windsor gateway carries roughly one-quarter of all merchandise trade between Canada and the U.S., representing well over $300 billion annually. And the bridge, of course, connects the U.S. with Ontario, Doug Ford’s province. Not a coincidence.

Every day, trucks loaded with beef, pork, dairy ingredients, grains, processed foods, fresh produce, beverages and food packaging move across the border. Many of the products found on grocery store shelves cross this corridor multiple times before reaching consumers. North America’s food economy no longer operates within national borders: it functions as one highly integrated supply chain.

Contrary to what many assume, the bridge was never expected to generate a dramatic increase in cross-border traffic. Its real value lies in improving reliability and resilience.

Today, too much trade depends on a single privately owned crossing that has served the region for nearly a century. A serious accident, customs disruption or maintenance issue can delay thousands of shipments within hours. For highly perishable food products and just-in-time manufacturing, predictability is often more valuable than speed. The Gordie Howe Bridge’s direct highway connections, expanded customs plazas and additional capacity will strengthen North America’s supply chains and reduce costly bottlenecks.

The project’s economics have also evolved dramatically. When it was announced in 2012, the bridge was expected to cost roughly $2.1 billion and open by 2020. Today, construction costs are approaching $6.7 billion, and the opening has been delayed by several years.

Canada assumed virtually all of the upfront construction costs with the expectation that toll revenues collected over decades would eventually recover the investment. Since a significant portion of those tolls will ultimately be paid by American trucking companies, manufacturers and retailers, it is understandable that Washington may want to revisit elements of an agreement negotiated under very different economic circumstances. Every additional month of delay, however, carries a cost for businesses and consumers on both sides of the border.

Americans have seen their share of delayed infrastructure projects, but they happen far more frequently in Canada. In the case of the Gordie Howe Bridge, the delays and cost overruns have fundamentally changed the project’s business model.

Washington’s concerns about the bridge’s financial realities are not only understandable—they are economically rational.

The lesson from my conversation with Ambassador Hoekstra extends well beyond one bridge. Infrastructure projects do not exist in a political vacuum. They depend on trust, credibility and constructive relationships between governments. If Washington genuinely believes that recent political rhetoric has weakened that trust, Canada cannot simply dismiss those concerns. Rebuilding that trust begins by recognizing that the American concerns deserve serious consideration.

Refusing to acknowledge the economic realities behind the bridge dispute risks delaying one of North America’s most important trade corridors even longer. Getting the Gordie Howe International Bridge open should not be viewed as a political victory for one side or the other—it is an economic necessity for both countries.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, co-host of The Food Professor Podcast and visiting scholar at McGill University.

The post Washington is right about the Gordie Howe Bridge first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Canada’s families have been shrinking for decades, and we did not arrive at a historic low fertility rate overnight. When birth rates decline year after year, as has been the case in Canada, they reveal something deeper about our society.

As new Cardus research has shown, the decline in fertility is not simply about people wanting fewer children, but Canadians struggling to have the children they say they would like to have. This reflects a complex interplay between economic and social realities. As Canadians consider future family life, they worry about affordability, stable housing, finances, and the tensions between having children and achieving other life goals. These challenges not only affect fertility rates but also the well-being of parents and would-be parents.

Home Alone: Why Most Canadians Have Fewer Children Than They Want is a follow-up to our 2022 survey looking at why Canadians are having fewer children and why many families are having fewer children than they hope for. The survey inquired about fertility preferences, intentions and outcomes of 3,000 Canadian women and men aged 18 to 44, including a diverse mix of Anglophone, Francophone and foreign-born adults.

The study revealed a gap between the number of children Canadians would ideally like to have and the number of children they intend to have. On average, Canadian adults say they want about two children but report they intend to have an average of just over 1.5 children.

Not all intentions are realized. The total fertility rate, an estimate of the average number of children a woman will have over her lifetime, was just 1.25 children in 2024.

Canada’s fertility remains below replacement level—internationally recognized as 2.1 children per family—and is trending in the wrong direction. While Canada’s population has never been higher, having a healthy fertility rate is typically essential to a country’s long-term prosperity and health and, as noted in the research, important to the well-being and life satisfaction of parents.

While the national implications are important, our primary concern is the effect of the gap between fertility desires and intentions on well-being. Our study found that “undershooting,” meaning having fewer children than planned, has a noticeable effect on life satisfaction. When asking adults aged 40 to 44 who participated in the study about their life satisfaction, those who achieved their desired family size averaged 6.2 out of 10 while those who undershot their fertility ideal averaged 5.8. We found that over half of respondents aged 40 to 44 had fewer children than they said they wanted. Ensuring Canadian families feel able to have the family size they desire should be an important social concern.

We were surprised that worries around child-care affordability and availability affecting fertility decisions increased between 2022 and the current survey. These worries increased despite the federal government spending more than $30 billion over the previous five years on day care affordability and access. The rapid reduction of some day-care fees has increased demand beyond available supply. This may have increased awareness about day-care cost and access issues, increasing worries among parents and potential parents who were considering having more children.

Public policy proposals that address issues such as housing and affordability can help. Policymakers should be concerned about Canadians’ ability to achieve the family life they desire. As the results of the survey show, not all factors can be addressed through public policy. Civil society has a role to play in strengthening community support for parents and in shaping how we think about and approach parenting.

Peter Jon Mitchell is the Family Program Director at Cardus and a leading expert on Canadian family dynamics. Co-author of I . . . Do? Why Marriage Still Matters, he is a national authority on child care and youth development, frequently consulted by media and parliamentary committees to provide insight on public policy.”

The post Canada’s fertility crisis reflects decades of bad government first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on June 12, his fortune crossing the line as SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq. Lost in the noise was a fact most Canadians would rather not dwell on. Elon Musk is Canadian.

Musk acquired his citizenship in 1989 through his mother, Maye, born in Saskatchewan. He cleaned a boiler room near Vancouver, laboured on a cousin’s farm, and spent two years at Queen’s University in Kingston before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania and never moving back.

Asked years later why he had crossed the Atlantic, Musk said he came to North America for the chance to do great things in technology. Read the geography in that sentence. North America, and in practice the United States. Silicon Valley held the capital, the customers, and the tolerance for risk. Canada held the doorway.

Honesty requires a concession. Musk did not flee Canadian hostility in 1992. The technological frontier ran through California, and almost any founder chasing it would have gone where he went. Canada lost him that year to opportunity, not to malice.

The malice came later, and it ran the other way. In February 2025, a parliamentary petition sponsored by New Democrat MP Charlie Angus demanded that Ottawa revoke Musk’s citizenship and void his passport. The petition gathered more than 360,000 signatures, among the largest the Commons had ever recorded. The Citizenship Act permits no such thing, so the campaign changed nothing in law. The sentiment it recorded is the point. What mattered was not what the petition could do but what it revealed.

Grant the petitioners their strongest grievance. A Trump administration was musing aloud about annexing Canada, threatening tariffs, and seating at its centre a Canadian who had poured his fortune into American politics. Set against that provocation, the response still shrinks. The annexation talk was presidential bluster, not a column of armour at the border, and the petition answered it by demanding Ottawa strip a man of his nationality. The alarm outran the threat. Notice the instrument it reached for. Confronted with a successful son who had cast his lot with the other side, the reflex was expulsion rather than contest, and the country applies that reflex to far more than people.

Consider the same disposition at the national scale. What appeared in miniature in the petition appears more broadly in the country’s treatment of investment and enterprise. Between 2015 and 2024, by the Royal Bank of Canada’s own reckoning, more than $1 trillion in net investment left the country, the largest capital exodus in Canadian history. For every dollar that came in, two went out, and RBC ranked Canada dead last in the G7 for investment at home.

The money did not evaporate. It went hunting, as Musk did, for higher returns and a warmer welcome, mostly south of the border. The capital was never even absent. Canadian firms sat on more than $1 trillion in cash they declined to deploy at home. The country was not short of money. It was short of reasons to keep it.

Here the irony sharpens to a point. The same RBC study named six sectors in which Canada must find some $1.8 trillion over the coming decade to lead the G7 in growth. One of those six is space, a field in which Canada once punched above its weight through achievements such as the Canadarm. Canada produced the founder of the world’s dominant space company, watched him build it under another flag, moved to cancel his nationality, and now learns from its largest bank that space ranks among the industries in which the country trails and must spend a fortune to rejoin. Canada exiled the asset and kept the invoice.

Could SpaceX have risen on Canadian soil? Most likely not. It survives on NASA and Pentagon contracts no Canadian firm could win, and Tesla drew on venture pools whose Canadian counterparts stay shallow to this day. Canada could not have built Musk’s companies in the 1990s, and it has spent the decade since manufacturing the reasons the next founder will leave: uncompetitive taxes, a regulatory thicket that turns projects into endurance tests, a federal posture that treats resource development as something to apologize for. Capital reads these signals the way water reads a slope.

The petition and the exodus rhyme. A confident country claims its successful and competes to hold it. An insecure one treats achievement as a problem to manage, reaches for the instruments of expulsion, a revoked passport in one case and a punishing fiscal regime in the other, and then wonders why the builders and their money keep settling somewhere friendlier.

Canadians tell themselves a flattering story that the world quietly longs to be Canadian. The Musk episode shatters the story. Canada produced a Canadian who conquered the commercial world, and the instinct was to disown him.

Canada did not lose Elon Musk to America. It practically gave him away, for the same reasons it keeps giving away its capital, and then asked for the passport back. A country that cannot keep its builders keeps only the grievance.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.

The post Canada self-destructive war on success first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Title: Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World
Author: Patrick Wyman
Publisher: Harper
Publication Year: 2026
Available from: Amazon

If you think of human development as having moved in a smoothly linear fashion—from foraging to farming to villages to cities to modern states—Patrick Wyman’s new book will add a dollop of messy complexity to your perspective. Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World paints a picture that’s the opposite of orderly.

“In some places, villages came before farming; in other places where people began planting crops and tending animals, newly minted farmers never settled down at all. Foragers were perfectly capable of building permanent settlements without ever taking a single step down the path toward domestication of plants or animals.”

Nor was the development trajectory consistently positive. Success for a while didn’t guarantee that it would be sustained: “In reality, rather than a convenient model of steadily increasing population and sophistication, societies fell to pieces all the time.”

Wyman focuses on what he views as the “transformative” 10,000-year period between the end of the Ice Age and the end of the Bronze Age. And the story he tells is facilitated by the revolution in archaeological science.

Satellite imagery, lasers and ground-penetrating radar provide maps to locate sites buried long ago. DNA and isotope analysis of excavated, ancient bones yield information about who these people were, their relationships to each other, their diets and their geographic origins.

Putting form to all this new data, Wyman identifies several themes.

As noted earlier, there’s the sheer variety, even chaos, of the early human experience. Apparent success could morph into total failure. Some groups even “died out completely, leaving behind no trace in the genetic record.”

The relationship between people and their environments is a big part of the story. With the climate “constantly in flux on every scale from the global to the hyper-local,” how people adapted to change or proactively shaped their environments was important. These actions were often, but not always, beneficial to human flourishing.

Demography—defined as the number of people living in a time and place—is another theme. Groups that were able to exploit resources thrived and their greater numbers magnified their influence. To a substantial degree, the future belonged to those who showed up for it.

Migration was also material, not only in the geographic spread of languages and cultures, but also in the adoption of new technologies and patterns of resource use. To quote: “The spread of farming around the world was almost entirely a record of migration, driven by demographic growth, rather than indigenous peoples adopting a new mode of subsistence and ecological engineering.”

To his credit, Wyman doesn’t shy away from the darker side of the story. Violence was a constant. Indeed, he characterizes it as “a foundational part of the human experience.”

A 2011 discovery of a mass grave in southern Poland offers a small-scale example. It contains the remains of 15 people who were clubbed to death, children included. Radiocarbon data narrows the timing of the massacre to between 2880 and 2776 BC. Further detail comes from DNA and isotope analysis, indicating that the victims were a familial group—four half-brothers with their locally born spouses and children. And the absence of defensive injuries suggests calculated, cold-blooded killing.

Wyman illustrates the prevalence of warfare in the Late Bronze Age with three roughly contemporaneous examples.

One is the Battle of Kadesh, fought in 1274 BC, in Syria between two kings—the Egyptian Ramesses II and the Hittite Muwatalli II. It was a large-scale affair, featuring 5,000 or 6,000 chariots and tens of thousands of infantry. All in all, there were at least 40,000 participants. As Wyman puts it, “Ramesses and Muwatalli had resources to burn, territory to conquer, and glory to seek.” Tendentiously written contemporary accounts notwithstanding, the resulting carnage seems to have been inconclusive.

A second example takes us to China and what was then the largest settlement in the world. With a population of around 100,000 spread over 14 square miles, Anyang was the capital of China’s first historical dynasty, the Shang.

It was a nasty place, rigidly hierarchical and characterized by an elite ruling class that waged endless wars and enslaved thousands, the latter constituting not only an involuntary workforce but also fodder for human sacrifices to placate ancestral spirits and deities.

Although on a much smaller scale, the third example is particularly interesting. Unlike the other two, there are no contemporary written records as the region where it transpired—northern Germany—was “entirely without writing for at least another thousand years.” So what we now know is a function of modern archaeology.

The location is in the Tollense Valley and the combatants were a mixture of locals and non-locals, the latter coming from as far afield as 350 miles. Weapons ranged from swords and axes to wooden clubs, and the fighting took place along a short stretch of the Tollense River. Evidence suggests it was a vicious, close-quarters affair with bodies being left to decompose where they fell or dumped into shallow nearby pits.

Reading Wyman’s book is a sobering experience, a reminder that prosperity and security aren’t the natural order of things. And certainly not something to be taken for granted.

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical—well, perhaps a little bit.

Our Verdict

Patrick Wyman’s Lost Worlds succeeds because it replaces the familiar story of human progress with one that is richer, more complicated and far more convincing. Accessible without sacrificing scholarly depth, Lost Worlds challenges long-held assumptions about humanity’s past while offering a fascinating reminder that history is shaped as much by chance and circumstance as by progress.

The post History is a lie: Progress isn’t inevitable first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Canada is one of several countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway, Austria and Denmark, considering or proposing a social media ban for users aged 16 or younger. If Ottawa ultimately implements this plan, it would join a small list of countries to choose this course of direction: Australia (the first nation to ever initiate this policy in Dec. 2025), Indonesia and Malaysia.

While this discussion to protect young social media users may be well-meaning in principle, it will be a complete waste of time in practice. Ottawa’s proposed social media ban has no realistic chance of success.

Prime Minister Mark Carney “has faced calls from child safety advocates and children’s health organizations,” the National Post’s Stephanie Taylor wrote on June 8, “to revive efforts that were advanced under former prime minister Justin Trudeau to legislate tech platforms to tackle the harms users face.” Trudeau’s Bill C-63, or the Online Harms Act, was a controversial, draconian and anti-free speech proposal that mercifully died when the House of Commons was prorogued in January 2025.

Carney is going to revive it in a different fashion. His Liberal government’s plan, Bill C-34, would “establish a social media ban for minors younger than 16 will include provisions that allow platforms to seek exemptions should they demonstrate an ability to keep the youngest Canadians safe while using their products online.” While this piece of legislation “is not expected to include the same type of ban for AI chatbots,” it will “establish a set of responsibilities platforms need to meet.”

Bill C-34, also known as the Safe Social Media Act, would implement a “16-year-old minimum age requirement” for social media users. A Digital Safety Act would be introduced to “establish new safety requirements for social media services and AI chatbot services.” Social media services would have “A Duty to Make Certain Content Inaccessible” that could be harmful and victimize children or survivors of sexual abuse, as well as “A Duty to Act Responsibly” by reducing harmful content and blocking users who choose to abuse their social media privileges. There would also be a “Digital Safety Commission of Canada Act” to establish “a new Digital Safety Commission of Canada to administer the framework and to help foster a culture of online safety in Canada.”

Some Canadians will likely view Carney’s Bill C-34 as being more reasonable on the surface than Trudeau’s Bill C-63. While the language and measures are arguably a bit more tempered, the same obtrusive, draconian tone and principles haven’t disappeared. If the Liberal government ever emulates Australia and considers either implementing or increasing penalties for social media companies, it will only get worse.

Moreover, the proposed ban on social media platforms won’t work. While few would deny the issues, problems and concerns related to young children and access to social media, this would be an extremely poor decision.

Here are a few reasons why.

First, excessive government regulation in our lives has always been undesirable. Why on earth would we want more of it? We should always be demanding less of it. Canadians need to seriously think about it.

Second, these types of controversial and difficult decisions should be left up to parents, not politicians. This should almost go without saying. Unfortunately, it needs to be said on a regular basis in this country.

Third, where does Ottawa plan to exactly set the bar? Your guess is as good as mine. Based on the fact that there will reportedly be exceptions to AI chatbots, it could be a very low bar for the foreseeable future.

Fourth, does Ottawa really know how far-reaching social media is, from texting to gaming? Carney and the Liberals will suggest that they do. History has shown that this Liberal government, whether led by Trudeau or Carney, has huge gaps in their thinking, rationalizing and general expectations. That’s not a good sign in terms of what they’re planning to do with social media. Far from it, in fact.

Fifth, children will easily get around this ban. They’re more adept at social media than the vast majority of adults. If you think a social media ban is going to change anything and everything, you really don’t have any idea how the mind of a child works.

Sixth, if you think that putting the genie back in the bottle at this late date is going to help or work, you’re even more foolish than Carney and the Liberals.

These reasons, among others, help ensure that Canada’s proposed social media ban for users under the age of 16 will fail miserably if it’s implemented. The best strategy for Canada and other countries toying with similar legislation to do? That’s easy: don’t do it.

Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.

The post Stop pretending Ottawa’s social media ban will actually work first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Relations between Ottawa and Washington have soured, and the therapy suggestions arrived on schedule: look across the Atlantic. Europe, the argument goes, is a stable counterweight to an unpredictable America. The Economist even floated Canadian membership in the European Union.

The premise is appealing, but it mistakes Canada’s problem. No trading partner can compensate for an economy that has spent years producing too little from each hour of work.

At first glance, the size numbers flatter the idea. The European Union produces close to US$20 trillion a year, one of the largest blocs on Earth. If diversification is the goal, why not lash the canoe to another giant?

But size tells only half the story. Gross domestic product (GDP) measures the size of an economy. GDP per capita measures how much it produces for each person. American output per person sits near US$85,000 and the European Union near US$43,000. Canada, around US$54,000, has drifted far closer to Europe than the United States. Demographics can influence that figure in the short run, but over time living standards rise or fall with productivity.

The reflex is to read that drift as a verdict on trade. That gets the cause backwards. Canada did not slide toward European income levels by selling to Europe. It slid there by getting less out of every hour its people work.

Carolyn Rogers, the Bank of Canada’s senior deputy governor, said as much in March 2024. She called the situation “an emergency” and said it was “time to break the glass.” In 1984, the Canadian economy produced 88 cents of value for every dollar an hour of American work produced. By 2022, that figure had fallen to 71 cents, a slide of nearly a fifth. Among the G7, only Italy lost more ground.

Productivity is how much value an hour of work creates. That is the engine. That is what stalled.

Now for the part the Atlantic enthusiasts skip. Much of the gap between American and European incomes is a choice. Europeans take longer holidays, shorter weeks, earlier retirements. They traded income for time.

Canada never struck that bargain. Canadians work close to American hours and take home European pay. The OECD counts about 1,709 working hours a year in Canada, near the American 1,799 and well above France’s 1,500 and Germany’s 1,343. On the measure that settles the argument, output per hour, Canada does not even match Western Europe. By OECD estimates, an hour of Canadian work produced about US$75 of value in 2023, against US$89 in France and US$97 in the United States. Canada reaches European income only by working longer hours, and still produces less value per hour.

So the Washington-or-Brussels argument starts to look like what it is. A way of avoiding the troubled engine. You can tow a stalled car to a bigger garage or a friendlier one. Neither turns the key.

None of this makes diversification foolish. Resting a trading nation’s whole weight on one dominant customer is a real risk, and it grows when that customer turns erratic. Spreading commerce toward Europe, Asia and Latin America is, and should have been, ordinary prudence. Diversification and substitution are different undertakings, though. No partner replaces the United States. Geography and a century of cross-border investment have settled that.

Trade is the easy part. Production is the hard one. A more productive Canada would carry real weight in Washington. Low productivity is what breeds dependence. Strength buys room to disagree.

The lever is no mystery. Workers produce more with better tools, and better tools come from investment in the machinery, software and infrastructure that let each worker produce more. Canadian firms have invested less than their American rivals for years. Between 2013 and 2023, capital spending per worker grew about 28 per cent in the U.S.and roughly seven per cent in Canada, and investment in the resource industries fell about 15 per cent. Business makes that investment. Government sets the climate in which firms decide whether to.

When a mine needs a decade of hearings before the first shovel, the company digs in Nevada instead. When a major pipeline is abandoned after the review rules shift mid-stream, as Energy East was in 2017, the next one never gets drawn up. When a carbon rule might change after the next election, the factory waits, or rises in Texas. Capital is not patriotic. It goes where the rules are clear and the answer comes quickly. None of that is decided in Washington or Brussels. It is decided in Ottawa and the provincial capitals.

A hostile president across the border has become a convenient alibi for a generation of officials asleep at the productivity switch. The slowdown began years before this White House. Washington did not create it. Ottawa has failed to reverse it.

Ottawa did not fail alone. The business class shares the blame, having lobbied for protection and subsidy when it should have pressed for a regime that rewards building. Raising the elbows toward Washington was never going to lift output per hour.

Carolyn Rogers warned two years ago that it was time to break the glass. Canada went back to debating trade instead of productivity.

Canada turns 159 this July 1. Birthdays invite celebration or reckoning, perhaps a measure of both. The fireworks will go up easily enough. The harder question is the one Ottawa keeps avoiding.

No trading partner can compensate for a productivity problem. This Canada Day, the honest gesture is to look past the border, at the engine idling in the driveway.

A country must earn prosperity before it can trade on it.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.

The post Canada can’t trade its way back to prosperity first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Canada cannot expect to negotiate from a position of strength while sending contradictory messages about its economy and its relationship with the United States. Yet that is precisely the position Ottawa has created as the first formal review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) begins on July 1.

For a country whose economy, and particularly its agri-food sector, depends on stable, predictable access to the U.S. market, credibility matters.

Only weeks ago, the federal government released a video portraying Canada’s reliance on the U.S. as a strategic weakness. Shortly thereafter, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before an audience in New York proclaiming that Canada could help “Make America Great Again.”

Which message are our trading partners supposed to believe?

Trade policy is not branding. It is about confidence. Businesses investing billions in food processing plants, logistics networks and manufacturing facilities need to know where Canada stands. Policy cannot shift depending on the audience.

Carney has also attempted to reassure Canadians by claiming that Canada is now creating jobs at twice the rate of the U.S.

The data tell a different story.

Over the past year, Canada has recorded a net loss of roughly 25,000 jobs while the U.S. has added nearly 900,000. Canadians are entitled to their political preferences, but they are equally entitled to expect public statements to reflect official data.

What is equally troubling is how little scrutiny these claims receive. When economic statements from the country’s highest office do not align with official statistics, one expects journalists, economists and the opposition to ask difficult questions. Increasingly, that seems not to happen. Regardless of which party governs, evidence—not messaging—should drive public debate.

Canada’s export diversification narrative deserves similar scrutiny.

Yes, exports to countries outside the U.S. have increased. But much of that growth has been driven by higher shipments of gold and other commodities. Statistics Canada has noted that, excluding precious metals, export performance is considerably weaker. Other analyses show that the gains have largely come from established exporters selling more abroad rather than new Canadian firms successfully entering foreign markets.

Nowhere is that disconnect more apparent than in Canada’s agri-food sector.

Roughly 70 to 72 per cent of Canada’s agri-food exports still go to the U.S. That dependence is not a policy failure; it is an economic reality. Geography matters. Integrated supply chains matter. Shared food safety standards matter. Decades of commercial relationships matter.

Diversification should remain an objective but it cannot become an excuse to underestimate the importance of our largest customer.

Recent tensions surrounding the opening and operation of the Gordie Howe International Bridge illustrate why Canada’s relationship with Washington matters beyond the negotiating table. Nearly one-quarter of all Canada-U.S. agri-food trade moves through the Detroit-Windsor corridor, where the aging Ambassador Bridge has long served as the backbone of cross-border commerce. Every unnecessary political dispute involving this critical gateway increases uncertainty for exporters, processors and distributors on both sides of the border.

Media reports that the U.S. is seeking a share of toll revenues are difficult to justify given that Canada financed the construction of the bridge. Canada assumed virtually all of the financial risk, and many Canadians understandably view Washington’s position as unreasonable.

But it is what it is. Trade negotiations are not about fairness. They are about leverage and outcomes, and food supply chains do not respond well to diplomatic friction.

That is why the tone of Canada’s relationship with Washington matters. Public disagreements are sometimes unavoidable, particularly when national interests diverge. But there is a meaningful difference between defending Canada’s interests and allowing political theatre to overshadow economic diplomacy.

If Canada hopes to influence the upcoming CUSMA review, it must recognize a simple reality: successful trade negotiations are built through credibility, relationships and continuous engagement. They are rarely advanced through public rhetoric alone.

Canada has every right to defend its interests. It should do so firmly and confidently. But firmness is most effective when accompanied by consistency, accuracy and strategic discipline.

CUSMA has transformed North American agriculture into one of the world’s most integrated food systems. Millions of consumers benefit every day through lower costs, greater product availability and more resilient supply chains. That success should not be taken for granted.

As the agreement enters its first formal review, Canada needs fewer slogans and more strategy.

Our exporters, our farmers and Canadian consumers deserve nothing less.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, co-host of The Food Professor Podcast and visiting scholar at McGill University.

The post Ottawa is gambling with our most critical trade relationship first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on June 12, the day SpaceX went public. American singer Billie Eilish had already called him a coward and shared a graphic listing the hunger he could end. When the day came, Oxfam called it a danger to democracy, and politicians reached, as always, for a wealth tax.

Before you join in, ask a simple question: What is the trillion, really?

Picture a vault full of coins, one man swimming in it while the world goes hungry. Almost none of it is like that. Musk’s fortune consists largely of his shares in SpaceX, Tesla and the rest, worth whatever price the market sets today. It is not cash in a bank. It is an estimate, and it moves every minute. It can drop by hundreds of billions between Friday and Monday. A number that can vanish in an afternoon is a strange kind of hoard.

So what would it mean to give it away, like Eilish wants? To get the cash, Musk would have to sell. Dumping that many shares at once would crash the price he was selling at, and the trillion would shrink in his hands as he reached for it. You cannot spend a number on a screen.

A bigger mix-up sits underneath. SpaceX was not a public company a month ago. Today, the market figures it is worth more than most countries make in a year. Who got poorer when that number showed up? Nobody. No one took a slice from anyone else’s plate. Reusable rockets that cut the cost of getting to space made it. Wealth like this is built, not grabbed from a pile that was already sitting there. The idea that his gain is your loss comes from an older time, when one man’s full barn meant another’s empty one.

Say someone could grab the trillion and spend it. Would that go well? The graphics assume a planner who could spend a trillion dollars better than the market that made it. Money in private hands has to answer to profit and loss. A business that wastes its resources goes under and stops wasting. Money run by politicians answers to nothing so strict. Take the wealth from people who have to please customers and hand it to people who have to win votes, and the question is no longer whether anyone is kinder. It is whether anyone still knows where the money should go.

The inequality numbers are real. Oxfam puts billionaire wealth at $18.3 trillion. The richest tenth own about three-quarters of the world’s wealth. But those numbers measure the gap, not hunger. Even the reports waving them admit, usually in a line they hope you skip, that extreme poverty keeps falling. A world where the bottom rises while the top rises faster is not clearly worse than one where both sink together, unless you have decided the gap matters more than the floor.

The critics are not wrong about everything. When big money and government climb into bed together, both go bad. Musk is the proof. His companies have run on government contracts for years, and he walked straight into a White House job. Money made through government connections is not the same as money made by selling people something they want. The first kind should worry us. The second kind should not.

This is where the argument turns back on the people making it. They fear concentrated power, then ask for more of it. Every time the state gets bigger, the well-connected get a bigger prize to chase. The cure for cronyism is a smaller government, not a fatter one. Cut the subsidies and contracts that let people get rich in Ottawa or Washington instead of in the open market.

The panic treats a price as a hoard, a lucky decade as a dynasty, and a thing built as a thing stolen.

Envy makes a poor economist. It makes an even worse lawmaker.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.

The post Envy of Musk’s wealth is a losing economic strategy first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

For students across Ontario, the school year has come to a close. While some of us might be thinking about vacation and beach season, Acton Academy Mississauga founder Sabrina Anzini is hitting the accelerator.

Acton, a Kindergarten-to-Grade 8 school, was founded just two years ago and uses self-directed education for 18 learners. It has expansion plans, including high school programming, in the years ahead.

Acton is part of a global network of learner-driven schools founded, Sabrina says, “to recognize that every child is on a hero’s journey to find their calling to change the world.” Her independent school operates on a learner-driven model of education, without graded assessments. Instead, it focuses on mastery of the curriculum through Socratic discussions, real-world projects and individualized goals. Learning is facilitated by educators (“guides”) who help students research questions, solve problems and build resilience and ownership of their own learning.

Sabrina and Acton are not alone. Recent Cardus research has found that more than 300 schools have been started since 2022 in Ontario, ranging from nature schools, Montessori schools, schools for students with special needs, microschools, classical education schools and more. Some offer distributed learning programs in which students learn at home for two or three days each week and attend school for the remainder of the week. Across Canada, more than 470,000 students attend a wide variety of independent schools like these.

Our research shows more than ever that families in Ontario want educational options and opportunities for their children. Independent schools are responding to that demand, even without government support, with a laser focus on meeting the needs of students and their families:

“To give children autonomy and a place to learn and play in nature.”
“To provide a place for neurodiverse students to learn in a safe, caring community.”
“To provide…the wider community with a middle school that allows students to develop independence and a strong foundation of knowledge and skills.”

As for Sabrina, she says simply, “There were no learner-driven education offerings in my local area.”

These school leaders are ordinary folks who have seen a problem and are creating solutions. They believe that education in Ontario can be better, and that education that meets all student needs is a shared goal—not something that should be left only to public education.

Each of these schools offers solutions to some of education’s most pressing challenges, and their presence and growth reflect real desires from real parents for real educational opportunities. They challenge our default assumptions about education and how it should be offered.

As entrepreneurs like Sabrina work without support to address gaps in our education system, it’s time to ask our educational policymakers: Shouldn’t a robust publicly supported education system include all sorts of different schools? Why would our conception of what public education is—or what it could be—exclude alternative delivery methods like Montessori and nature schools?

One of the most common arguments for the status quo that I hear is that only public education can build social cohesion, and that allowing choice in education automatically leads to segregation. Not only does Cardus data on graduate civic outcomes suggest otherwise, but logic suggests our framework is faulty.

Social cohesion is a product of human formation, not something exclusive to public education. Both independent and public schools are a reflection of their local communities, and both are highly capable of fostering within their students the attributes and disciplines that build social cohesion. What’s more, social cohesion, which we desperately need more of these days, is a function of local community contexts built around shared goals—something inherent to independent schools.

We can build better systems. All we need to do is pay a little more attention to, and support, the grassroots activity going on around us. As Sabrina told us, “Parents are well aware and acknowledge that traditional education methods don’t work anymore.”

It’s brave souls like Sabrina and the parents sending their children to her school who are doing something about the untenable status quo. While the Sabrinas of the world get to work this summer, it’s time for our educational policymakers to hit the books and rethink what education looks like in Ontario.

Joanna DeJong VanHof is the Program Director for Education at the think tank Cardus. An expert in K-12 education systems, her research focuses on the availability, accessibility, and accountability of independent schooling in Canada. With a background in educational leadership and governance, Joanna is currently completing her PhD in educational leadership and policy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

The post The public school monopoly is failing Ontario’s kids first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

As Alberta moves to implement its two-tier health-care system with Bill 11, policymakers and commentators are increasingly debating whether Canadian provinces should pursue more private-pay medicine in response to the long wait times and other challenges that patients currently face. This is not the best way forward.

Alberta’s experiment with two-tier health care—access to surgery based on wealth, not need—will worsen wait times and undermine the principles of Canadian medicare.

And while our health-care system is failing many Canadians, the solution is not to make it better for those who can pay while making it considerably worse for everyone else.

In Canada, access to health care is supposed to be based on need, not on ability to pay. Yet Alberta’s newly passed Bill 11, which takes effect on Sept. 1, moves the province toward U.S.-style, for-profit health care.

For the first time in Canada, surgeons will be allowed to work in both the public system and a private-pay market for medically necessary surgeries. Before Bill 11, physicians could leave the public system and work privately, but they had to choose. Under Alberta’s new model, surgeons can participate in both systems simultaneously. Even Quebec, which has a more developed private sector, does not allow physicians to bill the public insurance plan while also charging other patients privately for the same medically necessary services.

This change will hurt the public health-care system in many ways, but three concerns stand out:

First, Alberta already faces a shortage of nurses, anesthetists and other specialized staff. Many of the surgeries targeted for expansion—including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery, hernia repairs and endoscopic screening procedures—depend on these same professionals. Private facilities will compete with public hospitals for scarce personnel, drawing resources away from the public system.

Second, Alberta’s recent experience expanding for-profit surgical clinics is discouraging. Median wait times have increased for nine of the 11 major procedures being tracked, including all cancer surgeries. Greater reliance on for-profit surgical clinics has coincided with longer waits, including in emergency departments.

Third, the system creates perverse incentives. Surgeons and private facilities will be able to profit while faster access is available to those who can pay. There is no business model for private-pay surgeries if public wait times are short. During the Alberta government’s announcement, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange did not discourage physicians from making a “sales pitch” to patients seeking faster treatment. That is not a side effect of the policy. It is a predictable consequence.

Proponents point to Germany and Australia as models. But those comparisons are misleading. In many European countries, private practice is tightly regulated, and most surgeons have hospital employment contracts that constrain private activity. Most also devote a larger share of spending to publicly funded care. Australia heavily subsidizes private insurance and has longer waits than Canada. Neither country demonstrates that two-tier care improves access for everyone.

Canadians should pay attention because the implications extend beyond Alberta. It is the first province to legislate two-tier health care while encouraging a private insurance market for medically necessary care. If this approach spreads, it could fundamentally change the character of Canadian medicare and conflict with the Canada Health Act’s ban on financial barriers to care.

The issue comes down to a choice between two visions of health care—and two visions of Canada. One treats health care as a public good, where access is based on need. The other treats health care as a market, where investors profit from illness. Canadians should have an open discussion about health care. It should start with a simple question: Do we want a system that rewards queue-jumping for the rich, or one that guarantees access based on need? Bill 11 moves Canada in the wrong direction.

Andrew Longhurst is a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Dr. Paul Parks is an Alberta-based emergency room physician.

The post Alberta’s Bill 11 undermines the foundation of public health care first appeared on Edmonton's Business.