From the Fraser Institute

By Jock Finlayson

It’s no exaggeration to describe the Trudeau years as almost a “lost decade” for Canadian prosperity.

The Justin Trudeau era is ending, after nine-and-a-half years as prime minister. His exit coincides with the onset of a trade crisis with the United States. Trudeau leaves behind a stagnant Canadian economy crippled by dwindling productivity, a long stretch of weak business investment, and waning global competitiveness. These are problems Trudeau chose to ignore throughout his tenure. His successors will not have that luxury.

It’s no exaggeration to describe the Trudeau years as almost a “lost decade” for Canadian prosperity. Measured on a per-person basis, national income today is barely higher than it was in 2015, after stripping out the effects of inflation. On this core metric of citizen wellbeing, Canada has one of the worst records among all advanced economies. We have fallen far behind the U.S., where average real income has grown by 15 per cent over the same period, and most of Europe and Japan, where growth has been in the range of 5-6 per cent.

Meanwhile, Ottawa’s debt has doubled on Trudeau’s watch, and both federal government spending and the size of the public service have ballooned, even as service levels have generally deteriorated. Housing in Canada has never been more expensive relative to average household incomes, and health care has never been harder to access. The statistics on crime point to a decline in public safety in the last decade.

Reviving prosperity will be the most critical task facing Trudeau’s successor. It won’t be easy, due in part to a brewing trade war with the U.S. and the retreat from open markets and free trade in much of the world. But a difficult external environment is no reason for Canada to avoid tackling the domestic impediments that discourage economic growth, business innovation and entrepreneurial wealth creation.

In a recent study, a group of economists and policy advisors outlined an agenda for renewed Canadian prosperity. Several of their main recommendations are briefly summarized below.

Return to the balanced budget policies embraced by the Chretien/Martin and Harper governments from 1995 to 2015. Absent a recession, the federal government should not run deficits. And the next government should eliminate ineffective spending programs and poor-performing federally-funded agencies.

Reform and reduce both personal and business income taxes. Canada’s overall income tax system is increasingly out of line with global best practise and has become a major barrier to attracting private-sector investment, top talent and world-class companies. A significant overhaul of the country’s tax policies is urgently needed.

Retool Ottawa’s existing suite of climate and energy policies to reduce the economic damage done by the long list of regulations, taxes, subsidies and other measures adopted Trudeau. Canada should establish realistic goals for lowering greenhouse gas emissions, not politically manufactured “targets” that are manifestly out of reach. Our climate policy should reflect the fact that Canada’s primary global comparative advantage is as a producer and exporter of energy and energy-intensive goods, agri-food products, minerals and other industrial raw materials which collectively supply more than half of the country’s exports.

Finally, take a knife to interprovincial barriers to trade, investment and labour mobility. These long-standing internal restrictions on commerce increase prices for consumers, inhibit the growth of Canadian-based companies, and result in tens of billions of dollars in lost economic output. The next federal government should lead a national effort to strengthen the Canadian “common market” by eliminating such barriers.

Jock Finlayson

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute

From the Fraser Institute

By Bjørn Lomborg

Whenever there’s a heatwave—whether at home or abroad—the media loves to splash it. Politicians and campaigners then jump in to warn that climate change is at fault, and urge us to cut carbon emissions. But they are only telling us one-tenth of the story and giving terrible advice.

Global warming indeed causes more heat waves, and these raise the risk that more people die because of heat. That much is true. But higher temperatures also cause a reduction in cold temperatures, reducing the risk that people die from the cold. Almost everywhere in the world—not just Canada—cold kills 5-15 times more people than heat.

Heat gets a lot of attention both because of its obvious link to climate change and because it is immediately visible—meaning it is photogenic for the media. Heat kills within a few days of temperatures getting too high, because it alters the fluid and electrolytic balance in weaker, often older people.

Cold, on the other hand, slowly kills over months. At low temperatures, the body constricts outer blood vessels to conserve heat, driving up blood pressure. High blood pressure is the world’s leading killer, causing 19 per cent of all deaths.

Depending on where we live, taking into account infrastructure like heating and cooling, along with vehicles and clothes to keep us comfortable, there is a temperature at which deaths will be at a minimum. If it gets warmer or colder, more people will die.

A recent Lancet study shows that if we count all the additional deaths from too-hot temperatures globally, heat kills nearly half a million people each year. But too-cold temperatures are more than nine-times deadlier, killing over 4.5 million people.

In Canada, unsurprisingly, cold is even deadlier, killing more than 12 times more than heat. Each year, about 1,400 Canadians die from heat, but more than 17,000 die because of the cold.

Every time there is a heatwave, climate activists will tell you that global warming is an existential problem and we need to switch to renewables. And yes, the terrible heat dome in BC in June 2021 tragically killed 450-600 people and was likely made worse by global warming. But in that same year, the cold in BC killed 2,500 people, yet these deaths made few headlines.

Moreover, the advice from climate activists—that we should hasten the switch away from fossil fuels—is deeply problematic. Switching to renewables drives up energy prices. How do people better survive heat? With air conditioning. Over the last century, despite the temperature increasing, the US saw a remarkable drop in heat deaths because of more air conditioning. Making electricity for air conditioning more expensive means especially poorer people cannot afford to stay cool, and more people die.

Likewise, access to more heating has made our homes less deadly in winter, driving down cold mortality over the 20th century. One study shows that cheap gas heating in the late 2000s saved 12,500 Americans from dying of cold each year. Making heating more expensive will consign at least 12,500 people to die each year because they can no longer afford to keep warm.

One thing climate campaigners never admit is that current temperature rises actually make fewer people die overall from heat and cold. While rising temperatures drive more heat deaths, they also reduce the number of cold deaths — and because cold deaths are much more prevalent, this reduces total deaths significantly.

The only global estimate shows that in the last two decades, rising temperatures have increased heat deaths by 0.21 percentage points but reduced cold deaths by 0.51 percentage points. Rising temperatures have reduced net global death by 0.3 per cent, meaning some 166,000 deaths have been avoided. The researchers haven’t done the numbers for Canada alone, but combined with the US, increased temperatures have caused an extra 5,000 heat deaths annually, but reduced the number of cold deaths by 14,000.

If temperatures keep rising, cold deaths can only be reduced so much. Eventually, of course, total deaths will increase again. But a new near-global Nature study shows that, looking only at the impact of climate change, the number of total dead from heat and cold will stay lower than today almost up to a 3oC temperature increase, which is more than currently expected by the end of the century.

People claim that we will soon be in a world that is literally too hot and humid to live in, using something called the “wet bulb” temperature. But under realistic assumptions, the actual number of people who by century’s end will live in unlivable circumstances is still zero.

The incessant focus on tens or hundreds of people dying in for instance Indian heatwaves makes us forget that even in India, cold is a much bigger challenge. While heat kills 89,000 people each year, cold kills seven times more at 632,000 every year. Yet, you would never know with the current climate information we get.

Hearing only the alarmist side of heat and cold deaths not only scares people—especially younger generations—but points us toward ineffective policies that drive up energy costs and let more people die from lack of adequate protection against both heat and cold.

Bjørn Lomborg