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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Let’s Make Canada Great Again!

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Trump’s Team Unity… Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, President-elect Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jun., Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy… if they’re able to do all they’re promising, Canada will be more uncompetitive yet, writes Brian Giesbrecht and the best and brightest will leaveTrump campaign.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Giesbrecht

Trump will make America so tempting to the talented, that we’re going to get more uncompetitive still

“The number of people migrating to the US is not the main concern, more importantly it is who is leaving.”

The “brain drain” is a problem that has been a real concern for Canada at many times in our history. In the 1990s it was a topic fiercely debated by policy wonks, politicians and other concerned Canadians. Many of our best and brightest were benefitting from expensive college and university educations here, then promptly moving south for better opportunities.

Simply put, when Canada raises taxes, and stifles economic opportunity for young people here, while the Americans are lowering taxes and opening up their economy to the south of us, we can expect to see much of our best talent move south.

That’s what we have been seeing for some time now — doctors, engineers, trades and businesspeople of all types moving to escape the high taxes and the stagnant economy they see in what is today’s high-tax, big government, woke Canada.

Since 2015, housing costs have risen much faster than wages, making house ownership and rent costs absolutely punishing. Excessive immigration numbers have only added to the misery. Canada, for many years considered to be one of the best western countries in which to live is now one of the worst.

Canada’s current brain drain trickle can be expected to turn into a flood. Trump has promised to deregulate, lower taxes and “drain the swamp”. His appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to the mischievously named “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency) is evidence of his seriousness.

As evidence of how quickly things are turning, consider the huge stock market gains that happened as a direct consequence of Trump’s election. Clearly, the “smart money” is anticipating that Trump’s promises to “drill, baby, drill” and reinvigorate an over-regulated and over-taxed Biden economy are more than empty promises.

So, while right now Trump is busy trolling Democrats with his cabinet picks, by the time we get around to a spring election here it is probable that Trump will have the American economy galloping along. Meanwhile, at the same time that Trump is lowering taxes and deregulating, the Trudeau government is going in exactly the opposite direction.

Chrystia Freeland is determined to raise the capital gains tax. A capital gains tax hike will cause widespread damage. Meanwhile her proud socialist colleague, Steven Guilbeault — who has never seen an extra tax or regulation he doesn’t like — is dead-set on hiking Canada’s job-killing carbon tax yet again.

And let’s not forget the Trudeau affirmative action, DEI, merit-killing philosophy that has steadily eroded our competitiveness and standard of living. When contrasted with the Biden race-based version of the same, it was bad enough that Canada’s productivity continues to fall relative America’s. (Our sickly dollar is barely over 70 percent of theirs, while our government expenditures make up a staggering 44% of GDP.)

The contrast between the two economies can only be expected to become more pronounced as Trump’s America becomes increasingly merit-based. DOGE will take a meat cleaver to government spending, and the DEI, critical race theory Bidenite mush, will be trashed.

While Canada is still dealing with such woke idiocies as boys in girl sports, child mutilation in the name of gender ideology, and pretending to believe indigenous activist claims about secret burials of indigenous school children, Trump’s America will look very attractive to ambitious young Canadians who want to skip the wokeism, and raise their families in a country that rewards hard work. It will be hard to blame our best engineers, and tradespeople from heading down to exciting opportunities in Texas, Montana and elsewhere in the United States, when their talents are not appreciated here.

Many have already departed. Canadian accents are increasingly common in Texas. The contrast between a Trump America that rewards hard work, and a Trudeau Canada that only taxes it will be stark. Enterprising Canadians will face the choice of staying in a Canada that takes bigger and bigger bites out of paychecks, or moving to a country that doesn’t.

Let’s remember that many of our highly educated doctors and professionals are recent immigrants, with no special loyalty to Canada. Steven Harper also spoke of the “anywhere people” and the “somewhere people”. Those in the first category are the educated and privileged class whose have the money and talent that make it possible for them to move anywhere in the world on short notice. We need both the talented immigrants and “anywheres”, but they will be the first to leave.

Canada has gone through similar brain drain episodes before. During the 1990s there was a very real concern that we were losing far too many good people. A debt problem that began with the big-spending Pierre Trudeau government got steadily worse, our civil service was bloated, and taxes were far higher than they were for our American counterparts. To their credit, the Chrétien/Martin government introduced a budget in 1995 that helped with those problems.

The incoming Steven Harper government 2006-15 further stemmed the tide of departures by building a competitive economy that had our dollar at par with the American dollar. For a brief time the Canadian dollar was even higher! In these days of our pathetic 70 cent dollar it now seems hard to believe that even happened.

There seems to be little hope that the current Liberal government — still dug in in Ottawa — will take steps to make our economy competitive with Trump’s. As Kevin O’Leary explains, the damage that Trudeau has done to the Canadian economy is incalculable.

Canada has been on a slow downward slide since 2015. This has been Canada’s “lost decade”.

But there are reasons other than just the economic for wanting to leave. Under Justin Trudeau Canada has become not only a poorer place, but a directionless dystopia for many conservative-leaning Canadians. Extreme progressivism — “woke” — is the Trudeau Liberal religion.

As Eric Kaufman points out, extreme beliefs, such as “a man becomes a woman by saying so,” the belief in such economy-killing absurdities as “carbon-zero by 2040,” “borders don’t matter,” “merit-based hiring is systemic racism” etc are accepted by only a small minority of Canadians, and yet those are the policies the current government is forcing on everyone.

To add insult to injury we have Trudeau tweeting “a trans woman is a woman,” “we accept all comers,” “Canada is a genocidal nation,” and other such inanities. The great majority of Canadians do not want Trudeau’s “post-national state with no core identity” bilge. They want Canada back.

Trump has promised to rid his country of the extreme progressivism that Americans so convincingly rejected on Nov 5. Post-election surveys have revealed that the single most important issue that persuaded swing voters to vote for Trump was Kamala Harris’s support for taxpayer funding for transgender surgery for prison inmates.

This bit of woke craziness proved to be a bridge too far even for those who usually voted Democrat.

We can expect to see a virtual war on woke when Trump assumes power. In fact, it is already happening. Absurdities, like men forcing their way into women’s sporting events and women’s spaces will come to an end. Most Americans simply don’t want radical progressivism. As Professor Kaufman’s survey shows (above) — neither do Canadians.

The old saying is that living next to America is like sleeping with an elephant. Every time that the elephant moves, we had better do so too. With the election of Donald Trump, Canada must quickly adjust to the moves that elephant makes. Or suffer the consequences.

The chance to do so will likely be next spring, when Justin Trudeau will finally be forced to call an election. His election strategy will almost certainly be the same one he has used against previous Conservative challengers — he accuses them of being “like Trump.” But this time this strategy might not work.

If Trump’s America is humming along on all cylinders, while Trudeau’s weak, woke Canada looks pathetic in comparison, this time Canadians might say, “Yes, like Trump’s America. That’s exactly what we want!”

We need our best and brightest to stay here. We need to end the brain drain. We can do that by making Canada into a 2025 version of the Canada we used to know.

Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He was recently named the ‘Western Standard Columnist of the Year.’

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It Took Trump To Get Canada Serious About Free Trade With Itself

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From the  Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Trump’s protectionism has jolted Canada into finally beginning to tear down interprovincial trade barriers

The threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the potential collapse of North American free trade have prompted Canada to look inward. With international trade under pressure, the country is—at last—taking meaningful steps to improve trade within its borders.

Canada’s Constitution gives provinces control over many key economic levers. While Ottawa manages international trade, the provinces regulate licensing, certification and procurement rules. These fragmented regulations have long acted as internal trade barriers, forcing companies and professionals to navigate duplicate approval processes when operating across provincial lines.

These restrictions increase costs, delay projects and limit job opportunities for businesses and workers. For consumers, they mean higher prices and fewer choices. Economists estimate that these barriers hold back up to $200 billion of Canada’s economy annually, roughly eight per cent of the country’s GDP.

Ironically, it wasn’t until after Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that it began to address domestic trade restrictions. In 1994, the first ministers signed the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), committing to equal treatment of bidders on provincial and municipal contracts. Subsequent regional agreements, such as Alberta and British Columbia’s Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement in 2007, and the New West Partnership that followed, expanded cooperation to include broader credential recognition and enforceable dispute resolution.

In 2017, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) replaced the AIT to streamline trade among provinces and territories. While more ambitious in scope, the CFTA’s effectiveness has been limited by a patchwork of exemptions and slow implementation.

Now, however, Trump’s protectionism has reignited momentum to fix the problem. In recent months, provincial and territorial labour market ministers met with their federal counterpart to strengthen the CFTA. Their goal: to remove longstanding barriers and unlock the full potential of Canada’s internal market.

According to a March 5 CFTA press release, five governments have agreed to eliminate 40 exemptions they previously claimed for themselves. A June 1 deadline has been set to produce an action plan for nationwide mutual recognition of professional credentials. Ministers are also working on the mutual recognition of consumer goods, excluding food, so that if a product is approved for sale in one province, it can be sold anywhere in Canada without added red tape.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has signalled that his province won’t wait for consensus. Ontario is dropping all its CFTA exemptions, allowing medical professionals to begin practising while awaiting registration with provincial regulators.

Ontario has partnered with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to implement mutual recognition of goods, services and registered workers. These provinces have also enabled direct-to-consumer alcohol sales, letting individuals purchase alcohol directly from producers for personal consumption.

A joint CFTA statement says other provinces intend to follow suit, except Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

These developments are long overdue. Confederation happened more than 150 years ago, and prohibition ended more than a century ago, yet Canadians still face barriers when trying to buy a bottle of wine from another province or find work across a provincial line.

Perhaps now, Canada will finally become the economic union it was always meant to be. Few would thank Donald Trump, but without his tariffs, this renewed urgency to break down internal trade barriers might never have emerged.

Lee Harding is a research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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2025 Federal Election

The Cost of Underselling Canadian Oil and Gas to the USA

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Canadians can now track in real time how much revenue the country is forfeiting to the United States by selling its oil at discounted prices, thanks to a new online tracker from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. The tracker shows the billions in revenue lost due to limited access to distribution for Canadian oil.

At a time of economic troubles and commercial tensions with the United States, selling our oil at a discount to U.S. middlemen who then sell it in the open markets at full price will rob Canada of nearly $19 billion this year, said Marco Navarro-Genie, the VP of Research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Navarro-Genie led the team that designed the counter.

The gap between world market prices and what Canada receives is due to the lack of Canadian infrastructure.

According to a recent analysis by Ian Madsen, senior policy analyst at the Frontier Centre, the lack of international export options forces Canadian producers to accept prices far below the world average. Each day this continues, the country loses hundreds of millions in potential revenue. This is a problem with a straightforward remedy, said David Leis, the Centre’s President. More pipelines need to be approved and built.

While the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) pipeline has helped, more is needed. It commenced commercial operations on May 1, 2024, nearly tripling Canada’s oil export capacity westward from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels daily. This expansion gives Canadian oil producers access to broader global markets, including Asia and the U.S. West Coast, potentially reducing the price discount on Canadian crude.

This is more than an oil story. While our oil price differential has long been recognized, there’s growing urgency around our natural gas exports. The global demand for cleaner energy, including Canadian natural gas, is climbing. Canada exports an average of 12.3 million GJ of gas daily. Yet, we can still not get the full value due to infrastructure bottlenecks, with losses of over $7.3 billion (2024). A dedicated counter reflecting these mounting gas losses underscores how critical this issue is.

“The losses are not theoretical numbers,” said Madsen. “This is real money, and Canadians can now see it slipping away, second by second.”

The Frontier Centre urges policymakers and industry leaders to recognize the economic urgency and ensure that infrastructure projects like TMX are fully supported and efficiently utilized to maximize Canada’s oil export potential. The webpage hosting the counter offers several examples of what the lost revenue could buy for Canadians. A similar counter for gas revenue lost through similarly discounted gas exports will be added in the coming days.

What Could Canada Do With $25.6 Billion a Year?

Without greater pipeline capacity, Canada loses an estimated (2025) $25.6 billion by selling our oil and gas to the U.S. at a steep discount. That money could be used in our communities — funding national defence, hiring nurses, supporting seniors, building schools, and improving infrastructure. Here’s what we’re giving up by underselling these natural resources. 

342,000 Nurses

The average annual salary for a registered nurse in Canada is about $74,958. These funds could address staffing shortages and improve patient care nationwide.
Source

39,000 New Housing Units

At an estimated $472,000 per unit (excluding land costs, based on Toronto averages), $25.6 billion could fund nearly 94,000 affordable housing units.
Source

About the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy is an independent Canadian think-tank that researches and analyzes public policy issues, including energy, economics and governance.

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