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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:18
Canada Is More Free Than the United States!
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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I am here with Redmond Weisenbisenberger, who is the chief nabob head Punjabi of Mises Canada, Mises.ca, and who also is the driving emotional-slash-sexual force behind Liberty Fest North or the Canadian Liberty Fest.
Now, I just wanted to point out, for those of you who think that Canadian liberty is like Steph Mohawk...
military intelligence, some sort of oxymoron.
Canada is actually further up in the index of economic freedom than the United States.
This is relatively new and this is like a slow warming icicle.
This knowledge has not dripped down to our friends in the south, but we are actually on top for economic freedom.
And so the idea that there's a Canadian liberty fest is not quite as strange as it might sound.
But, Redman, perhaps you could remind people what a glorious meeting of liberty minds it's going to be.
Okay, so...
Yeah, the website is libertynow.ca.
And I think we had a couple different name changes, but we've been going with libertynow.ca for a little while.
It's going to be here in downtown Toronto.
It's all day on Saturday, November 3rd, 2012.
And you can go to our website right now.
You'll see some pictures of our top speakers.
You can also see our full schedule.
We've now got, of course, including a keynote speech by the one and only Stefan Molyneux of Freedom Aid Radio.
He's going to be a new person. That hack?
Oh, my God. Are you really scraping the bottom of the barrel that hard that you get?
Yeah, for sure.
I heard he's going to be doing some improv.
I think it's some improv philosophy or something.
You're just going to grab people from the audience and get them all involved or something, some sort of weird...
Is that old Woody Allen joke that he had a class on metaphysics but he failed because he looked into the soul of the student sitting next to him during the exam?
Anyway. But, yeah, so we were definitely doing some eyeball-to-eyeball philosophical delving.
But, yeah, I'm really looking forward to it.
And, of course, thanks a lot for the opportunity.
But who have we got speaking?
Because it seems to me some great names.
Oh, yeah, for sure. So we've got it sort of split into – and we're going to have tons of tables there as well.
You know, the Institute for Liberal Studies, Mises Canada, sort of – Students for Liberty.
Students for Liberty is going to be there.
Europe Pacific Canada, of course, the offshoot from Peter Schiff's group is going to be there as well.
And then otherwise, again, it's split into two sections.
We've got ideas and action.
In the ideas side, we've got Doretta Wilson for the Society for Quality Education.
And now they are there sort of fighting for things like school choice, vouchers, these sorts of things.
Justice M. Morton of LEAP, and that's Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
Then we've got Yann Narvison, philosopher from the University of Windsor, Lloyd Gerson from U of T.
We've got Peter Fosser from the National Post, Jesse Klein from the National Post, Jerry Nichols is going to be speaking, Chris Schaefer from the Canadian Constitution Foundation.
And of course, some people don't even realize that I think most lawyers in Canada are fighting for things like, the way I see it, they're fighting for...
The government to create more positive rights for people, whereas Chris Schaefer in the Canadian Constitution Foundation is actually fighting for the government to leave us alone, which is kind of strange.
And for those who don't recognize the term, a lawyer fighting for positive rights for people is sort of like a mugger trying to encourage you to give positive income redistribution towards himself.
The same mechanism is pretty much employed.
One of them is the gun under the jacket and the other one is the gun over the jacket.
Other than that, it's pretty much the same.
Yeah, exactly. And then otherwise, we've got freedom on campus.
So we've got several people from the Students for Liberty and then we've got the Economics of Liberty.
Also, three people there.
Myself, Chris Horlacher, who is also one of the board members of Mises Canada, and Dan Simon from Europe-Pacific Canada will also be speaking.
So it's an action-packed day of liberty and ideas, and tickets are selling fast, and we might even have some beer.
I don't know. And I'll certainly be sticking around afterwards and during.
I'll be going for dinner with people if they're interested.
I love to chat with like-minded folks, so I'm sure there'll be some socializing as well if people want to come down.
Oh yeah, for sure. And then we've strategically placed it.
The next day is the Ontario Libertarian Party sort of, I guess, annual general meeting or something like that.
So, you know, if there's any aspiring Ron Pauls who want to run in Ontario, they can stick around the next day and hang out at the Libertarian meeting the next day.
Right. Ron Paul, eh? Yeah.
So, okay. So, I wanted to mention because, of course, when I... I've posted this as I have over the weeks in various places.
I get a lot of emails like, are you kidding me?
A Liberty Fest in Canada?
I think they think that we're all sort of Inuit staring out from between this scraggly half-assed beard of Che Guevara or something like that.
This is some sort of socialist paradise.
I would argue that that information is a little out of date and I will show you just a few stats and then we can sort of take it from there.
Yeah. In the 90s, as you know, Canada was spending over 40 cents of every dollar just on interest payments.
The currency was – it was referred to by the Wall Street Journal as the northern peso and it was – federal spending was over 17.5% of GDP and – They really did.
And these were the liberals. And the liberals are what the liberals are in the U.S. I mean, they are sort of left of center, but not totally left of center.
We've got even more left of center called the NDP. And actually, strangely enough, just by the by, a guy I actually went to theater school with is playing Jack Layton in the TV movie.
He was in my class in theater school.
Yeah, it's kind of cool. It's kind of strange.
I'm wondering if they're going to have the scene where he gets caught up in the raid on the rub and tug.
I doubt it. Very much so.
But of course, if they do, I will be putting in to do a bit part as a Japanese geisha as usual.
Because I get typecast of that so often.
It's such a hard thing to break out of.
It's terribly racist, but there it is.
So, people don't recognize the degree to which – and it's a huge instructive lesson for America and other countries in Europe that are facing this kind of crisis.
There were some serious like amen, hallelujah to Jesus cuts in government over the past sort of 15 years, 20 years in Canada.
So, for instance, it went from – In 17.5% of GDP, federal government spending, to just over 11%.
Massive cuts. All but one of Canada's 22 federal departments were cut.
Real cuts, like 22%, fisheries 27%, natural resources 50%.
There was a slight raise in taxes, but spending cuts were six times more.
Canada's debt has now gone from nearly 70% of GDP down to less than 30% of GDP. There were no riots, no protests, and what was really fascinating was When they fired a whole bunch of government workers, the unemployment actually decreased.
It went from 12% to 6%.
6%. And so we've kind of taken a real libertarian turn.
I mean, okay, libertarian relative to the 80s, not relative to the 1880s and the 1980s.
But it really shrank.
I mean, so America, I think it's still hovering around 20% federal.
So we're less than half of federal spending in the U.S. And there's been huge cuts.
Unemployment insurance used to be called Lotto 1042.
You know, like you work for 10 weeks, you get unemployment insurance for 42 weeks of the year.
And it was not geared for seasonal workers who earn more when they're working and so on.
It really was. Stuff was cut really heavily.
Now it's indexed to how much you've contributed and how much you were making rather than just be this free handout.
Welfare was cut. And of course, Canada is now looking at cutting significant amounts of...
I think we're good to go.
You know, there's Singapore, maybe a couple other countries above us, but we have really taken quite a move towards a smaller government.
Federal government's been cut by almost half, you could really argue, and that's really significant.
Yeah, well, you know, and this is the funny kind of thing about it is that we're actually fairly decentralized compared to the United States.
And when you look at sort of the social democratic welfare state sort of policies that we all, you know, quote unquote, enjoy at the moment, you know, Canada, the United States got a central bank in 1913.
You know, we got a central bank in 1935.
We got things like Social Security after the United States did.
We got unemployment insurance after the United States did.
Our socialized medical care, which of course is sort of shown as this model for the world, or at least a model for the United States, that came in at exactly the same time that Medicare and Medicaid did in the United States.
So we got our socialized medicine the same time that the United States got its socialized medicine.
Although, to be fair, socialized medicine in Canada is socialized far beyond what it is even in Europe.
In Europe, you can still have private care, but you just simply can't do it in Canada.
Oh yeah, no, no. The NDPs, the Saskatchewan Tommy Douglas fans, they really went full frontal communist on us in this area, and that's been really hard to shift.
Yeah, what we have is a single-payer system, socialized healthcare system.
And it is true.
It is actually illegal for you to pay for your own medical care within Canada privately, right?
I mean cats and dogs get faster service than humans do in Canada.
Do you know, it's interesting.
Someone who studied Canadian versus U.S. healthcare found that the relationship between wealth and health is actually higher in Canada than it is in the U.S.
Because, you know, they always say, oh, we don't want a two-tier healthcare system.
But we actually have a multi-tier healthcare system.
In which if you know people, if you're rich and powerful, you go to the U.S., you go overseas or you go to the front of the queue in your own sort of – but you can't get any published facts about the doctors.
If you know people, it's different.
William Gairdner just had a piece.
You can do a search on him.
William Gairdner and I guess Canadian Medical Care or something like that.
He figures there's actually eight tiers of Canadian Medical Care.
And because as you rightly point out, when you can't pay, when you can't use money to do it, you use other means, whether it's connections, friends, just the fact that you live in a city, a large city as opposed to in rural areas.
You know, if you're any sort of professional athlete, you immediately jump to the head of the queue.
Or a politician. Wasn't it Robert Barasa when he got cancer immediately went to America?
Oh, yeah. No, no.
I think even the premier of...
The premier of Newfoundland also went to the United States.
And as well, like I said, sports people, politicians, they will actually jump the queue.
If there's a three-month wait for a CAT scan or an MRI, if you're a sports person, you will get right to the head of the thing.
But in terms of other decentralized or other places where we have less, say, government involvement than the United States, for instance, we don't have a federal Department of Education, right?
Each province sort of decides on its own educational spending and how it allocates its resources.
Within the province, of course, it's very top-down.
And then also, we don't have the equivalent of a federal Department of Energy, right?
So in the United States or here in Canada, Alberta can choose to do with its own resources as it sees fit.
So it uses the oil sands.
Whereas in the United States, oftentimes there's a lot of federal permits you have to go through, you have to jump through a lot of hoops with the EPA and these sorts of things.
And even Bob Murphy, he's now doing some work with the McDonnell Laurier Institute.
And Bob Murphy, he has a website consulting by RPM. He's a good Austrian economist.
When he was doing some research on this through a book he just wrote on, and he actually wrote this book with Brian Lee Crowley, specifically on the Canadian budget cuts of the 1990s, he said he was quite surprised.
He found that, he said, what, you guys don't have as much centralization as we do?
I'm now trying to get him to move up here.
Right. You know, Paul Ryan is saying something like, he's honestly saying, it's got to be a joke, he's saying we'll balance the budget in 40 years.
You know, Canada, once it got set on cutting the budget and cutting the federal spending, and of course what happened was that the cutting started at the top, it started at the federal level, I think we're good to go.
Well, and this is a strange thing that I think people underestimate that – there's this old phrase which says only Nixon can go to China.
In other words, only Nixon after his 20-year career as a rabid anti-communist could go and try and establish some sort of detente with China.
Only the left can take on government spending.
It seems to be a fairly common situation that occurs.
When someone from the right tries to take it on, you get all these protests and this mischaracterization of the whole thing, this hysteria and so on and Margaret Thatcher and Paul Ryan and Schwarzenegger to some degree or to some very small degree, Scott Walker and all these kinds of guys.
But here it was the people more on the left who took it on and it's sort of like expecting a lot of anti-war protests from Democrats under Obama.
It only happens under Bush.
So this idea that if you get a Republican in, you will get sort of guaranteed to get smaller spending.
I mean that myth should have been blown apart by the two George Bushes.
But you could really argue that if you've got spending coming in, you want a Democrat in there to take on the unions because they really won't have as compelling a story to spin.
Well, I think – well, just touching on the Republicans quickly, there is a big myth about the Republicans – Really, the Republicans from Lincoln on were the party of big government.
But then when, you know, but then when FDR went whole hog into the New Deal and fascism, you know, they sort of turned around and started opposing that.
But, you know, really, they've paid a lot of lip service to it.
But another point to why Canada cut, of course, Canada doesn't have the World Reserve currency, right?
And in the 1990s, we had up to, I think, 80% debt to GDP ratio.
Now, what's, of course, interesting about that is that the United States right now has about 100% debt to GDP ratio.
Places like Greece have 120% debt to GDP ratio.
But basically, our debt was downgraded.
You know, the people called us up, you know, whatever the bankers called us up and said, you know, we want our money.
Interest rates were going up.
We had a housing crash, actually, in the early 90s, or late 80s and early 90s, we had a housing crash.
And that was essentially what pushed us into cutting, right?
In some ways, because America has the World Reserve currency, they don't feel the same pressure that we do in terms of having to cut.
Yeah, it's a bigger house of cards, so there's a lot more creditors propping it up.
Yeah, and of course, what's going on in Europe is that when Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, all these governments sort of joined the Euro, they were then able to sort of push off the need to really cut their governments.
Because as you pointed out, I think you read that piece by Veronique de Rougie, and as she was pointing out, you know, there's all this talk of austerity, but European governments really haven't cut at all yet, you know.
No, no, that's still to come and one of the terrible things about what happened was – I mean I'm Irish so I watched that with some slightly elevated interest was the countries – I mean basically lied and frauded their way and of course nobody will ever pay for this because remember it's only kids who steal candy bars who get in trouble.
Not anybody who rips off the whole factory.
Amateurs rob a bank.
Professionals use a bank to rob everyone.
But they lied their way into the EEC and they gained advantage by getting their hooks into the better credit ratings of Germany and England and other countries.
And so, of course, their costs of borrowing went down and rather than pay off, they just went hog wild and spent themselves into oblivion.
I mean, how much did Greece spend?
spent $3.5 billion on the Olympics.
Maybe higher than that, some lunatic amount.
So yeah, it's crazy.
But I think that the U.S. experience is going to be quite different.
Canada, of course, again, I've just finished this John Stossel book called No You Can't, which is sort of the response to Barack Obama's Yes, We Can, which was, I mean, Canada, we got no Fannie Mae, no Freddie Mac.
We've got no FHA, Federal Housing Authority.
We've got no zero down payment loans and not that same sort of quasi-racist driven to get everyone into a house kind of drive.
And we actually have higher rates of home ownership than the US even at its peak.
I mean I know that it's kind of – well, you've done some research on this bubble in Canada but it hasn't hit yet and – There has been less stimulus than there was in the U.S. to the housing market.
Yeah, well, that's a bit questionable.
But one last point on it.
Once we started really cutting our government spending, we rebounded in about 18 months.
And this is the key point.
Once the government decides to cut, and once they really just start to really get out of the way of the private sector, you will see a rebound.
It happened in 1921.
It happened throughout the United States' history during the 19th century.
And once these governments just decide they're going to get out of the way, like it happened in the Soviet Union, once the government said, we're going to get out of the way of the private sector, and in China, the government got out of the way of the private sector, you will start to see an increase in the economic system.
It's just heartbreaking, sorry, just to point out that if you count the crash as sort of beginning of 2008, by mid-2009, it could all have been better.
All have been solved and be heading in the right direction as opposed to this just grim, slow, drawn and quartered economy where anytime any green shoots show up, they just get a massive amount of government urine dumped on them.
So it's just awful to see just how unnecessarily long all of this is.
Well, yeah, I think we're really, at least in the United States, I mean, we're really, they're really repeating the mistake, repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression is what they're doing.
And Japan? Yeah, you know, and Japan.
So you were going to take on the sort of my view of the housing market.
So you said that I was incorrect in some areas.
So let's discuss that.
Well, we do have the equivalent of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
We have something called the CMHC, which sort of in Austrian circles, we like to call it the Canadian Moral Hazard Corporation.
And if you do a Google search, just search Mises Canada CMHC, and we have a host of articles that people can read all about the CMHC. We have the same issue where we have a government body that does insure mortgages.
That does exist.
Now, in terms of the housing bubble, during the crash of 2008 down in the United States, we saw these massive sort of housing failures and the banks then were greatly affected.
Of course, it resulted in TARP and these sorts of things.
Now, and of course, what happened there is that interest rates were pushed down, the housing bubble started, then interest rates started to go up over time until about 2007.
Adjustable rate mortgages started to reset, and that's when you started to see the housing faults, right?
So people would start defaulting on their mortgages, they would go declare bankruptcy, these sorts of things, and then that spread to the banks.
Now, the key point here, I think, is When you look at the debt to income ratio, in 2008 in the UK and the United States, and I'll send you a JPEG of this so you can post it up.
At that point, the debt to GDP ratio or debt to income ratio, now this is the household income versus household debt.
Canadian debt to GDP was lower than it was in the UK and the US. But now, what we're seeing in Canada, and so in some ways, we were in the housing bubble much as the United States was because our central bank followed the same trajectory as the Federal Reserve.
When the Federal Reserve lowered its interest rates, we lowered our interest rates.
We have now very high housing prices in Vancouver, very high housing prices in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, various cities around Canada.
But now, in 2012, we now have a higher debt to income ratio than U.S. consumers and U.S. homeowners did in 2008.
Now, I've read that too.
I mean, it's extraordinarily high.
But what is that composed of?
I mean, I think mostly it's maybe some student loans, cars and houses, and maybe some visa.
But how does that break down?
Now, you've caught me there because I haven't done a lot of research on that specific breakdown.
But the majority of it would be houses, right?
Well, houses and then also it's borrowing against houses.
Oh, okay, okay.
My house is an ATM kind of thing.
Well, yeah, and people are doing that in Canada as well.
A lot of Canadians are doing exactly the same thing.
And, of course, the interesting thing about that is that for the last two years or so, the Bank of Canada, and specifically Mark Carney, that he's sort of hailed around the world as this sort of magician or something.
He's this guy who knows it all.
And, of course, he's ex-Goldman Sachs, of course.
Now, for the last two years or so, the Bank of Canada, which sets the interest rates, has been saying, Canadian consumers, you have to borrow less.
You have to borrow less. You're going to pay for this in the long run.
Well, there's an easy way to do that.
Just jack up the interest rates a little and lo and behold.
But I guess if the debt is so high, jacking up the interest rates is threatening to any economic growth, right?
Well, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of knock-on effects from raising the interest rates.
And, of course, an interesting statistic that is just popping up now, if you look at now what the Canadian government has done to sort of rein in the high housing prices, right?
You look at, say, a neighborhood just south of me.
Eight years ago, the houses were $300,000, $400,000.
The houses are now going for $800,000, $900,000, a million dollars.
And of course, Vancouver is very well known for its sky-high condo prices, sky-high housing prices.
I'm sorry, I just wanted to mention for those who haven't seen the full video, you are in fact sitting on a Well, here's the issue, right? This is the problem.
Of course, the Bank of Canada You know, doesn't want to raise interest rates, right?
Because it's going to essentially start to bring down housing prices.
And then we'll start to see the same problems happening in the United States that we had, or we'll see the same problems here that we had in the United States.
You mean when the variable rates reset and hit the higher interest rates and people can't afford it and all that, right?
Yeah, it's variable rates reset, but it's also if you purchased a home in 2007 and you got it at a 2.75 interest rate or a 3.25 interest rate and you paid $700,000 for that house or $500,000 for that condo and you didn't sell and all of a sudden it's 2013, interest rates are back up at 5% or 6%.
Wherever they are, you then have to sell your house, your spending is going to go down, there's going to be all these knock-on effects, right?
Well, and of course, the governments are heavily invested, literally, in having housing prices go up because they get to jack up your property rates, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, that's been a real boon.
I mean, yeah, exactly. That's been a real boon to...
As this housing boom has gone on, municipal governments have been able to extract more and more money from the people.
Every time a house changes hands, there's a land transfer tax.
It's based on a percentage because the actual housing property, the property taxes within cities are based on a percentage of the home value.
So they get to reassess you every couple of years.
I mean, knock wood, I haven't been reassessed lately.
But, I mean, what am I going to do if all of a sudden I'm paying $5,000 a year in my property tax rate?
Properties taxes, yeah.
Let's say we have a housing crash, there's going to be starting to be people sort of saying, listen, I want my rate reduced because- Yeah, let's reset this baby, right?
Yeah, and also the effect of rates because the Fed in the United States has said, basically they said they're going to keep a ZERP policy, a zero interest rate policy Yeah.
But I mean, these policies are not going to make unemployment go down.
So if we started to raise interest rates as well, you would see essentially the Canadian dollar appreciate against the American dollar, which would then hurt our exporters.
Our importers would do well because everything that we import would get cheaper, but everything that we export and still a large majority of our trade is with the United States, so that would go down.
I've been talking to some people who run metal fabrication places in southern Ontario.
I was talking to this economist, actually, in Calgary, and he said that, yeah, a lot of manufacturing places in southern Ontario are at 20% capacity or something.
Because during the entire housing boom, during the entire last 10 years, they were just doing gangbusters work with the Americans, and now that's all gone away, basically.
Because, of course, we had this situation where the Canadian dollar was about 65 cents U.S. for about, I don't know, about almost 20 years or so, for a very long time.
Certainly, most of the time that I was in business, it was a huge boon to us to sell in U.S. dollars.
Well, yeah. Oh, exactly.
Yeah, because we could compete against homegrown American consumers or homegrown American producers and Because, you know, we looked to the Americans to be a very cheap place to do work, right?
And now, our Canadian dollar is on par with the American dollar.
And personally, I don't see that going anywhere soon.
Yeah, it is strange, of course, that you – I mean here in Canada, as in most places in the West, you are punishing savers and rewarding borrowers and then complaining that there's too much consumer debt.
I mean of course, right?
I mean it's very strange to lecture people to do the exact opposite of everything your policies are promoting.
And by the way, just to touch again on housing prices and whatnot, of course, what the Canadian government did just a little while ago, maybe about six months or so ago, instead of the Bank of Canada raising interest rates, what the Canadian government did is that they said we will only insure mortgages what the Canadian government did is that they said we will only insure mortgages For a little while, you could get a 40-year amortization on a home.
Yeah, I remember that.
Which of course means that you can pay a lot more because you're amortizing the cost of that home over, instead of over 20 years or 30 years, you were amortizing it over 40 years.
But most people were getting, say, a five-year mortgage or something like that.
So they would be in very bad shape if interest rates went up.
So what the Canadian government did was that they started saying things like, you have to have more money down.
You were shortening the amortization times.
And what's very interesting right now...
Housing sales, and this is just a recent article from about, what is it, September 24th.
Housing sales in Toronto experienced a 70% collapse in Toronto in August.
So this is 1,242 no homes sold in the greater Toronto area in August 2012, down 70% from 3,496 sales in August of the previous year.
So we already could be in the beginnings of the popping of the housing bubble in Canada.
Because I think that what's going to happen is the prices will stay high because people will continue to expect higher prices.
But if the offers aren't there, say a house about three doors down from me was on the market for actually about, I'd say, six months to a year.
Well, no, say seven months to seven, eight months, and she never sold it.
Wow. Which is kind of funny to me because I'm always looking out when I drive around my neighborhood.
I'm looking at houses for sale.
I go check out the price.
I check out how long it's staying on the market for.
It's just interesting to see this.
As well, in Vancouver, home sales have declined 32% based on over a year ago.
So, September of 2011, you've got 1,500 houses sold, or in September 2012, 1,500 houses sold.
September 2011, 2,200 houses sold.
So, we're already starting to see a big, and what's interesting about that as well is that if you look here in Toronto, You've got non-stop condo building here.
It's crazy. The skyline in the last 10 years in Toronto has completely changed.
I moved here in about 1999 and it's completely different than what it was back then.
Yeah, I certainly know that in Vancouver it's nuts.
I mean, I'm staying with a friend of mine over the summer and a small condo, $700,000 plus.
I mean, it's just mad.
Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, there are different issues going on there.
You know, you might say that like a place like Ottawa, you know, it's all basically, you know, there's some varying points here, right?
Like a place like Ottawa, it's government.
So no matter what, no matter if the economy is up, no matter if the economy is down, They're always getting raises, unless they do something crazy like actually fire some workers.
Of course, Edmonton and Calgary are fueled by the oil prices, so we're seeing inflation there.
Vancouver, of course, the rumor is they're saying that a lot of money is coming over from Asia, and that's serving to push up housing prices out there.
And in Quebec, they get federal transfer payments, which everyone uses to prop themselves up economically and pay off the semi-mafioso unions.
Well, I don't think it's semi anymore.
Yeah, sorry, they've upgraded full-on, quad-powered.
And of course, Toronto, you know, I mean, Canada is only a country of 36 million people or so.
And of course, Canada or Toronto, of course, is the equivalent of New York City, right?
It's the Canadian equivalent of London or New York City.
It's the Yeah.
From Quebec and Montreal, and Montreal in particular all the way over, it's still a boon that we enjoy, and we'd just like to thank these crazy separatists for all of that.
Oh, for sure. Well, you know, I think somebody said, I forget who said it, but somebody said that really a golden statue of René Levesque should be erected at the corner of Bay and King.
We could pay homage to him on a yearly basis.
Thank you, René Levesque, for your largesse.
You're showering this money on Toronto.
He was sort of the Pied Piper with all of the dollar signs going after him westward across Quebec and Ontario.
Let's just finish up with, do you in particular think that Well, I mean, just based on these recent articles that are coming up, it already sounds like there's a housing correction going on, regardless of whether prices are going up.
Even when interest rates stay at almost zero, which basically they are.
I think the Bank of Canada is lending out at a quarter percent or something like that.
That overnight lending rate is what sets the interest rates that people pay for houses.
And even when it's kept at zero for years and years on end, there is a point where people will only take on so much debt.
So I think that you are going to see at least a slowing down in housing prices.
And if we do eventually have the situation where interest rates are starting to go up, certainly you're going to start to see housing prices come down.
Now, what that means for the larger Canadian economy...
Of course, not a lot of people know this because, you know, during the 2008 crisis, there was this sort of myth about Canadian banks and the Canadian banking system being far better than the American banking system or, say, the European banking system.
But what people don't realize, and it's not widely publicized, you know, the CMHC bought $69 billion worth of mortgage securities off of the Canadian banks.
The Canadian banks were bailed out, no matter what anybody tells you, they were bailed out.
They got assets purchased from them and the Canadian banking sector as well, of course, it's just as highly leveraged as any of the European banks or any of the American banks.
There's no legal fractional reserve requirement in Canada.
We actually have a zero percent reserve requirement.
In practice, they actually do keep some on reserve based on international banking standards and these sorts of things.
But if we start to see a real drop in Canadian housing prices, you're going to start to see the Canadian government print money, lend to banks, bail out banks, these sorts of different things will happen in Canada.
Yeah, the only vaguely Austrian thing that's happened lately in Canada other than the debt reduction is that there was not a massive stimulus package over the course of the recession, and that's good.
I mean, it's sad what you have to count as good these days, but a lack of catastrophe is a huge positive relative to what's going on south of the border.
Oh, for sure. I mean, yeah. We definitely have weathered the storm far better than, say, our neighbors south of the border.
I don't know exactly why.
I mean, we have various different things like, you know...
No empire. Well, yeah.
I mean, no empire really does help.
And also, it really does help that Canada did act in a fiscally responsible manner about, you know, 15 years ago.
You know, because we acted in a fiscally responsible manner all those years ago, you know, like you said, our debt to GDP is far lower.
And, of course, those knock-on effects, those...
Those things that we did then still have an effect today on the sort of stability of our various economies.
Now, when you take a look at individual provinces, the situation starts to get a little bit worse.
Quebec, of course, is the eternal basket case, massive debts.
You know, and then, but of course in Ontario, under the Harris, Harris who of course was loathed by teachers, you know, if you went to high school in the 1990s when Harris was in, you would get daily diatribes from the teachers about, you know, cutting, you know, cutting their pay and how it's important to support people.
You know, support teachers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Meanwhile, since McGinty has been in, he has completely reversed that.
And, you know, Ontario now has massive budget deficits, massive overpay in the public sector.
You know, he completely reversed any benefits that have been done.
He went hog wild on the green energy sort of scheme.
So now, We've got a situation where IKEA, one of the largest corporations in the world, is being paid 60 cents a kilowatt hour for 20 years for the solar power that they provide.
Beautiful. Green energy is just missing one syllable.
It should be gangrene energy as far as the rot that it puts into the economy.
There's just slight typos there.
Yeah, I mean, the bright lights in Canada obviously are places like Alberta, Saskatchewan, or some of these other provinces where they're actually willing to utilize their resources.
And so a place like Alberta is benefiting from the record high prices in oil.
And of course, part of that, the record high prices in oil, is due to things like money printing.
But, you know, if everybody around you is devaluing their currency and they're just throwing money around, we might as well get some of that back, you know.
And Alberta has had no problem sort of – they can actually sop up labor from – or across Canada.
So you've gotten people – I think that will be positive in the long run.
Oh, for sure. Well, over and that actually is one thing that Canadian, at least the federal governments have been doing.
If you look at the, you know, for a very long time, I think about 80-90% of our trade was with the United States.
Americans, of course, didn't understand that, but we were basically the largest trading partner with the United States for years and years and years.
But for the last 10 years, Canadian trade has been diversified.
So we have been shipping more to Asia, more to China, more to Japan, all these sorts of different things.
And sort of a little bit off topic, you sort of start to wonder why A $300 million has poured in from the United States to try to stop things like pipelines and stop the oil sands, which of course we're selling to Asia.
We're selling all this oil to Asia instead of selling to the United States.
That being said, a lot of Americans don't even realize as well that Canada actually ships more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia does.
Yeah, absolutely. I mentioned that in the show recently.
Well, I mean, they've just been so corrupted by this idea that if we don't exist, the planet is better off.
Nobody wants oil who's green unless they're in an ambulance heading to the hospital.
And then suddenly oil seems to be an exceedingly good idea and the power for their CAT scan seems to be an exceedingly good idea and lights in the operating room seems to be an exceedingly good idea.
So that's all just nonsense, I think.
The best thing to do is to power through as best you can the higher pollution until you get to enough wealth that you can put pollution controls on it.
I think you've just got to get through it.
It's fortunately faster than it was in the 19th century for the West to do it elsewhere in the world.
Anyway, listen, I want to not tax our listeners' patience too much.
I really want to remind people to go to Mises.ca.
You guys have an amazing set of resources.
I'm glad that we had a chance to break some of these stereotypes of, you know, the Karl Marx's to the north with our giant beards and mukluks.
Oh, man.
That rat bastard. Anyway, who actually did look like a rat, sadly enough.
But if people want to come, it's November the 3rd.
It's Victoria College downtown.
It is going to be a very, very exciting day.
I am coming up with – I cough up speech like hairballs and I can feel one gathering within me that's about the size of a tumbleweed.
So I think it's going to be really good and it's going to be some great ideas, great speeches, great socializing and I hope that people will check it out.
Liberty Now does. And one last thing.
The next Saturday, Saturday, November 10th, we're holding the very first Toronto Austrian Scholars Conference.
And you can go to Mises.ca to find out about that.
We're going to have Joe Salerno, Academic Vice President of Mises.org in the United States in Auburn.
We're going to have an international cast of people presenting papers.
And that's going to be sort of our premier event every year to sort of start to Ignite the Austrian revolution here in Canada as well.
And if I get this name right, it is – you have a very – to me, a very powerful event going on at that, which is the Joe versus Joe mudslinging cage match, which is Joe Salerno versus Peter Joseph from the Zeitgeist Movement really fighting.
And I believe it's going to be with teeth to the death about the economic price calculation issue.
Oh, absolutely, Ben.
The giant boxes, the other cities.
Hey, man, Marxism with robots, that's pretty much what it is, you know?
Well, thanks, Emil. Of course, I will be talking before the conference.
I look forward to seeing you at it, and thanks again so much for your time.
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