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Just a collection of some good reactions to this week's events.
First, I think Canada appreciates Carney's budget
I don't think the negativity and catcalling from Poilievre and the trashtalking from Lewis will land with Canadians. Yes, there's corporate stuff in the budget, lots of it, but I believe that Canada needs economic development to support our social progress. and this budget represents both.
Evan Scrimshaw writes
I don't think the negativity and catcalling from Poilievre and the trashtalking from Lewis will land with Canadians. Yes, there's corporate stuff in the budget, lots of it, but I believe that Canada needs economic development to support our social progress. and this budget represents both.
Evan Scrimshaw writes
...Carney’s budget was always going to be about boosting the growth, and finding new and better ways to do so. Some of them are re-announcements of commitments from the investor summits, some are changes to the tax consequences for the owners of successful new companies to not hoard their wealth in assets and actually pay any amount of cap gains taxes, instead of holding it all in shares that they never cash. But what matters from this budget is not any of that, at least for me - it’s the fact that Carney is using the proceeds of better than expected growth and the war in Iran to do a lot of good and progressive things that will help the people of Canada. And frankly, this is the best Canadian budget in many, many decades because of it.
...The anti-homelessness effort is government at its best, a real effort with a real goal to achieve a real outcome. The scale of the ambition is important, and a clear and discernible goal makes it likelier that even if the whole thing doesn’t happen, serious progress is made. The government obviously hasn’t met its target for eliminating all boil water advisories, but the promise being “eliminate all of them in 5 years” spurred a lot more action than a vague commitment to action at some point on some timeline.
Will the government eliminate it? Who knows, but even failing to achieve full elimination would result in the lives of thousands of Canadians getting better, and that is a worthy aspiration. The problem with Canada is that we’re often too focused on the specifics of a pledge, and too worried about the downside of failing to meet it, and forget to think about all the good we could do. This ambition is something that will help a lot of people, and that’s a good thing.
The Indigenous infrastructure announcement is big money at an important cause too. The problem with the boil water advisories is that successive governments have allowed First Nations communities to become decrepit wastelands, exacerbating all kinds of societal harm and sometimes even being completely unreachable for months at a time. Building the infrastructure to get to these communities, and building the infrastructure in these communities, will enable job creation and better health care and education. Imagine what will happen to Indigenous life expectancy when you can get something resembling 21st Century health care on reserve, or even at least get off reserve to get to a decent hospital.
And then there’s my personal favourite announcement, the $4B cultural fund announced and the tax break for artists. I joked on Twitter about whether the tax break applied to Professional Assholes with Substacks, but in reality Canada should be a country that takes our cultural sector seriously. We’ve spawned one of the biggest cultural hits of the year, we have authors and musicians and actors who routinely break through internationally, and using a small amount of money in the grand scheme of our budget for culture and art is a good thing....
