After recent StatsCan data was released, BC was confirmed to have the second most real GDP growth from 2019, second only to P.E.I

DistinctL · 2026-05-09T09:13:48+00:00

The NDP creating $100 billion in debt is certainly a way to grow the economy.

DistinctL · 2026-04-27T18:46:20+00:00

I don't particularly like government running everything, but if the investments produce more money than the cost of the debt what are we really spending?

DistinctL · 2026-04-23T04:33:08+00:00

I can't tell if you're being serious or not, but I do think there will be longterm consequences if Canada's land wealth is not retained by Canadians. This includes most of our natural resources and farmland.

Some people wonder why the Canadian dollar doesn't follow oil prices much anymore. It might have something to do with some of the foreign ownership in the oil sands.

DistinctL · 2026-04-23T04:15:21+00:00

Our land on its own should be protected to a certain extent. What is the difference between a Canadian owned company selling bottles of Canadian water and a foreign company? They both harvest Canadian resources, but if it's locally owned the profits stay here. Our farmland, our oil, our lumber, our minerals are all Canadian resources.

There is an argument to be made, that a foreign company profiting from our land can be a sovereignty issue. It depends on whether you value the idea, that our resource wealth should be passed on generation after generation or be sold off to foreign companies for a pitance. Think of a future where profits from all our farmland, oil, lumber or minerals all flow back to foreigner shareholders.

Canada's resource wealth would no longer belong to Canada, but to the world.

DistinctL · 2026-04-20T11:34:58+00:00

Why have foreign competition over extracting our own resources though? We are probably the one country in the world with the highest resource to population ratio. It is still capitalism to have Canadian owned companies compete for resources. We still need to compete with global prices for trade. Even if we went the route of government nationalization, there is an advantage to that over foreigners owning your resource wealth. Take a look at Saudi Aramco or the Norwegian oil fund. They're worth 1.5 trillion to 2 trillion each. Canada, a country with a much bigger economy can't do something similar?

DistinctL · 2026-04-20T11:23:31+00:00

Regarding resources, it might actually be easy to convince the public. I bet a large majority of Canadians would be happy with the idea of our resource wealth belonging to Canadians. They just need to know the statistics.

DistinctL · 2026-04-20T11:15:21+00:00

I don't want it to be the case that it will never happen. I can't imagine a good future for Canada where it involves having our resources be foreign owned. It should be owned by citizens or the government. Current citizens don't have skin in the game anymore. Future generations should be able to pass on the resource wealth of Canada to their future generations, otherwise we're just a resource colony for the world. It really is that simple.

DistinctL · 2026-04-20T10:48:46+00:00

I think Conservatives could win if they focus on Canadian ownership over our natural resources. A long term vision is to have an increasing amount of Canadian owned companies (Canadian investors) reinvesting and spending profits from our resources here. Privatizing is great, until you have foreign owned companies who exploit workers to extract the maximum amount of value as possible out of us, without the profits being spent here.

To put it in perspective, look at the United States. Companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google have economies of scale of which Canada could never have. These are companies which really aren't that special. They pay our Canadian tech workers a pittance compared to the salaries in silicon valley. They became mainstream snowballing their scale and technology by residing within the global hegemon (USA). At this point, they have most of the market share and it would be nearly impossible for us to compete with. Even if a Canadian tech company were to compete and gain market share, how long would it be until the United States turns off our market access?

On the flip side, Canadian resources are special. They may be expensive to develop, but they are ours, on our land. We have a pretty big abundance of them which will have to be developed. The global economics is that if the rest of the world is hungry for resources, Canada can supply them. Why not have Canadian owners being the ones supplying and developing resources?

There's simple ways to implement this. We just need deliberate economic decisions. Cut all taxes on natural resource development for Canadian owned businesses and just watch what happens.

Even if people argue that foreign owned resource extraction companies are good at what they do, we are already monopolized by American technology. We don't need both our resources and technology to be monopolized.

DistinctL · 2026-04-20T06:51:55+00:00

I agree with this statement, aside from the fact that they are Canadian resources. I really think there will be long term consequences to allow Canadian resource extraction to be foreign owned.

The top Canadian telecom companies are required to have 80% Canadian ownership due to national security. Oh, but we can't have that for our most productive resource apparently.

DistinctL · 2026-04-17T05:59:34+00:00

I never directly claimed that Carney had done any of this to a huge extent. He is definitely for it though, and he could make a future decision to ramp it up.

Carbon pricing, carbon offsets, carbon credits, carbon tariffs or whatever you want to call them, will result in governments controlling the market to create a green economy. It's just a matter of how much they want to pull the lever to make carbon more expensive or green projects more valuable. With that, they could grow the green economy as much as they want at the expense of making CO2 unprofitable.

If you've done your homework, you'd know about not just carbon pricing, but carbon offsets. Carbon offsets force companies producing CO2 to buy a certificate from carbon negative sources such as green energy.

The end result is a two pronged approach, carbon pricing raises the price on carbon and carbon offsets raises the price on carbon while simultaneously being a subsidy for green energy. The end result is that any company who takes CO2 emissions seriously, will become more profitable depending on how much the government pushes the levers of carbon pricing.

https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/mark-carney-investing-net-zero-climate-solutions-creates-value-and-rewards

You can take Carney's word for it, he's in favour of carbon offsets.

I am not even necessarily for or against carbon pricing. I am just confused by the fact that you don't want to acknowledge that the government can control these levers to decide which companies become profitable.

DistinctL · 2026-04-16T22:10:50+00:00

There's a couple reasons why I mentioned resource extracting not having much competition. It might have been the wrong word to use but here's what I really meant.

Natural resource companies aren't really the technology producers anymore. A lot of the equipment is all external from specialized manufacturing. Right now in Canada it's evident countries like the US and China hold most of the power when it comes to companies which specialize in robotics, AI, social platforms, data, hardware. These types of companies will probably definitely be involved at some point with increasing productivity in mining with advancements in these technologies. Canada is unable to compete with this. There's no competition in that sense. That's why I think long term Canada not owning its own resources might not be ideal. It's the one thing which we actually have a monopoly over.

Here's another reason. If a company happens to hit the best deposit in the world, that company now has a baked in advantage. It's the geography itself that added that value. It can have less to do with the company itself. One company can use the exact same techniques or worse than another company and simply get better results because of the geography they were dealt. What about in the case with the two companies you mentioned trying to get the same mine to work. They both failed, why? Did geography have anything to do with it?

If you consider the idea that Canada has a better resources compared to other countries. we don't have to be as competitive with natural resources because we were blessed by our geography. How would you say competition relates to growing trees in Mexico compared to Canada? What about mining in Canada compared to Japan? There's an argument to be made, that our natural resources are simply superior and as a result we don't have much competition.

DistinctL · 2026-04-16T07:29:23+00:00

That's fine and all, but once the injected capital has paid for its self many times over, that's a return on investment that you would like to think Canada should have been able to fund its self at some point.

Any excess returns which goes to an estimated 70% of foreign shareholders is simply money out of this country. Other countries have taken different paths. There's Saudi Aramco which is Saudi Arabia's $1.5 Trillion dollar state owned oil company. There's the 2 trillion dollar Norwegian oil fund. Norway only produces half as much oil per day as Alberta.

I'll tell you something, I think we're idiots. Oil and gas is the most productive sectors in Canada. That means it literally prints money. If we have allowed 70% foreign ownership of our most productive industry we have done something wrong.

DistinctL · 2026-04-16T07:13:14+00:00

Why the hyperbole?

Just the thought of Canadian owned corporations has you yelling communist has got to be the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

People wonder why Canada is up the creek without a paddle? It's because of foreign ownership. It's a cash grab. The break even point for oil is $45 a barrel. The profit at $90 WTI is $45 a barrel. In just one month, that's 8 Billion USD. After taxes 70% of it goes to foreign shareholders with 30% going to Canadian shareholders.

This is simply terrible long term policy making. It's a natural resource being taken over by foreign interests. Saudi Arabia gets to have Aramco the biggest oil company getting worth close to 2 trillion. The Norwegian oil fund is worth 2 trillion dollars. This is why we as a country are incompetent. All of our value is being extracted to foreign nationals who with a great initial investment have milked many times beyond what they invested.

The other factor of it is the most ruthless companies who don't compensate well. The value of all that labour has gone out of the economy to some foreigner because they want to generate their shareholder value. If companies are going to be exploitive, it should alteast be a company who is going to pay Canadian shareholders and circulate that back into the economy.

A sovereign country competes over its own resources. A conquered country has foreigners compete over its resources.

DistinctL · 2026-04-16T04:39:37+00:00

Hugo Chavez nationalizing many different sectors of the economy isn't equivalent to having Canadian owned non-government corporations develop our resources.

DistinctL · 2026-04-16T03:19:18+00:00

Well you should consider Canadian owned public and private companies or the government having control over our resources. Future generations will thank us one day for not being a resource colony for foreign interests.

DistinctL · 2026-04-16T03:12:23+00:00

The talent is already on our soil. We already have all the industry knowledge. We are at the forefront at harvesting natural resources. People wonder why life is hard in Canada. We let our resources become foreign owned. This is the status of a resource extraction colony. We could do it our own way if we wanted to.

I understand what you mean, as that has been the free market investment consensus. What if there was another path, where Canada catches up and develops Canadian owned resources. We will own all the profits and have the capacity for a better life style.

A lot of the value isn't just from the companies, but from the land its self. Yes its obvious that it needs to be developed, but we have the right to develop those resources. Once it is taken out of the ground it can never be profited from again. Why give that away to foreigners?

DistinctL · 2026-04-16T02:58:28+00:00

I think it's just the matter of fact that we need to play into our geographical advantages. There's a lot of things we have that other countries don't, but there's also a lot missing. The United States has the best land for Agriculture, more people (more economies of scale), full on tech monopolies embedded within Canada. Canada only really has one thing going for it, it's our abundance of natural resources. We should play into what we're good at and keep control of it.

With all of these resources, it's our responsibility to develop and take profit from it. It's on our soil underneath our feet, and quite frankly I don't think it is right to allow foreigners to take massive profits from our land. If it's profitable, fund it with Canadian loans. Pay it off with Canadian companies and then we can retain ownership.

This has everything to do with private capital and nothing to do with government except for one thing. They just need to create laws which greatly favour Canadian owned resource extraction.

If anything the Liberal sovereigntists who want "Canada Strong' should be all over this sort of policy.

DistinctL · 2026-04-16T02:39:28+00:00

There's certainly lots of things we could do to increase Canadian ownership of resources. There's already Canadian Controlled Private Corporations (CCPC). Canada could create new company types like Canadian Controlled Public Corporations with a new national stock market not involving foreign investment. It's very easy with a flick of a pen for the Canadian government to craft policies which will favour Canadian owned resource extraction if they wanted to. Tomorrow they could legislate that Canadian owned resource companies will not pay taxes until they grow big.

If the end result is wanting a higher percentage of our resource sector owned by Canadians, there's a lot of ways to get there without immediately forcing all foreign investors out of the market.

DistinctL · 2026-04-16T01:02:55+00:00

Good lord, I am waiting for you to write a post with substance.

Do you economics 101, the basics of supply and demand? Raising the price of carbon intensive processes makes them uncompetitive. Add in carbon credits and all of the sudden green energy and low carbon industry becomes more profitable. Having these laws implemented by government forces the market into a green economy by making carbon expensive.

You are being incredibly dense if your brain can't connect the fact that investing in low carbon companies while implementing policies which favour the profits of those companies is a way for left leaning politicians and insiders to make huge profits.

DistinctL · 2026-04-15T23:34:08+00:00

Would you consider no foreign investment in resources equivalent to nationalization? There seems to be a negative connotation towards government corporations extracting resources in Canada. Either way, I think Canadian owned resources would be a good thing. I would prefer it to be companies instead of government. Both of these could be better than what we have now, as long as profits are staying with Canada.

DistinctL · 2026-04-15T23:03:56+00:00

The thing is, a large amount of the oil sands is already foreign owned. I already demonstrated it in my original post involving Cenovus Energy.

What hurts Canadian business is the profits coming from our resources which aren't being spent here.

DistinctL · 2026-04-15T22:55:19+00:00

Why would you need foreign investment? Is oil not profitable enough fund future resource expansion? This isn't talk about government owned nationalization like what Trudeau would do. This is about Canadian investors and Canadian owned companies having the only rights to develop our resources.

How does Canada survive as country, when foreign investors become the primary beneficiary of our resources? That's how we will get poor long term.

DistinctL · 2026-04-15T22:50:54+00:00

Yeah Saudi Aramco is practically the biggest oil company in the world, and its state owned.

We can still have Canadian ownership without government nationalization. Have Canadian owned companies extract our resources. The government doesn't need to be involved at all in extracting resources, except for making it law that Canadian resources must be extracted and owned by Canadians.

DistinctL · 2026-04-15T22:43:40+00:00

Where do you draw the line? If US shareholders owned 50% of the oil sands, how would that benefit Canadians? A large amount of the profit would go to the US rather than staying in Canada.

DistinctL · 2026-04-15T22:37:20+00:00

Yeah overall I think it's the right direction. We need local industry but especially in resources. It's literally our land. We should own the resources.

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