It is rare for the Bank of Canada to say that we face a national economic emergency. But that is exactly what Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers did on March 26. She was referring to Canada’s dismal record on labour productivity, which is indeed a major, albeit long-standing issue. Her widely publicized speech put a sharper focus on very weak Canadian economic performance, especially relative to the US.

Those who promote right-wing solutions for societal ills have long argued for minimal state interference with the play of market forces. It has often been suggested that all attempts to constrain unbridled profit-making are just so many barriers to ambition, hard work and prosperity. The sexist term “nanny state” is often pressed into service to make the point.

Western economists continue to argue that the Chinese economy is heading down the drain. As Michael Roberts argues, this critique is not factually correct, and it aims to distract attention from the reality that the Western capitalist economies (apart from the United States) are floundering in stagnation and near slump.

While the bank accounts of Canada’s richest executives and CEOs bloat with money that should be equitably distributed to all, food prices, housing costs, and homelessness are spinning out of control, disproportionately impacting the marginalized and oppressed: Indigenous peoples, people of colour, women and LGBTQ+, and the working class in general.

Even if producing a record supply of housing units could guarantee solving the affordability issue, actually building that much housing with viable density comes with a steep price tag. Even advocates of mass housing admit as much. If we don’t go after the land value itself, we are essentially trying to deflate a balloon by blowing on it.

Canada’s growing food insecurity crisis requires solutions that go beyond asking grocery store CEOs to bring down prices. Policies from windfall profits taxes, to price controls, to city-owned grocery stores would do much more to help with food insecurity, while backing labour’s struggle for wages and working conditions.

The three-day summit of the BRICS leaders ends today. The BRICS are Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Russian leader Vladimir Putin was not present in person. The five BRICS nations now have a combined GDP larger than that of the G7 in purchasing power parity terms (a measure of what GDP can buy domestically in goods and services).

Like Jordan Peterson in his prime, Sylvain Charlebois will walk back his most outrageous suggestions by claiming he was just asking questions, accusing anyone who inferred otherwise of misinterpreting him. Making bold claims and then backing away from them by feigning neutrality as a dispassionate observer is what I call the “Charlebois Shuffle.”

Wages do not cause inflation but they do eat into profits. And profit, the unpaid labour of the working class, is the lifeblood upon which all the parasitic layers of society depend—from bosses to central bankers. The wage-price spiral is not a serious model; it’s a tale told to frighten workers out of threatening profit.

We are often told by the political class in Ottawa that more aggressive decarbonization is magical thinking. The reality, of course, is that imagining capitalism can continue on its current path with nothing more than an engine swap is magical thinking. And it’s a fantasy based on the quantitative results of modelling rooted in the assumption that nothing can fundamentally change.