Mark Carney’s new budget exposes how Canada’s political class weaponizes the deficit to protect elites and justify austerity. Despite alarmist rhetoric, Canada’s debt is modest and self-financed. The real danger isn’t economic, it’s political: using deficit panic to erode public services and discipline workers in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

Canada’s banks no longer serve the real economy. Decades of private lending have fuelled housing bubbles, record household debt, and economic instability. Revisiting the CCF’s Regina Manifesto, James Hardwick makes the case for public banking—a solution to redirect credit toward housing, infrastructure, and productive investment while reclaiming finance as a public utility.

The disconnect between big economic indicators and Canadians’ day-to-day experience is a gap our political leaders seem unable or unwilling to bridge. Indeed, parliamentarians have gotten in the habit of telling us that everything is basically fine—we just need to live within our means. It hasn’t occurred to them that the economic indicators might be missing something.

Canada’s household debt has soared to $3.07 trillion, the highest in the G7 for 15 years. James Hardwick explores how speculation, housing bubbles, and government policy created a fragile economy where ordinary families bear the costs—warning of bankruptcies, austerity, and the urgent need to confront financial elites.

Canada’s so-called productivity crisis isn’t about lazy workers—it’s about complacent executives, protected oligopolies, and metrics that reward speculation over real value. If being “productive” means enriching landlords and gutting public services, writes James Hardwick, maybe we need to be less productive.

Over the past three decades our governments have once again walked away from direct housing provision and, for the third time in a century, allowed the private sector to make a mess of our housing system. We know from our nation’s history that only strong non-market alternatives will restore affordability and get people into the homes they deserve.

If we wanted to create a world where everyone has affordable housing we would. We would take a track similar to France, Austria, or Finland and work to undo cultural stigmas against renting and social housing and use non-market alternatives to provide decent homes for all. But our leaders have made it clear that they have no interest in following this path.

It is clear that supply and demand curves are not sufficient for understanding the housing crisis. We can build all we want, but if we are building houses as financial assets prices are going to stay high. The act of building matters a lot less than the decisions we make about what to build, who to build for, and most importantly, who will own our homes.

There is no more utility in technocratic fixes. We need to lower housing prices and address the knock-on effect falling home values will have on older Canadians. We must restore housing affordability while simultaneously improving our public pension and elder care systems. Every Canadian deserves both an affordable home and a dignified retirement.

Imposed from above during an economic emergency, rent control played a significant role both in curbing out-of-control inflation and solving the housing crisis Canada was experiencing at the time. A combination of robust rent control and concurrent investments in public housing saw housing prices fall by as much as 30 percent in real terms between 1975 and 1978.