Trade talks between Canada and the US collapsed on August 21 after Washington introduced sweeping, late-stage demands, including restrictions on sovereign trade policy, the exclusion of Ontario-built heavy trucks from tariff relief, and attacks on Francophone cultural rights.

Prime Minister Carney responded by walking away from the table and recalling Canadian negotiators.

He also announced immediate retaliatory measures just hours before a 50% tariff on $20 billion of Canadian goods was set to take effect.

Despite adopting a largely supportive tone in the wake of this move, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had previously seized on the timing of the Liberal leader’s recent summer family vacation in Tuscany, Italy. The leader of the Official Opposition claimed that Carney was AWOL while the country’s economic security burned, pointing to official party criticisms over high-profile travel expenditures and arguing that “while Canadians are pinching pennies and stressing over their household budget, Carney is lavishing himself while failing to deliver results”.

This fits into a broader, ongoing Conservative campaign attacking the high percentage of time Carney has spent away from the country.

Now, to be fair, in his 17 months in office, Carney has travelled almost 185,000 kilometres (around 115,000 miles), visiting every continent except South America and - disappointingly - Antarctica.

Critics have consistently argued that his extensive travel volumes fail to yield concrete protections for Canadians (who presumably would otherwise benefit from Poilievre’s oversimplified promises of oil pipelines, tax cuts, and “getting government out of the way” - whatever that might mean).

However, these criticisms somewhat overlook the Prime Minister’s clear, consistent strategic pillars driving Canada’s foreign policy.

Across multiple continents, these engagements reflect an assertive middle-power playbook designed to navigate a fracturing global order.

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BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER

On March 9, 2025, Mark Carney succeeded Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

He was sworn in as our 24th Prime Minister by Governor General Mary Simon on March 14. And, only two days later, the self-assured political rookie traveled to Western Europe for the first of many - and I mean many - foreign trips.

Carney traveled to Paris and London to discuss rapidly strengthening ties with our two oldest and closest allies across the pond.

Coming together, the three middle powers sought to present a united diplomatic front amid aggressive US trade threats, advancing bilateral economic and security cooperation.

In Paris, Carney and French President Emmanuel Macron launched a new bilateral partnership focused on intelligence sharing, cybersecurity, and countering foreign interference, while strongly reaffirming commitments to the Canada-EU trade agreement (CETA).

The CETA is in effect through provisional application, which has already removed roughly 98% of pre-existing tariffs between Canada and the European Union - although full and permanent legal implementation remains pending complete ratification by all EU member states.

While Canada and the vast majority of EU nations had completed formal ratification, a small group of member states (10 out of 27) were yet to fully ratify the pact due to domestic legal and constitutional hurdles (such as debates over investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms).

The ten countries still holding out were Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Slovenia.

Oh, and France (not helped by its Senate voting down the implementation bill).

Despite the lack of universal parliamentary ratification across every single member state, the provisional framework continues to govern and heavily boost bilateral trade, energy, and regulatory cooperation - forming the baseline of the renewed commitments emphasized during subsequent European diplomatic engagements.

Following a hop, skip, and a jump across the Channel, Carney held his first audience with Canada’s Head of State (weird, eh) King Charles III at Buckingham Palace before meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street.

Together, they explored practical mechanisms to deepen commercial corridors and accelerate bilateral trade, specifically building upon the existing Canada-UK Trade Continuity Agreement and capitalizing on the United Kingdom’s recent accession as the 12th member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

While the brief tour of Canada’s former colonial masters was more about strategic signaling than signing new formal treaties, it successfully set the tone for Carney’s broader middle-power foreign policy - and previewed the bold political gambits that would ultimately help him secure a personal mandate from Canadians in April, capped by a historic arrangement with King Chuck to travel to Ottawa and personally open the new session of Parliament.

THE (ORANGE) ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Fresh off his European tour, our Prime Minister headed straight into the lion’s den for his first official visit to Washington, DC on May 5-6, 2025.

For context, Carney’s arrival followed a tumultuous sequence of early foreign visits to the newly inaugurated Trump administration:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had kicked things off in February, followed by French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, before culminating in the diplomatic disaster of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s late-February Oval Office meeting.

And we all remember how well that went.

Stepping into the West Wing, Carney sought to balance a firm insistence on national sovereignty with pragmatic, clear-eyed diplomacy - notably opening by declaring Trump as a “transformational President” focused heavily on the American worker and border security - with the choice of word being deliberately opaque.

Coming just weeks after Trump’s provocative (and outrageous) rhetoric regarding Canada becoming the “51st state” and mounting threats of sweeping sectoral tariffs, the stakes could not have been higher.

However, rather than getting dragged into public mudslinging over Trump’s real-estate-style musings about annexing Canada, Carney firmly drew the line, quietly reminding him that in property, some things - like nations - are simply never for sale, to which the President nodded (although that may be because he was trying hard not to fall asleep).

Pivoting the narrative toward mutual economic self-interest, Carney emphasized that after six decades of increasing economic integration, the US and Canada are structurally stronger when cooperating on integrated continental supply chains, energy grids, and security frameworks.

While no sweeping new permanent trade architecture was signed overnight, the visit seemingly de-escalated the immediate, hair-trigger tariff threats hanging over the spring by establishing ongoing working channels and setting the stage for continued face-to-face talks at the upcoming G7 Summit.

Domestically, the trip was viewed as a crucial test of Carney’s “value-based realism.” It signaled to Washington that Canada would not be bullied or easily isolated, while simultaneously reinforcing to Canadians that his administration was actively managing the US relationship head-on before accelerating broader trade diversification efforts across the globe.

And at the very least, Trump stopped referring to Canada’s head of government as “Governor”.

Sadly, it would not last.

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MASS-IVE PROBLEMS REQUIRE MASS-IVE SUPPORT

For Carney, there would be little time to rest.

Immediately after returning from Washington, his administration began intense behind-the-scenes alignment with provincial premiers to map out a united front on internal trade barriers and responses to US protectionism, setting the stage for their formal summit in Saskatoon, where the Prime Minister successfully worked on his fellow first ministers to tear down internal trade barriers.

Notably, Ontario signed major agreements with Alberta and Saskatchewan to mutually recognize goods, credentials, and labour, marking a rare breakthrough in reducing internal Canadian friction.

Meanwhile, to preempt US whining regarding synthetic drug-related border enforcement, the Liberal government tabled sweeping legislation designed to tighten security. This was despite Canadian intelligence and US customs data confirming that the President’s claims were wildly exaggerated - a predictable twist, given that greater illicit fentanyl and contraband flows into Canada from the US rather than the other way around.

Bill C-2 (later repackaged and refined as Bill C-12, the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act) granted authorities expanded powers to screen mail, combat transnational crime, and staunch the flow of illicit fentanyl and irregular migration, directly addressing the key issues weaponized by the Trump administration to justify border tariffs.

Not very liberal.

And then - a mere eleven days after returning from Washington, the Prime Minister set off for Rome on May 18 to represent Canada at the Inaugural Mass of Pope Leo XIV in St. Peter’s Square.

The historic gathering - attracting over 150 international delegations and dozens of heads of state - provided a strategic venue for soft-power diplomacy and targeted outreach across Europe.

(And an opportunity to finally answer the question: “Is the Pope Catholic?”)

Carney’s interactions centred on aligning Canada with the Holy See on core global priorities. In diplomatic exchanges squeezed in on either side of the formalities, Carney highlighted shared commitments to humanitarian relief in international conflict zones, global poverty alleviation, and environmental stewardship - echoing the new pontiff’s emphasis on human dignity amid rapid technological and geopolitical shifts.

While in town, Carney also stopped in to see Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni - it would have been rude not to - and other European counterparts for high-level bilateral talks.

Discussions focused on deepening transatlantic security cooperation, expanding green energy corridors, and reinforcing joint commitments to rules-based international trade.

The brief Italian tour showcased Mark Carney’s ability to pivot seamlessly from defensive economic negotiations in North America to principled, values-based multilateralism in Western Europe.

Feeling energized, Prime Minister Mark Carney next traveled to Belgium.

Carney met with Prime Minister Bart De Wever. Accompanied by his wife, Diana Fox Carney, they together visited the Antwerp Schoonselhof Military Cemetery to pay tribute to the 348 Canadian soldiers laid to rest there, a solemn stop that visually reinforced the deep, historical blood ties underpinning Canada’s relationship with European security.

From there they went to Brussels - the home (or at least one of the homes) of the European Union.

Carney met with European Council President António Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for the official leaders’ summit.

Against the backdrop of American protectionism and the ongoing Russian threat in the east (obviously more than just a “threat” for the people of Ukraine), the leaders officially launched what Carney termed “a new era of partnership.”

The centrepiece of the summit was the historic signing of the EU-Canada Security and Defence Partnership.

This landmark accord opened institutional pathways for Canada to integrate into European defence initiatives - including laying the groundwork for participation in joint defence procurement and European security action programs.

Beyond security, talks tackled the urgent need to shore up resilient supply chains, critical minerals, clean energy corridors, and advanced digital trade frameworks. Leaders also renewed joint political commitments to push through the final, stubborn national ratifications required to bring the long-provisional CETA trade agreement into full permanent legal effect.

And the number of national signatories had risen from 10 to 17.

(Plus the plucky Brits. For plucky, read ‘desperate’ to make some amends for Brexit.)

WAR IS HELL

Directly following his engagements in Brussels, Mark Carney traveled to The Hague - much more than an international criminal court - for the 2025 NATO Leaders’ Summit hosted at the World Forum - a very hoity toity venue for major conferences.

Operating under intense diplomatic scrutiny, the summit served as a high-stakes crucible for transatlantic alliance management amid persistent pressure from the US administration.

The event was the scene for one of Donald Trump’s ‘greatest hits’:

NATO spending.

To keep everyone united and prevent a major falling out, national leaders worked out a compromise, agreeing to a new spending framework that splits investments between traditional military power and critical public infrastructure.

Meanwhile, NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte was taking a shower after climbing out of the US President’s rear end.

(I also considered a “Dutch oven” joke in light of Rutte’s nationality but I thought better of it.)

Despite the transactional friction, Carney was a part of a collective effort pushing for an unequivocal, unvarnished reaffirmation of Article 5 - the one that states that an armed attack against any single NATO member state in Europe or North America is legally considered an attack against the entire alliance.

You know - the whole point of NATO.

Building on the momentum of his prior stop in Brussels, Carney used the summit’s parallel Defence Industry Forum to advocate for joint procurement pathways and the reduction of trade barriers among trusted allies, positioning Canada as a reliable partner in advanced defence technology and secure supply chains.

(In March 2026, we finally reached the magic 2% of GDP commitment made in Wales in 2014. Unfortunately, as Trump wants NATO spending to keep up with self-inflicted US inflation, the commitment is expected to increase to 3.5%, with a further 1.5% on propping up the military industrial complex sector.)

Returning home, Ottawa helped broker major interprovincial agreements; most notably, Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan signed sweeping Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) to build critical energy and trade infrastructure - including proposals for new pipelines connecting Western Canadian oil to Eastern refineries and rail corridors opening up Northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire.

Relations between central and western Canada had never been so good!

Meanwhile, as the impact of US sectoral tariffs began to seriously hit Canadian industries, in early August, Carney announced a $1.2 billion support package for the softwood lumber sector, split between loan guarantees and product diversification funding.

Simultaneously, the government implemented aggressive retaliatory measures, placing strict 50% surtaxes on targeted foreign steel imports to prevent cheap global overproduction from undercutting domestic producers.

As the summer was coming to an end, Carney headed to Eastern European for an unannounced visit to Kyiv for Ukrainian Independence Day, before arriving in Warsaw on August 25, to embark on a major strategic realignment with Poland.

Meeting with Prime Minister Donald Tusk (previously sparring partner of the UK in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum), Carney formally struck a sweeping bilateral pact spanning trade, defence, aerospace, and clean energy - all with the objective of driving European demand for Canadian exports.

Capitalizing on the EU defence procurement framework established earlier that summer, Carney announced that Canada would serve as the lead country at a major Polish defence industry exposition. Discussions focused heavily on joint defence manufacturing and coordinating support for NATO’s Eastern Flank.

(The one which Russia haunts.)

However, before sitting down with Tusk, Carney visited Canadian Armed Forces members stationed in Poland under ‘Operation Unifier’, emphasizing that training Ukrainian personnel remains vital to long-term European stability.

Both leaders reiterated that “no decisions about Ukraine should be made without Ukraine”.

(Meanwhile, Trump still believed that Ukraine held no cards.)

The visit successfully solidified a crucial bridgehead in Central Europe, deepening trade and security links with one of the continent’s fastest-growing economies - recovering from the “Trumpian” Law and Justice Party days - as Canada aggressively diversified its alliances away from US market volatility.

Prime Minister Carney next traveled north to Riga, Latvia, on August 27, shifting his focus directly to frontline deterrence and boots-on-the-ground execution.

Accompanied by Minister of National Defence David McGuinty - brother of former Ontario Premier Dalton -the Prime Minister visited the Ādaži Military Base to inspect Canada’s largest active overseas military deployment under Operation REASSURANCE.

(It must have been incredibly reassuring. Sorry - had to.)

Carney toured the tactical infrastructure at Ādaži, meeting directly with Canadian Armed Forces personnel and reviewing combat readiness alongside the leadership of Multinational Division “North” (MND-N).

With approximately 2,000 Canadian troops serving as the framework nation for the NATO Multinational Brigade in Latvia - integrating forces from over a dozen allied nations - Carney emphasized that Canada’s commitment to European collective security remains absolute, regardless of political crosscurrents in North America.

Capitalizing on the visit to cement long-term stability, Carney formally announced a three-year extension of Canada’s leadership mandate for the Multinational Brigade.

The decision locked in critical institutional continuity for NATO’s defensive posture along the Baltic frontier.

Beyond the diplomatic messaging, closed-door briefings with Latvian leadership and military commanders confronted hard logistical truths. Discussions squarely addressed the complex supply chains, heavy equipment maintenance needs, and the urgent requirement to integrate advanced drone warfare and counter-UAS systems into the brigade - underscoring that long-term deterrence would demand sustained, multi-year capital investments beyond baseline personnel commitments.

It’s one way to meet the 3.5% of GDP NATO commitment for sure!

The visit successfully reinforced alliance solidarity and provided tangible reassurance to a front-line ally which has the geographical misfortune to share a border with Russia, serving as a cornerstone of Carney’s broader strategy to project reliable middle-power leadership where it mattered most.

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YOU SAY “T-MEC”, I SAY “CUSMA”, DON’T CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF

In early September, the federal government announced a targeted restructuring of Canada’s retaliatory trade posture.

Ottawa rolled back several miscellaneous consumer surtaxes on US goods while holding firm on strategic heavy protections for core sectors like steel, aluminum, and autos, seeking to stabilize domestic supply chains ahead of the autumn.

Increasingly clear that Washington was no longer a reliable ally, the federal government heavily promoted alternative international agreements. Domestic business circles closely monitored the finalization of new non-US trade frameworks - particularly with nations in Southeast Asia and the Pacific - further demonstrating the Prime Minister’s objective of diversifying the Canadian economy.

Nevertheless, Canada also retained allies in our own continent.

Carney traveled to Mexico City in the middle of September, arriving at the Palacio Nacional, to hold bilateral consultations with President Claudia Sheinbaum.

The two commiserating leaders focused on North American trade resilience and industrial coordination ahead of upcoming review milestones for the CUSMA review.

Also known as T-MEC in Mexico.

Also known as USMCA - in the US. (But screw that.)

Carney and Sheinbaum established a unified front to insulate cross-border supply chains.

Furthermore, discussions centred on safeguarding integrated automotive, manufacturing, and energy corridors, ensuring that Ottawa and Mexico City coordinated their negotiating postures to prevent being boxed into bilateral deals dictated strictly from Washington.

Leveraging shared priorities on sustainable development and industrial policy, the leaders explored joint frameworks to accelerate nearshoring investments away from volatile global markets.

(Unfortunately there’s a whole big US of A preventing nearer-shoring but we do what we can.)

Canada and Mexico agreed to establish dedicated bilateral working groups focusing on critical mineral extraction, refined battery supply chains, and cross-border clean energy grids.

Beyond trade, the two administrations addressed shared security priorities, including regional law enforcement cooperation, intelligence-sharing frameworks to combat transnational cartels, and coordinated management of irregular migration corridors affecting North American border security.

While the meetings successfully yielded warm diplomatic rapport and reaffirmed shared commitments to trilateral economic integration, underlying tensions remained.

Canada and Mexico handle government subsidies and natural resources very differently, making it really tough for us to team up and present a united front when outside trade pressures get intense.

DON’T LOOK BACK IN UNGA

Immediately following his trip to sunny Mexico, between September 21-24, Mark Carney traveled to New York City to lead Canada’s delegation at the high-level opening week of the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

The Prime Minister was finally ready to pitch his doctrine of “value-based realism” to an audience of international peers.

(And a narcissistic toddler. Naming no names.)

Taking to the UN podium, Carney framed the compounding crises of protectionism, fractured supply chains, and climate disruption not merely as temporary market shocks, but as structural threats to global democracy.

He pressed fellow middle powers to band together against economic coercion, advocating for resilient multilateral frameworks that insulate clean energy transitions and critical supply lines from unilateral political weaponization.

Capitalizing on parallel high-level climate and sustainable development roundtables during the assembly week, Carney pushed for innovative blended-finance models involving both public and private capital.

He emphasized that developing economies must be actively supported in their green transitions, lest trade fragmentation entirely stall global decarbonization targets.

Away from the plenary hall, Carney maintained a relentless schedule of bilateral and plurilateral meetings.

He again spent time with European counterparts, while holding targeted consultations with the Global South (previously known as the “developing nations”; formerly known as the “Third World”) leaders to build consensus on multilateral governance reforms.

While the summit successfully elevated Canada’s diplomatic profile as a pragmatic, steady-handed anchor for rules-based international order, but - for now, at least - the most the Prime Minister got in response was a round of applause and a pat on the back.

And then many of them went back to kissing up to The Donald.

In the days prior to the UNGA, Trump had been given the honour of being the first US President in history to attend his second state visit to the UK.

Leaving New York, Carney flew to London to ask Starmer, “what the actual f***?” face-to-face - arriving on September 26, for a targeted two-day diplomatic and economic sprint.

Presumably somewhat embarrassed by his personal relentless sycophancy, the British Prime Minister had invited Carney to be the keynote at a high-profile summit, addressing an international assembly of progressive leaders, policymakers, and economic strategists.

Leveraging his deep credibility as an economic thinker, his address focused squarely on constructing resilient, worker-centric economic models capable of resisting populist protectionism and supply chain weaponization.

Starmer nodded along.

Like an automaton with the charisma of a cauliflower.

Aside from the keynote address, Carney maintained a closed-door schedule with major British institutional investors, asset managers, and fintech executives.

The discussions targeted substantial foreign direct investment (FDI) into our emerging clean tech sector, critical mineral extraction, and advanced manufacturing corridors - pitching Canada as a secure, rule-of-law harbour amid mounting global volatility.

(The diplomatic equivalent of putting a Maple Leaf flag on your suitcase when travelling abroad.)

Before departing the UK, Carney still found time to hold strategic consultations with Prime Minister Keir Starmer and key cabinet ministers at Number 10.

The leaders synchronized their diplomatic postures on ongoing security flashpoints in Europe and the Middle East, ensuring a unified Anglo-Canadian front ahead of upcoming autumn multilateral summits.

The visit successfully reinforced Canada’s strategic economic alliance with the UK and generated tangible momentum for private-sector investment, critically important at a time when global inflation remained stubbornly high, European growth looked like it had jumped into a very cold lake, and the usual disagreements over continental security.

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BEWARE THE FURY OF A PATIENT MAN

Following earlier September announcements for trade-hit sectors, the federal cabinet worked around the clock to finalize the mechanics of the Strategic Response Fund and localized workforce re-skilling packages, coordinating closely with provincial premiers and labour leaders to protect manufacturing hubs in Ontario and Quebec.

After which, Prime Minister Mark Carney returned to Washington, D.C., on October 6 for his second working visit to the White House.

Touching down amid mounting domestic economic pressure from ongoing US sectoral tariffs, Carney sought to secure carve-outs and lay groundwork for the upcoming formal review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).

Arriving at the West Wing, Carney sat down with President Donald J. Trump following preliminary consultations with key US senators and a concurrent domestic push coordinated with provincial premiers.

During a widely watched, unstructured joint press conference in the Oval Office, Trump alternated between praising the bilateral relationship and defending his aggressive trade policies as necessary peacekeeping tools, while Carney maintained a disciplined, pragmatic posture focused squarely on structural economic integration.

The core breakthrough of the summit centred on targeted work streams.

Carney and Trump formally directed their respective trade teams and cabinet ministers to lock down material progress and carve out relief on stubborn bilateral bottlenecks, specifically focusing on steel, aluminum, and cross-border energy corridors.

Beyond commerce, the discussions mapped out vital security coordinates.

Marking two years since the October 7 attacks in southern Israel, playing to his audience of one, Carney commended US diplomatic efforts in the Middle East before pivoting the conversation toward continental defence.

Highlighting Canada’s accelerated defence spending trajectory and upcoming industrial strategies, Carney pressed for closer cooperation on joint Arctic sovereignty and surveillance infrastructure.

Later that evening, Carney rounded out the trip with strategic-level dinners hosted by Vice President JD Vance.

(Hasn’t the poor man suffered enough?)

While the visit successfully established working conduits for sector-specific tariff exemptions and aligned defence priorities ahead of the CUSMA review cycle, Canadian exporters were still left to navigate persistent protectionist headwinds.

SHEIKH IT OFF

Continuing an unrelenting autumn diplomatic schedule, Prime Minister Mark Carney next flew to the shores of the Red Sea on October 13, to attend an emergency international peace and stability summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Convened in the wake of escalating regional conflict and severe humanitarian crises across the Middle East, the summit brought together key regional stakeholders, European leaders, and international partners to chart a path away from all-out regional war.

(Good luck!)

Against the backdrop of catastrophic civilian displacement and acute shortages of food, medicine, and clean water in active conflict zones, Carney used his address to press for immediate, unhindered humanitarian access.

Working closely with European and Arab counterparts, Canada pledged targeted funding increases for frontline aid agencies and advocated for formalized, secure logistical corridors to bypass bureaucratic and military bottlenecks.

While in Egypt, Carney also engaged in high-stakes bilateral consultations with regional leaders and international counterparts - including discussions with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and European delegates (of course).

Building on his UNGA speech, Carney again underscored that middle powers must actively bridge the widening chasm between Western democracies and the Global South, pushing a pragmatic security framework that couples immediate de-escalation with credible, long-term political horizons.

Beyond the immediate humanitarian focus, closed-door strategy sessions addressed the broader economic and security fallout of the crisis - specifically protecting critical maritime trade routes through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, which remained highly vulnerable to asymmetric disruptions and directly impacted global shipping costs for Canadian exporters.

(At least the Strait of Hormuz was still open!)

The summit successfully reinforced Canada’s reputation as a reliable, constructive actor committed to human security and multilateral diplomacy in volatile regions.

However, there’s only so much that words of warm wishes can achieve in the region.

Back in Ottawa, the minority government faced intense legislative gridlock as opposition parties debated the sweeping border security and immigration reform bills introduced earlier in the autumn (Bill C-12).

The administration fought to secure parliamentary buy-in, framing the legislative package as an essential domestic shield against US protectionist criticisms regarding border integrity.

(I’m sure everyone was confident that President Trump would be grateful.)

Meanwhile, Cabinet ministers convened extended sessions in Ottawa to finalize the operational framework for the upcoming National Energy Corridor initiative.

Collaborating closely with provincial labour organizations and resource sector leaders, the federal government worked to align domestic infrastructure investments with the upcoming Indo-Pacific trade push, ensuring Canadian energy producers could reliably pivot supply to non-US markets.

Prime Minister Mark Carney arrived in Kuala Lumpur on October 25 to lead Canada’s delegation at the 47th ASEAN (Association of Southeast Nations) Summit.

Playing to his strengths, Carney leaned heavily on his background as a central banker and international economist to cement commercial conduits across one of the world’s fastest-growing economic zones.

Addressing the plenary session of regional leaders, the Prime Minister made economic diversification a matter of national security, pressing for expedited negotiations on the comprehensive Canada-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement.

Recognizing that breaking dependency on the US market required concrete institutional frameworks, he successfully urged his Southeast Asian counterparts to streamline regulatory barriers and fast-track chapters on digital trade and resilient supply chains.

In addition, Carney and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim signed a landmark bilateral Letter of Intent.

(It’s at least better than a Letter of Indecision.)

The pact locked in intensive energy and industrial cooperation, focusing specifically on liquefied natural gas (LNG), civil nuclear energy integration, and renewable tech infrastructure. To ensure the framework translated into real-world projects, Ottawa accompanied the agreement with targeted technical assistance funding.

Throughout the summit’s parallel business forums, Carney again positioned Canada as a secure, predictable, and rule-of-law partner for Indo-Pacific capital and resource extraction - pitching Canadian critical minerals, clean tech, and agricultural exports as indispensable inputs for Asian manufacturing hubs.

Directly following the conclusion of the ASEAN Summit in Malaysia, Prime Minister Carney headed to Singapore for a high-level working visit on October 28-29.

Carney focused heavily on anchoring Canada’s long-term commercial strategy in one of the world’s most vital financial and logistics hubs.

Meeting with Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, Carney formally marked six decades of bilateral diplomatic relations. The leaders used the milestone to frame a modern economic partnership centered on strategic resilience, technological cooperation, and mutual security in the Indo-Pacific.

Central to the discussions was Canada’s national mission to double its non-US exports over the decade. Carney and Wong aligned on expediting the finalization of the comprehensive Canada-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement and leveraging the expansion of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) to lower barriers for Canadian businesses.

(It was a real alphabet souper!)

Beyond government-to-government talks, as he had previously done in the UK, Carney engaged major Southeast Asian institutional investors and toured the state-of-the-art facilities of PSA International - a major global port operator with significant terminal investments in Canada.

Discussions targeted expanding Canadian export capacity for clean energy, agri-food, civil nuclear components, and critical minerals to supply fast-growing Asian markets.

The visit yielded overwhelmingly positive diplomatic momentum, cementing Singapore as a primary anchor for Canada’s trade diversification strategy.

Next up was a visit to South Korea on October 29.

Carney split his time between attending an economic summit in Gyeongju and touring heavy shipyards on Geoje Island, locking in a major strategy to secure vital supply chains and high-value defence partnerships.

At the Gyeongju leaders’ gathering, Carney continued to pursue Canada’s national objective of doubling non-US exports over the decade by coordinating with regional partners to reduce tariff barriers and protect integrated supply networks from rising global protectionism.

As a major milestone of the tour, Carney and President Lee Jae Myung formally announced the landmark Canada-Republic of Korea Security and Defence Cooperation Partnership - the first bilateral framework of its kind for Canada in the Indo-Pacific region.

Alongside this overarching pact, the two leaders concluded negotiations for a reciprocal General Security of Information Agreement (GSOMIA), clearing the administrative pathways for deeper intelligence sharing and defence-industrial collaboration.

Carney subsequently traveled to Geoje Island to tour the sprawling facilities of the Hanwha Ocean Shipyard.

Evaluating advanced maritime engineering, naval capabilities, and commercial shipbuilding infrastructure, Carney explored avenues for joint technological cooperation and industrial integration to support both nations’ strategic maritime goals.

While the visit to Asia delivered some economic and diplomatic dividends, one cannot escape the reality that Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Gyeongju are a long, long way from Vancouver, which complicates matters somewhat.

(What’s the opposite of nearshoring?)

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Prime Minister Mark Carney spent his first seven months in office executing an aggressive, globe-spanning middle-power foreign policy designed to insulate Canada from US protectionism and trade volatility.

From securing defence and trade frameworks in Western Europe, the Baltic, and the Middle East to launching an ambitious economic pivot across the Indo-Pacific, Carney sought to reorient Canadian supply chains away from American dominance.

However, these high-stakes international triumphs continuously collided with the exhausting realities of domestic legislative gridlock, stubborn macroeconomic headwinds, and the immense logistical challenges of trying to diversify a North American economy from halfway across the world.

But our Prime Minister was not ready to become a homebody just yet.

‘Davos Man’ would spend the rest of the year - and the first half of 2026 - continuing to pursue an aggressive diversification tour across the globe.

But that’s all to come in Part 2 of I’ve Been Everywhere, Man.

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

I said it on Tuesday.

The three day pause was purely so President Trump can make an announcement before the weekend and prepare for the Monday morning trades.

He’s once more treating ordinary Canadians - and Americans - as collateral for his personal enrichment.

It’s now time to switch focus.

Canada’s internal trade remains heavily restricted by non-tariff barriers, including conflicting provincial regulations, over 600 distinct professional licencing bodies, and rigid CFTA exemptions that cost the national economy billions annually.

And making progress on this front is not only a non-brainer economically, it could also help ease regional alienation - at least out west.

Australia and the European Union prove it can be done.

By adopting mutual recognition frameworks, any good legally sold or professional credential approved in one province should be automatically accepted nationwide - shifting the burden onto provinces to justify exceptions instead of trapping businesses and workers in a fragmented maze.

The existential threat from the south surely trumps (pun intended) protecting narrow provincial stakeholder interests.

We’re running a classic prisoner’s dilemma here, folks. But we can see each other’s responses.

That should be grounds for real optimism.

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Never forget: Trump never wanted a deal, he wants a capitulation.

But he doesn’t have the cards.

Right now, imagine the American federal government saying to themselves,

“Yeah, sure, Canada is right up there, but let’s be real for a second - what have the Canadians ever actually done for us?

Kept the lights on: Oh, nothing much, just supplying the entire US power grid and heating homes with billions in electricity and natural gas.

Fueled our cars and factories: Aside from being our absolute biggest foreign supplier of crude oil, piped right down to our refineries so we don’t have to rely entirely on overseas tanker routes.

Put food on our plates: No big deal, just sending over enough potash to keep our entire Midwest agricultural machine fertilized and growing, plus a steady stream of beef and food products.

Powered our reactors: Supplying the uranium that fuels a massive chunk of our domestic nuclear power generation.

Built our houses and cars: Just handing us softwood lumber for our housing markets and running a fully integrated automotive supply chain where car parts cross the border five times before a vehicle even rolls off the lot.

Other than keeping our homes warm, our cars running, our farms growing, and our power grids stable... what have the Canadians ever done for us?!”

We are a rich, successful country - not because of the USA, but because of our own people, ingenuity, and openness to the world.

See? We can still borrow from the Americans, too!

We control our own destiny.

And focusing on what is controllable turns a chaotic external threat into a clear, disciplined mandate for internal action.

No to the Nine.

Vive le Québec.

One Canada. 🇨🇦

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

Jean-Baptiste Say - a nineteenth-century French economist - argued that it was production, not consumer spending, that was the primary driver of an economy.

At the time, the logic seemed obvious: to buy anything, it must first be produced.

Because every dollar (or franc) of production creates a dollar (or franc; seriously, remember those?) of income somewhere in the system, total national purchasing power always equals total national output.

Say what?

In English: the total money everyone in the country has to spend matches the total value of everything the country produces.

En français : la somme totale dont dispose chaque habitant du pays pour ses dépenses correspond à la valeur totale de tout ce que le pays produit.

(Ok, that’s quite enough of that.)

“Supply creates its own demand”.

So said Say.

Or actually, he didn’t. That phrase would be coined a century later. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Classical economists assumed rational people sell goods only to buy other goods, believing it irrational to let cash sit idle under a mattress where it earns no interest. Even if deposited in a bank, that cash was immediately loaned to businesses to buy equipment and produce more goods.

So even in this completely unrealistic scenario, the money isn’t actually lost. (Unless you deposited the funds at a Northern Rock or a Crédit Suisse.)

Crucially, Say’s Law deemed a widespread surplus of unsold goods and systemic unemployment - a “general glut” in the parlance - across an entire economy to be impossible.

Sure, you can have a temporary surplus of a specific item - Harley Davidson perfume, for instance. (Look it up.)

But that is just a mismatch.

The excess supply of

Harley

Davidson

perfume

is balanced by a shortage of something else people do want.

(Like absolutely anything else).

After all, Adam Smith taught us that in a free market, prices would adjust, the market would self-correct, and equilibrium would restore itself.

Here lay the intellectual justification for laissez-faire capitalism:

If governments want to grow the economy, they should lower taxes, remove regulations, and encourage business investment rather than hand out cash.

If workers were unemployed, it was simply because unions or minimum wage laws held wages artificially high.

Lower the wages, and full employment returns.

Sounds familiar, right?

As Edmund Blackadder might put it, there was only one tiny flaw in the plan:

“It was bollocks”.

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When the Great Depression struck in the 1930s, factory floors sat idle for years and tens of millions of workers in the USA, Canada, and Germany (eek), in particular, were stranded without jobs.

We had a massive, undisputed general glut.

Against this backdrop, John Maynard Keynes - the great patrician economist of Cambridge - felt empowered to attack Say’s Law at its very foundation.

Keynes pointed out that in the real world, during times of financial panic, ordinary people hang onto their hard-earned money and avoid spending it.

(And even the investor classes hoard their capital, waiting for the market to bottom out so they can “buy the dip.”)

When individuals save rather than spend, goods sit unsold on shelves. And as you might notice, businesses don’t respond by magically lowering prices—they cut production and fire workers instead.

After coining the term “supply creates its own demand” - for it was he - Keynes flipped the script to declare that:

“Demand creates its own supply.”

In 1936, Keynes published his magnum opus. (A Cambridge man deserves a Latin descriptor.)

In The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money - typically shortened to The General Theory, because much like the second verse of the British national anthem (or third, or even fourth, fifth, and sixth in some crazy traditional versions), no one ever bothers with the rest - Keynes argued that total spending dictates aggregate output.

In plain terms: how much money people and businesses actually spend determines how much stuff an economy produces.

If private consumption and investment collapse, market economies can remain trapped in prolonged slumps indefinitely.

To break the vicious cycle, policymakers must step in as the “spender of last resort” through counter-cyclical deficit spending.

In other words, when everyone else stops spending, the government borrows money and pumps it directly into the economy to get cash moving again.

It was a solid theory.

Undeniably so.

But Keynes’ work was written largely in prose and intuition.

This was still more philosophy than science.

Keynes’ revolutionary theoretical variables - aggregate demand, national income, the spending multiplier - existed on paper as abstract concepts. Policymakers had no practical way to measure them in the real world.

And so, after prattling on for nearly 800 words, we are finally ready to introduce the recipient of the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences: the Russian-American macroeconomic empiricist, Simon Kuznets.

THE RESEARCH

Woah - hold your horses.

Not

quite

yet.

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As we already explored in Episode 1, Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen transformed economics from abstract philosophy into a data-based operational science. Frisch gave us dynamic business cycles - showing how external “shocks” ripple through an economy’s internal “propagation” structure - while Tinbergen built the first national econometric models to steer government policy.

Then, in Episode 2, we covered how Paul A. Samuelson supplied the missing micro-foundations through revealed preference theory and constrained maximization.

But Samuelson wasn’t done: he was also busy combining Keynesian macroeconomics with traditional microeconomics into the Neoclassical Synthesis - the belief that policymakers could finely tune the economy by tweaking interest rates and government spending like knobs on a car stereo.

Beyond his micro-foundations, however, Samuelson - because he was a very busy guy - also formulated the Multiplier-Accelerator Interaction Model.

By showing that total national output is the sum of household consumption, business investment, and government spending - where consumption depends on income, but business investment responds directly to the speed at which consumer demand accelerates - Samuelson proved that this internal feedback loop naturally generates boom-and-bust cycles from within the system itself.

Yet, as Samuelson acknowledged, abstract mathematical formulations were nothing if they could not be applied to the real world.

The discipline still lacked standardized, reliable national data. An econometric equation or a constrained acceleration model is useless if you have no real-world numbers to plug into its variables.

This is where Simon Kuznets supplied the missing empirical fuel.

(Finally!)

The Roaring ‘20s were behind us.

The Stock Market Crash and Great Depression had taken root, and global powers were marching toward war.

Again.

All the while, Kuznets was designing the first standardized framework for national income accounting - the system that evolved into Gross National Product (GNP) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Before Kuznets, national economic output figures were little more than educated guesses. But by systematically - and manually - compiling US data back to 1869, Kuznets broke down national income by industry, final product, and end-use.

Samuelson’s theories about how individual choices add up to a national economy finally had real-world numbers to back them up, and Frisch and Tinbergen’s policy-forecasting models finally had actual data to run on.

Kuznets didn’t just count up a nation’s wealth - he gave governments the instrument panel they needed to steer the whole economic engine.

And just like that - to quote Carrie Bradshaw (how do I know that?) - Keynes’s theoretical variables could become more than the intellectual musings of a fastidious Cambridge academic.

After looking long and hard at the data, Kuznets produced all kinds of fresh insights.

He identified medium-term economic fluctuations lasting 15 to 25 years - now known as “Kuznets cycles” or “long swings.”

Driven by population growth, immigration, and massive infrastructure builds like housing, rail networks, and urban grids, these cycles demonstrated why private capital investment is inherently volatile.

Heavy infrastructure takes decades to build and decay; an economy inevitably overbuilds during a boom, leading to prolonged periods of oversupply where construction halts and drags down aggregate demand for years.

In his landmark 1954 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Kuznets introduced his famous hypothesis regarding economic growth and income inequality:

The Kuznets Curve.

He observed that as an economy industrializes, income inequality initially rises.

Capital owners and skilled urban workers capture the early gains, while rural workers lag behind.

(If you’ve ever wondered what causes the urban-rural divide in polities, now you know. At least, from an economic perspective.)

But as the nation matures, higher national income generates the tax revenues needed to fund public education, social safety nets, and infrastructure. Inequality eventually declines, forming a neat, inverted U-shaped trajectory over time.

Crucially, Kuznets linked this structural evolution directly back to aggregate demand - the total spending power of an entire nation.

Because poorer households spend a far larger fraction of their income than the wealthy, extreme inequality concentrates money at the top where it sits idle. (Again, sound familiar?)

This starves consumer spending, weakens aggregate demand, and triggers short-term recessions.

Until the birth of the credit card, that is.

THE APPLICATION

As a further refresher, Jan Tinbergen revolutionized governance by treating economic policy as a design problem - formalizing the “targets and instruments” framework to prove that governments need distinct, independent policy levers for each target macroeconomic objective.

Samuelson and Solow took this principle and expanded it into linear programming and capital allocation to solve complex, multi-sector production problems.

The practical execution of this design approach reached its peak during the Second World War, when governments needed to mobilize massive industrial capacity without triggering the runaway hyperinflation that had devastated Europe - though admittedly less than the fighting itself - during World War I.

The difference this time around?

Our economist heroes.

Simon Kuznets served as the Associate Director of the Bureau of Planning and Statistics for the US War Production Board.

Using his national income accounts alongside Keynesian principles and Tinbergen-style policy design, Kuznets and his team calculated the exact trade-offs between civilian production, military hardware, and tax policy required to run a total war economy.

Just as a defence ministry faces Samuelson’s classic “guns versus butter” trade-off (or pizza versus fighter jet wings - remember?!) when selecting between stealth fighters, naval recapitalization, or domestic social spending, World War II planners faced identical constraints under severe fiscal and material scarcity.

Actually, identical seems like the wrong word.

They faced exponentially worse constraints and far more severe material scarcity relative to what was required.

Without Kuznets’ accounting framework, military planners would have had no way to determine how much steel, rubber, and manufacturing capacity could be diverted to weapons production without collapsing the domestic economy or causing catastrophic shortages.

To execute a Keynesian stimulus or war mobilization responsibly, a government could not rely on political intuition alone.

(And the Western powers were fortunately not plagued by populists spouting “common sense” nonsense.)

Policymakers needed to know the exact gap between actual output and full-capacity output, along with an empirical measure of Keynes’ Marginal Propensity to Consume.

In plain English: how much of every new dollar people actually spend rather than save.

In posh English: how much of one’s pocketbook of pounds sterling is expended relative to the amount conserved.

Kuznets’ empirical breakdowns provided the operational dashboard required to execute counter-cyclical fiscal policy - spending money during slumps to offset private sector pullbacks - first during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and later to manage the precise allocation of industrial resources to fight a global war.

Once the Americans actually joined the fight, of course.

LIMITATIONS

While Frisch, Tinbergen, and Samuelson built deductive, top-down mathematical systems to model business cycles and consumer choice, Kuznets favored an inductive, historical approach.

(Taking the data and using it to create a generalized theory.)

Kuznets believed in gathering vast historical data to let empirical patterns reveal themselves naturally before formulating hypotheses, cautioning against forcing complex human histories into rigid formulas or relying on models that risk oversimplifying the lived realities of everyday people.

However, despite providing the primary metric used to measure global economies today, Kuznets was deeply sceptical of using GNP and GDP as proxies for national welfare or societal success - a caution that echoes the broader limitations of top-down economic modeling we addressed in the previous two episodes.

Just as Samuelson’s models relied on the idealized abstraction of homo economicus and ignored real-world behavioural quirks, GDP metrics suffer from their own blind spots.

In his very first report to the US Congress in 1934, Kuznets explicitly warned that the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.

He recognized that national accounts measure the volume of market transactions, not the quality or equity of human life.

GDP counts expenditures on armaments, environmental cleanup after industrial spills, and emergency medical treatments as positive economic activity, while completely ignoring unpaid domestic labour, child care, environmental degradation, and overall public health.

Which largely explains why so many people grow hostile towards capitalism.

But not towards communism.

Go figure.

MODERN USAGE

Kuznets’ wartime macroeconomic methodology laid the groundwork for managing post-war reconstruction in Europe and Japan.

And - even today - his national income accounting framework remains the universal architecture used by central banks, finance ministries, and international institutions like the IMF and World Bank to track economic health.

Every quarterly GDP report, deficit calculation, and growth projection published globally relies on the foundational concepts Kuznets formalized nearly a century ago.

Just as central banks today use Frisch’s impulse-propagation concepts in modern DSGE models (those tools used to simulate how the economy reacts to shocks), rely on the Tinbergen Rule (a distinct lever for every policy target) to adjust interest rates against inflation, and apply Samuelson’s constrained optimization (picking the best path when resources are limited) to analyze market shifts, they rely simultaneously on Kuznets’ accounting data to inform every single decision.

His work on the Kuznets Curve also remains a central reference point in contemporary development economics, public policy, and debates over income distribution.

Although modern economists debate whether his clean, inverted U-curve holds true in late-stage post-industrial economies (a fancy term for “the West”), the arc of recent history with regard to wealth distribution has been anything but uniform.

Instead of moving steadily toward a greater state of income equality, modern crises frequently produce a K-shaped recovery - where capital owners and tech-enabled knowledge workers surge along the upward arm of the “K,” while wage earners and service workers tumble down the lower arm.

(For the latter - large - population, “K” stands for “krapped on”.)

Nevertheless, Kuznets’ core insistence on evaluating wealth distribution alongside aggregate output continues to shape tax policy, welfare design, and international development strategies today.

For better or for worse.

CONCLUSION

Lennon and McCartney.

Siegfried and Roy.

Keynes and Kuznets.

All great twentieth-century double acts.

Keynes supplied the grand theoretical rulebook for macroeconomics; Kuznets built the dashboard that actually made it useful.

Leonardo da Vinci drew the picture. Orville Wright flew the plane.

Together with their fellow early Nobel laureates, Kuznets and Keynes constructed the core foundation of modern quantitative economics.

Without Kuznets’ painstaking historical work to ground abstract theories in concrete measurement, macroeconomic policy would have remained a matter of speculative philosophy.

Or at best - incredibly localized.

Having built the dashboard and written the “rules of the road”, economists in the post-war era faced a brand-new, terrifying question: does any of this actually hold together when millions of self-interested individuals make decisions - all at the same time?

And not acting as homo economicus. (Social media made it extinct.)

It’s time we explore how macroeconomic policy-making stands the test of democratic action. For that, we must examine the work of Kenneth Arrow and John Hicks - co-winners of the 1972 Nobel Memorial Prize.

Economics is about providing options. Politics is about making choices through the application of power.

We must move toward judging governments not on identity or personality, but on policy. To do this, we must recognize that the policies we prefer are invariably informed by our own personal circumstances, background, and ideology.

There is nothing wrong with assessing policy through this lens - but it must be done with intention. By grounding our perspective in objective economic reality and acknowledging our own values, we can move beyond partisan noise and begin to make truly informed assessments of the choices that shape our world.

This is not just a better way to view governance; it is the only way to actually solve the problems we face.

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

“Meloni appears the most dangerous Italian political figure not because she explicitly evokes fascism or the practices of the black-shirted squadristi (militia), but because of her ambiguity.” - Roberto Saviano in the Guardian, September 24, 2022

When Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing coalition came to power in October 2022, much of the international community (and the chattering classes) feared the worst.

Bringing together the protectionist populism of Matteo Salvini’s Lega and the establishment, pro-business instincts of the late Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia was a sure-fire recipe for disaster.

Conventional wisdom dictated that a government headed by the far-right Fratelli d’Italia would inevitably come to blows with Brussels over fiscal spending, destabilize Italy’s already vulnerable bond market, and strain key Western alliances.

(Even before Donald J. Trump had his chance to do so.)

And yet, on the economic front, at least, the Meloni government has pursued an unexpectedly mainstream approach, with the Prime Minister exhibiting a remarkably high degree of continuity with some of her technocratic predecessors.

How so, you may ask?

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‘SPENDERE E SPANDERE’ NO LONGER

The Meloni government promptly set out to restore fiscal credibility through targeted spending controls and structural budget realignments.

The administration had inherited a dire fiscal legacy from former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte - unresolved by his successor, Mario Draghi - most notably the unfunded “Superbonus 110%” housing renovation scheme.

Introduced in 2020 to stimulate post-pandemic construction, the policy allowed homeowners to claim transferable tax credits exceeding actual construction costs. Unfortunately, accumulated liabilities topped €120 billion, driving Italy’s budget deficit to a staggering 7.4% of GDP in 2023.

In response, the Meloni government initiated an aggressive phase-down.

The Superbonus rate was immediately cut to 90% for 2023, with scheduled step-downs to 70% in 2024 and 65% in 2025. Emergency decree-laws halted the tradeability of tax credits (cessione del credito) and invoice discounts (sconto in fattura), shutting down bank-financed project pipelines overnight.

But further action was required.

In tandem with this fiscal tightening, the government executed a major overhaul of Italy’s €194.4 billion Post-Pandemic EU Recovery and Resilience Plan (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza, or PNRR).

Recognizing that delivering thousands of fragmented municipal projects risked missing strict EU deadlines due to bureaucratic bottlenecks, Rome renegotiated the plan with the European Commission - the executive branch of the EU.

Public capital was redirected away from low-impact municipal works toward strategic national initiatives: power grid resilience, cross-border energy interconnectors, biomethane infrastructure, and utility-scale renewables.

This pivot toward long-term energy security was paired with the completion of the long-delayed deregulated energy market transition (servizio di maggior tutela). State-regulated price tariffs ended for domestic natural gas in January 2024, followed by electricity mid-year, shifting millions of households into liberalized free-market pricing (mercato libero).

To shield low-income, disabled, and elderly citizens from market volatility, the state carved out protected baseline safeguards (clienti vulnerabili), satisfying key EU structural benchmarks while expanding retail energy competition.

To accelerate infrastructure delivery, Rome also overhauled the Public Contracts Code (Codice dei Contratti Pubblici, Legislative Decree 36/2023). Direct contract awards (affidamento diretto) were raised to €150,000 for public works without requiring full formal tenders.

Supported by mandatory end-to-end digitalization, background and compliance checks are now processed through certified e-procurement platforms linked to the National Database of Public Contracts. Crucially, the code established a presumption of “good faith” for public project managers (Responsabili Unici del Progetto), directly tackling the pervasive “fear of the signature” (paura della firma) that had long stymied Italian public administration.

(For anyone who has ever had a boss, I’m sure this feels strangely familiar.)

When the Council of the European Union (the legislative body representing nation-state governments) formally opened an Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) against Italy in mid-2024, the Meloni government committed to a multi-year consolidation plan to bring the national deficit below the mandatory 3% EU ceiling by 2026.

While lingering Superbonus liabilities kept the 2025 deficit slightly elevated at 3.1%, after constraining discretionary spending, capping primary expenditure growth, and phasing out extraordinary pandemic and energy subsidies, current trajectories project a drop to 2.8% this year, paving the way for a formal exit from the procedure.

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MARKET-ORIENTED NATIONALISM

Meanwhile, to shield strategic corporate assets, the Meloni administration has also expanded governmental foreign investment screening mechanisms.

Originally established in 2012 under Prime Minister Mario Monti to protect defence, transport, and energy assets, the “Golden Power” framework - which allows the state to review, condition, or veto foreign acquisitions in key sectors - was systematically broadened under Meloni.

Screening mandates were extended to more up-to-date critical priorities, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, semiconductors, cybersecurity, and private cloud infrastructure. Under Decree-Law 104/2023, the government also closed a key oversight loophole by subjecting intragroup corporate restructuring to state review.

Consequently, Italian firms attempting to transfer critical patents, algorithms, or microelectronics to foreign subsidiaries within their own corporate groups now require formal governmental clearance. For example, during the sale of Telecom Italia’s fixed-line network infrastructure to US private equity firm KKR, the government exercised its special powers to secure a strategic minority stake alongside board veto rights over decisions affecting national security.

This approach underscores to international investors that access to Italy’s strategic sectors remains conditional on alignment with national interest priorities.

Italia first.

In an effort to move away from conventional subsidies and emergency welfare, the Meloni government also enacted the Made in Italy Framework Law (Law No. 206) in December 2023, committing €1 billion to combine economic protectionism with direct state equity financing.

(In plain language, the state acts as a sovereign growth fund - taking minority stakes in promising Italian supply chains and mid-sized exporters to help them scale without selling out to foreign buyers.)

To remain compliant with EU state-aid rules, the law relies on patient public capital (a method of state-backed financing that accepts higher up-front risks for longer-term strategic initiatives) to incentivize co-investment from the private sector.

The government is prioritizing high-value sectors - such as advanced machinery, specialized textiles, precision engineering, and agri-food - but the framework also enables family-owned enterprises to scale without relinquishing domestic control or offshoring production.

Demonstrating its serious intent, the Meloni administration has even established a complementary specialized secondary school curriculum (Liceo del Made in Italy) covering industrial design, business economics, and technical trades to preserve domestic talent pipelines.

(The policy was attacked by left-wing critics for prioritizing market demand over broad humanistic education. In practice, however, bureaucratic delays and lukewarm public interest yielded negligible early enrollment, turning a flagship cultural initiative into a minor policy blip.)

At the same time, the government has been tackling Italy’s historically low female labour force participation rate relative to EU averages.

Exacerbated by structural friction surrounding motherhood - from high private childcare costs and shortages in public nursery infrastructure (asili nido) to persistent wage disparities and a brief 10-day mandatory paternity leave - mothers have long been forced to transition to part-time roles or exit the workforce altogether, permanently undercutting their long-term career progression.

Replacing broader social transfers like the former Citizenship Income (Reddito di Cittadinanza), the Meloni government has preferred new corporate tax incentives, conditional welfare mechanisms, and senior workforce retention strategies.

Under Legislative Decree 216/2023, the government introduced the Hiring Super-Deduction (maxi-deduzione assunzioni) for corporate tax calculations.

The standard tier allows businesses to deduct 120% of labour costs for net new full-time permanent hires (tempo indeterminato). This deduction increases to 130% for hires from designated demographics, including working mothers, youth under 30, former welfare recipients, and individuals with disabilities.

The policy aims to incentivize permanent hiring over temporary contracts (tempo determinato) and, to qualify, employers must demonstrate a net increase in total permanent headcounts compared to the previous year’s average.

Meanwhile, to relieve financial pressure on the national pension system and keep experienced workers from leaving government jobs, the administration passed laws to encourage employees to work longer and delay retirement until the age of 70, in scenarios where their expertise remains in demand.

Concurrently, the administration revived the 2004 “Maroni Bonus”, which incentivizes older workers who are eligible for retirement to defer their pension and receive the employer/employee social security contribution share (~9.19%) directly in their monthly paycheque rather than directing it to the pension fund.

Alongside tax incentives and retention tools, the government restructured welfare administration through a unified digital platform, replacing universal income support with a two-tiered system.

The Assegno di Inclusione (ADI) provides basic income support for non-employable households or families caring for minors, elderly dependents, or individuals with disabilities, contingent on formal social inclusion agreements.

And the Supporto per la Formazione e il Lavoro (SFL) offers a time-limited monthly allowance for employable individuals aged 18 to 59, strictly conditional on active participation in vocational retraining, apprenticeships, or documented job search activities.

To fill critical gaps across agriculture, construction, caregiving, and logistics, the administration transformed the legacy Decreto Flussi legal migration framework.

Replacing unpredictable annual caps with multi-year plans, Rome expanded legal entries to roughly 452,000 permits for 2023–2025 and nearly 500,000 for 2026–2028, while ring-fencing quotas for economic sectors most in need and prioritizing nations that assist with border control and anti-trafficking.

By replacing universal welfare with strict active-labour requirements, leveraging corporate tax deductions to incentivize the hiring of working mothers (and keep seniors at their desks), and transforming the legal immigration framework into a predictable industrial input, Giorgia Meloni hopes to boost domestic productivity, combat demographic decline, and maintain greater fiscal discipline.

But there was still much work to be done.

FIXING THE MESS OF THE MESSOGIORNO

To address long-standing economic disparities between northern and southern regions - under Decree-Law 124/2023 (effective January 1, 2024) - the government of Prime Minister Meloni consolidated Italy’s regional development framework into a Single Special Economic Zone (ZES Unica) in the south. Eight separate regional economic zones (Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Puglia, Sicily, and Sardinia) were consolidated into one.

Dozens of idiosyncratic municipal, regional, and environmental permits for industrial, logistics, and commercial developments have been swept away in favour of a uniform digital process. The “South Decree” also established a standardized tax credit (Credito d’Imposta ZES) for capital investments, machinery acquisition, and facility expansions in the Mezzogiorno, with the best percentages for qualifying investments between €200,000 and €100 million.

And to support worker mobility alongside hiring incentives, the government introduced targeted tax relief for worker relocation.

Because high housing costs in major industrial hubs often impede workers in lagging regions from moving for employment, the state established a tax-exempt housing benefit for newly hired permanent staff.

(Employers can offer up to €5,000 annually in tax-free rental reimbursements or housing allowances - fully exempt from personal income tax and social security contributions - during an employee’s first two years of employment.

Prioritizing entry- and mid-level roles, eligibility is capped at workers whose prior-year income did not exceed €35,000, and the employee must formally transfer their legal residence (residenza anagrafica) more than 100 kilometers from their original municipality.

Meanwhile, to address the economic bottlenecks associated with Sicily’s geographical separation from the mainland peninsula - estimated to impose an annual “insularity cost” exceeding €6.5 billion (roughly 7.4% of regional GDP) - the government re-authorized the construction of the Strait of Messina Bridge.

Independent assessments by OpenEconomics project that total expenditure across the main span and over 40 kilometers of supporting road and rail links will generate over €23 billion in national GDP, while generating an estimated €10.3 billion in direct and indirect tax revenues.

During the construction phase, the project is expected to support 100,000 to 120,000 jobs annually across manufacturing, engineering, and construction supply chains, once again proving that you have to spend money to make money.

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‘THE TRAVAILS OF MARCO POLO' AND RE-IMAGINING ‘MARE NOSTRUM’

In March 2019, then Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China to join its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) - making Italy the sole G7 nation to do so.

Rome envisioned that Beijing’s global infrastructure push would boost Italian exports and attract major foreign direct investment into key logistics hubs like Trieste and Genoa.

But there was a catch.

The decision alienated NATO allies and EU partners, while drawing sharp criticism from Washington over Beijing securing an economic foothold in Western Europe.

By the time Giorgia Meloni took office in October 2022 - following the interim Draghi administration - the policy was widely viewed as a strategic failure. Italy’s trade deficit with China had widened, while European peers, France and Germany, continued to outperform in export growth.

Furthermore, foreign direct investment in Italian ports largely stalled, constrained by Rome’s increasing use of “Golden Power” national security vetoes over the past decade.

And decoupling from the agreement also presented a timely diplomatic move ahead of Italy’s 2024 G7 Presidency.

Leveraging an automatic renewal deadline in March 2024, Rome delivered a formal diplomatic note to Beijing in late 2023 terminating the arrangement. To pre-empt a geopolitical backlash, the government framed the exit around a commitment to maintain bilateral economic ties - a balance Meloni reinforced during a subsequent official visit to Beijing.

The retreat aligned Italy with the broader US and EU strategy of “de-risking” from China, allowing Rome to pivot toward Western-backed trade frameworks, notably the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) announced at the 2023 G20 summit in New Delhi.

Meanwhile, at a January 2024 summit in Rome, the government formally launched the Mattei Plan for Africa.

Named after Enrico Mattei - the founder of state energy company Eni who championed direct partnership models with developing nations in the 1950s - the initiative establishes an economic and energy framework with African partners.

As part of Europe’s weaning off of Russian natural gas imports (finally!), Italy is seeking to leverage its Mediterranean connections to link African resources to Northern European markets, particularly with regards to energy, agriculture, water management, education, healthcare, and infrastructure.

Within this context, Rome hopes to establish an alternative to traditional Western aid structures and competing foreign investments in North Africa, while addressing underlying drivers of irregular migration through economic development, vocational training, and local job creation.

The plan launched with an initial budget of approximately €5.5 billion in loans, grants, and guarantees - drawing roughly €3 billion from the Italian Climate Fund and €2.5 billion from development co-operation budgets. However, to increase scale, the Italian government has aligned its strategy with complementary international frameworks, including the EU’s Global Gateway, the G7’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, and African Development Bank financing.

Critics have argued that a significant portion of the initial portfolio comprises pre-existing energy and development projects led by state-backed entities, but you have to start somewhere. But, of greater concern, human rights organizations have cautioned against linking economic development funding closely to migration control and border enforcement mandates.

‘YOU’RE TWISTIN’ MY MELONI MAN’

When measured against both the dire warnings of her critics and the boisterous rhetoric of her own campaign rallies, the economic record of the Meloni administration has been pleasantly…routine.

The financial collapse predicted by commentators never materialized.

Sovereign bond stability has been prioritized over populist handouts.

And rather than fighting Brussels, the government restructured its €194.4 billion PNRR recovery plan, accepted the multi-year consolidation mandates to comply with the EU’s revamped Stability and Growth Pact, and completed the long-delayed phase-out of protected energy tariffs.

On the global stage, terminating Conte’s Belt and Road Memorandum of Understanding in late 2023 and pivoting toward the India-Middle East-Europe arrangement, repaired Italy’s relationships with NATO and the G7, completely disarming her foreign policy critics.

At the same time, Meloni’s populist campaign promises were heavily recalibrated to fit legal, demographic, and fiscal constraints.

The administration dismantled Conte’s unconditional Reddito di Cittadinanza (Citizenship Income), replacing it with welfare-to-work-based retraining programs and the Hiring Super-Deduction for permanent labour.

Instead of burning public money on non-repayable grants, the Made in Italy Framework Law deployed €1 billion in public-private co-investment partnerships.

Building on Monti’s 2012 framework, Meloni expanded Golden Power screening to modern economic needs

Even the 2022 electoral campaign slogan of a naval blockade evolved into the Mattei Plan - linking energy diplomacy and border enforcement with African partners - and a pragmatic, multi-year Decreto Flussi overhaul that authorized 452,000 legal non-EU work permits through 2025 to address severe labour shortages in construction, agriculture, and caregiving.

Indeed, it appears that Western European governments still remain bound by the hard realities of sovereign debt, energy security, and supply-chain inter-dependencies - irrespective of who holds power.

(Even neo-fascists!)

Defying initial scepticism, Italy has outperformed peer economies like France, Japan, and a stagnating Germany since late 2022. Meloni’s disciplined fiscal posture and steady deployment of EU recovery funds have won increasing plaudits across European capitals.

What a relief. (Pun intended.) We can all breathe again.

Although…

Sadly, while Meloni’s economic track record has entailed remarkable discipline and technocratic continuity, the same cannot be said for her approach to domestic social policy, LGBTQ+ parental rights, judicial reform, and the Premierato overhaul - an executive power grab that drastically erodes parliamentary authority and neutralizes the traditional moderating role of the President of the Italian Republic.

One fears that the effort to build macroeconomic credibility with Brussels and Wall Street is merely a means to buy the political capital required to wage a quiet, unyielding cultural revolution at home.

Fare un bel respiro.

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

In the 18th century, the indomitable Adam Smith (he of the “invisible hand”) believed that the “value” of something was determined by the physical labour and effort that went into producing it.

However, by the early 1870s, in an era of expanding industrialization and growing consumerism, this classical labour theory was rapidly losing its grip. Enter William Stanley Jevons (a Brit), Carl Menger (an Austrian), and Léon Walras (French), who independently developed a revolutionary framework to explain how and why people actually choose to buy and consume what they do.

Later codified by Alfred Marshall (another Brit) in Principles of Economics (1890), this neoclassical utility theory proposed the principle of marginal utility, which measures the additional happiness (“utility”) you get from consuming one more unit of a given good or service.

Unfortunately, the early versions of the theory suffered from a glaring flaw: it assumed you could measure someone’s happiness using hard numbers (cardinal utility).

But human happiness doesn’t work that way.

And so it was left to Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto to find a solution.

In his 1906 book Manuale di Economia Politica, Pareto showed that you don’t actually need to measure exact units of happiness; instead you can map consumer preferences - visually - on indifference curves.

Sloping diagonally downward from left to right, an indifference curve maps combinations of goods that deliver the exact same total satisfaction - measuring the precise marginal rate of substitution along the way.

This is the number of units of one good a person is willing to give up to get one more unit of another good, driven entirely by the relative marginal utility (happiness) the two goods provide me.

Crucially, Pareto argued that you only need to know whether someone prefers more or less of something, which is much easier to plot on a graph.

But wait - there’s more.

Expanding on Pareto’s work in Value and Capital (1939), John Hicks and R.G.D. Allen (both British) argued that ranking choices (ordinal utility) was entirely sufficient - you didn’t need numerical happiness metrics (cardinal utility) at all.

Continuing to leverage indifference curves, Hicks and Allen also refined how changes in price impact consumer behaviour.

But as Hicks (and Allen) were expanding the scope and usage of indifference curves to explain how markets, capital, and interest rates interact, across the pond, a young American economist was ready to go back to the drawing board.

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THE RESEARCH

A year earlier, Paul A. Samuelson, published his groundbreaking paper, A Note on the Pure Theory of Consumers’ Behavior (1938) in Economica.

Samuelson rejected indifference curves outright - arguing that they relied too heavily on people to accurately measure or rank their own happiness. (No easy task.)

He, instead, developed a consumer demand theory derived from observing what people actually spend their money on.

Real, visible choices, when individuals are faced with finite budgets.

He gave it the name revealed preference theory.

Pareto proved that consumers don’t need to assign numerical points to happiness - they just need to rank their choices. But Samuelson went one step further: stop guessing what’s in our heads altogether and just watch what we put in our (online) shopping carts.

When we weigh up two options within our budget - “Bundle A” versus “Bundle B” - by choosing Bundle A, I have revealed my preference.

No-one needs to ask how I feel about it; the fact that I spent my money on “Bundle A” when I could have equally afforded B provides objective proof.

And if market prices or my income shift and I switch to Bundle B, it isn’t a contradiction - it’s a rational response to changing budget constraints.

Samuelson codified this into the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference (WARP): a set of simple, undeniable behavioural rules grounded entirely in real-world actions rather than unobservable guesswork about human happiness.

Samuelson defined “rationality” entirely by observable action.

You can’t measure someone else’s inner feelings, so economics shouldn’t rely on them.

If someone makes consistent, logical choices at the store, in his model, they are acting rationally - no mind-reading required.

In Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947), Samuelson scaled his framework up to the broader economy: how markets balance supply and demand, and how companies determine output.

He argued that all economic actors, whether an individual shopper at the local store or a multinational firm, operate on the same principle: maximizing outcomes under strict constraints.

Building on his revealed preference theory, Samuelson provided the mathematical backbone to show exactly how consumer demand shifts when prices rise or incomes drop - no guesswork required.

By universalizing his concept of constrained maximization across every layer of the economy, Samuelson had given the great macro-economists of the era - including Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen from Episode 1 - a rigorous theory of individual choice, something that had hitherto been lacking.

However, the biggest breakthrough in Foundations was Samuelson’s correspondence principle, which solved a problem that had stumped economists for years.

Although it was possible to describe a market at rest (e.g., finding the point where supply meets demand), we had no way to prove whether that market would actually bounce back if something disrupted it - like an environmental event, a war, or a major supply shock.

An oil embargo, for instance. (Imagine that.)

Samuelson showed that a snapshot of a market at rest and the story of how that market moves over time aren’t two separate things. Mathematically, they are two sides of the same coin: you can’t understand where a market ends up without understanding how it got there.

The following year, Samuelson published International Trade and the Equalization of Factor Prices (1948) in The Economic Journal.

Having already provided the rigorous micro-foundations that macro-economists like Frisch and Tinbergen desperately needed, Samuelson now scaled his framework up to the global stage.

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THE APPLICATION

Following the Second World War, if policymakers were going to make new institutions like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) a success, they needed to understand the structural impacts of trade liberalization - or, in plain language, free trade.

During the interwar period, two Swedish economists - Eli Heckscher and his former student Bertil Ohlin - had posited that countries export goods that utilize their abundant resources and import those that rely on what they lack.

Free trade allows nations to focus on what they produce most efficiently, making goods cheaper and more plentiful overall. Instead of every country trying to make everything, nations trade based on their comparative resource strengths.

Paul A. Samuelson took the Heckscher-Ohlin framework and transformed it from a conceptual theory into a rigorous mathematical proof.

His Factor Price Equalization (FPE) theorem delivered an unexpected conclusion: under free trade, market forces don’t just equalize product prices across borders - they eventually push real wages and returns on capital toward the exact same level across trading nations.

Samuelson proved that if two countries trade freely with zero tariffs, negligible shipping costs, and shared technology, trading finished goods (like cars or clothes) acts as a direct substitute for moving workers or factories across borders.

Simply shipping products back and forth naturally pulls wages and capital returns into alignment over time.

But Samuelson didn’t stop there.

He also demonstrated that opening up to free trade doesn’t just grow the overall economy - it fundamentally reshapes who gains and who loses, shifting national income between workers and capital owners.

Until this point, conventional wisdom held that free trade was a straightforward win-win that made nations richer as a whole.

Samuelson proved mathematically that even if free trade makes the total economic pie bigger, it radically alters how that pie is sliced domestically. Trading with a capital-abundant or low-cost nation might boost corporate profits while pressing down on local manufacturing wages.

Then, in 1956, Samuelson teamed up with fellow American Robert Solow to publish A Complete Capital Model Involving Heterogeneous Capital Goods in The Quarterly Journal of Economics.

A generation earlier, the macroeconomic models of Frisch and Tinbergen (as well as Britain’s John Maynard Keynes) had relied heavily on sweeping aggregate measures like “total national capital” to model investment, economic growth, and business cycles.

Those older models treated “capital” as one big, homogeneous mass.

But a delivery van, a computer chip, and a blast furnace obviously aren’t the same thing: they cost different amounts, wear out at different speeds, and perform entirely different jobs.

Rather than lumping all business equipment into one oversimplified number, Samuelson and Solow set out to build a realistic model explaining how different types of physical capital are actually priced and allocated in the real world.

Together, they demonstrated how capital pricing, interest rates, and investment choices operate across a complex, multi-sector economy filled with diverse, specific assets - giving real mathematical teeth to industrial planning in an era where central planning was very much in vogue.

Two years later, Samuelson and Solow extended this work in their book, Linear Programming and Economic Analysis (1958), this time joined by another American economist Robert Dorfman.

This landmark work introduced activity analysis and linear programming as practical tools for solving complex allocation problems. It equipped economists, corporate executives, and policymakers with the computational tools needed to optimize production schedules, resource distribution, and shadow pricing across multi-sector environments - all without relying on unrealistic assumptions of smooth, continuous production functions.

However, Samuelson and Solow were soon embroiled in one of the 20th century’s fiercest economic battles: the Cambridge Capital Controversy.

THE LIMITATIONS

In the mid-1950s, Joan Robinson and a group of British economists at Cambridge University launched a sharp critique against the neoclassical establishment across the Atlantic at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It was the opening salvo of the “Battle of the Two Cambridges”.

The British side exposed a fundamental vulnerability in traditional macroeconomic models: measuring an economy’s “total capital” involved circular logic.

You cannot calculate the total financial value of physical machines without knowing the going interest rate, yet that interest rate is supposed to be determined by the productivity of those very machines.

Recognizing this flaw, Samuelson sought to make the micro-foundations of his neoclassical price theory logically airtight. Through his work on heterogeneous capital and linear programming models, he attempted to bypass crude macro-aggregates altogether.

By analyzing capital as a collection of distinct, diverse physical assets, Samuelson tried to prove that the individual prices and returns of equipment accurately reflect their relative scarcity and productivity - thereby defending the core mechanisms of his neoclassical synthesis.

Nevertheless, although Paul Samuelson successfully formalized modern economics, transformed it into a rigorous mathematical science, and built the analytical bridge between micro-foundations and macro-stabilization, his framework inherited deep methodological, psychological, and structural limitations.

By prioritizing mathematical elegance and market equilibrium, Samuelson’s models relied heavily on the idealized construct of homo economicus (or “economics man”) - a theoretical persona that assumes human beings act as entirely rational, self-interested agents with unlimited cognitive capacity, perfect information, and unwavering consistency.

In this world, every consumer calculates costs and benefits flawlessly to maximize personal satisfaction (utility), while every firm operates with singular focus to maximize profit.

His framework also relied heavily on the principle of diminishing marginal utility: the notion that the more you consume of something, the less satisfaction you derive from each additional unit.

By grounding his mathematical machinery in this idealized abstraction, Samuelson’s framework created models that often diverged sharply from real-world human behavior and market realities, ignoring the cognitive biases, emotional impulses, and social complexities that govern actual decision-making.

Even Samuelson’s revealed preference theory had its limitations.

During the 1970s, the likes of Amartya Sen and Stanley Wong argued that the theory falls prey to tautological reasoning.

Pure circular logic.

It defines a consumer’s preferences entirely by the choices they make, and then purports to explain those choices by claiming the consumer is maximizing those same preferences.

While Samuelson’s urge to purge subjective psychology was understandable in his quest for mathematical precision, any theory that assumes away cognitive biases, internal conflicts, weakness of will, and framing effects remains fundamentally incomplete.

Actual human beings almost exclusively make decisions with incomplete information (bounded rationality) - even in the age of AI - and are perpetually prone to impulse buying.

Meanwhile, Samuelson’s Foundations and his Correspondence Principle over-prioritized the study of how economic systems move toward or rest in a state of equilibrium, assuming this is the default destination of economic activity.

It failed to account for periods of prolonged unemployment, asset bubbles, market crashes, and severe supply shocks.

Because these models assumed that market disruptions were merely quick, self-correcting bumps in the road, they completely failed to predict or explain major, out-of-control economic crises.

And the past 60 years have seen no shortage of economic crashes.

Similarly, the Factor Price Equalization (FPE) is great.

In theory.

Unfortunately, its real-world predictive power proved exceptionally limited, as the theory relies on a fantasy setup: free shipping, identical technology, perfect competition, and zero market friction (e.g. zero transaction costs).

In reality, logistics are costly, tech gaps are huge, and politics and geography create massive barriers to moving money and labour.

Consequently, the theory struggles to explain modern reality: why global trade often widens income gaps inside developing nations, and why international wages frequently diverge rather than converge.

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Finally, critics exposed a glaring contradiction: trying to patch short-term economic rescue plans onto rigid free-market rules just didn’t hold up. Under standard free-market math, unemployment shouldn’t even exist unless you invent artificial frictions to explain it.

The Neoclassical Synthesis claimed policymakers could finely tune the economy - adjusting interest rates and government spending like car stereo knobs to balance inflation and job growth.

That illusion shattered in the 1970s with stagflation - a toxic mix of soaring inflation and high unemployment that standard models couldn’t explain or solve.

By staring solely at giant national figures like GNP, the framework swept wealth inequality, social disparities, and climate limits under the rug, dismissing environmental damage as mere “externalities.”

Like a modern-day Republican Congressman.

MODERN USAGE

Despite these limitations, Paul A. Samuelson’s research, methodology, and structural frameworks remain fundamental to how economic science is practiced, taught, and applied today.

His core premise - that consumers, firms, and investors all optimize their behaviour within budgetary constraints - remains the foundation of industrial organization, contract theory, and financial economics.

Whenever an economist constructs a mathematical model to analyze decision-making under scarcity, they rely directly on the constrained maximization formalised in Samuelson’s 1947 Foundations of Economic Analysis.

Within international trade, his Factor Price Equalization theorem remains essential.

Central banks across the globe, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and conventional trade negotiators routinely draw on Samuelson’s general equilibrium models to evaluate cross-border commercial dynamics.

In particular, his framework provides the analytical baseline for determining how tariff restructurings, trade agreements, and supply-chain realignments (like CUSMA or the European Union) alter domestic labour markets, wage differentials, and capital returns.

Furthermore, Samuelson’s celebrated textbook, Economics (1948), established the template for how macro- and microeconomics are taught worldwide.

Supply and demand curves, firm cost structures, and Gross Domestic Product all stem from his step-by-step teaching framework - as does the never-ending debate between letting free markets run “naturally” (bearing in mind that there is nothing natural about a free market) and using government policy to steer outcomes).

Finally, despite its failure to account for cognitive biases and bounded rationality, Samuelson’s 1938 revealed preference framework remains the vital starting point for empirical choice theory.

At a high level, it explains everyday consumer trade-offs - like choosing between wings and pizza. But more importantly, it serves as a sharp diagnostic tool for modern democratic governance and fiscal policy.

Deciding which party to vote for in an election or determining what a Finance Minister prioritizes in a budget are real-world examples of choosing between “Bundle A” and “Bundle B”.

While caring about debt and deficits has recently fallen out of fashion, political promises inevitably collide with fiscal reality. Tax revenues and borrowing capacity are finite.

A government can promise the world on paper, but fiscal scarcity always forces a choice.

And a budget strips away most - if not all - political ‘smoke and mirrors’, exposing the true rank-ordering of priorities. When constrained by both fiscal and geopolitical realities, do governments - and we as voters - truly prefer elevated defence spending, or expanded social transfers and domestic programs?

Consider modern military procurement, where soaring equipment costs demand immediate trade-offs.

Defence ministries must continuously weigh high-cost, cutting-edge strategic platforms against broader volume and operational scale.

(Or maybe just buy some drones?)

When a state chooses a small fleet of top-tier stealth fighters over a larger contingent of conventional aircraft - or prioritizes naval recapitalization over ammunition reserves - it makes an explicit economic calculation.

(As did cashing in on the “peace dividend” for the past thirty years.)

In the end, every signed procurement contract and line-item appropriation reveals a nation’s true strategic preferences: dollar by dollar, choice by choice.

Follow the money, not the spin.

CONCLUSION

When Paul A. Samuelson became the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1970, the award recognized a scholar who had taken the mathematical rigor championed by Ragnar Frisch (and further developed by Jan Tinbergen), and applied it across virtually every corner of economic theory.

Ultimately, the collective breakthroughs of these three pioneers established the foundational toolkit that governs economic policy today.

Their combined legacy permanently shifted economics away from literary philosophy and transformed it into a rigorous, deductive science.

If Frisch and Tinbergen engineered the engine of modern econometrics, and Samuelson built its mathematical blueprint at the individual level, someone needed to provide the real-world data.

Enter Simon Kuznets - the 1971 Nobel Laureate.

Economics is about providing options. Politics is about making choices through the application of power.

We must move toward judging governments not on identity or personality, but on policy. To do this, we must recognize that the policies we prefer are invariably informed by our own personal circumstances, background, and ideology.

There is nothing wrong with assessing policy through this lens - but it must be done with intention. By grounding our perspective in objective economic reality and acknowledging our own values, we can move beyond partisan noise and begin to make truly informed assessments of the choices that shape our world.

This is not just a better way to view governance; it is the only way to actually solve the problems we face.

Image Disclosure: The illustrations above were generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

When David Cameron figuratively nailed his ‘Bloomberg speech’ to the door at Finsbury Square in January 2013, he didn’t just pave the way for the destruction of the UK’s long-standing preference for cautious, iterative progress - he unleashed an ideology of permanent protest.

Just as the printing press democratized theology, the internet democratized grievance.

Millions of citizens were handed the tools to bypass traditional media and so-called “institutional gatekeepers”.

The resulting drama of Brexit gave ordinary people a powerful, intoxicating taste of bypassing centralized hierarchies and interpreting “truth” for themselves.

“Truth.”

And, once you reject central authority, splintering is mathematically guaranteed.

We saw this film before on the left.

In the 1970s and 1980s, anti-capitalist movements fractured into rigid micro-factions - militant tendencies, socialist branches, and eco-radicals - waging ideological civil wars over microscopic points of theory.

However, thanks to the deliberate efforts of Labour Party leaders, such as Neil Kinnock, John Smith, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown, that era of protest over performance was eventually brought to heel 30 years ago.

Today, it’s the radical right’s turn.

Broad anti-globalist populism continuously splinters into nationalist protectionism, accelerationist fringe groups, and cyber-sovereign cults.

(And their tech bro masters.)

Every time a new crisis hits - EU treaties, lockdowns, small boats - the script repeats:

Find your new enemy. Define your own tribe. (Defund the BBC.)

Here lies the eternal paradox of anti-establishment purism: when you have no central authority to define the baseline, you must rely on absolute internal conformity.

Groups that share 95% of their philosophy end up treating each other as mortal enemies over the remaining 5%.

Let’s just hope the endless schisms between Reform (once UKIP and the Brexit Party), the short-lived Veritas (remember Robert Kilroy-Silk?), Restore, and Reclaim remain confined to ballot boxes and podcast studios.

The antidote invariably largely depends on the UK Conservative Party remembering how to be a conservative party.

Conservatism should not be a dirty word, as it fails to recognize that progressive change is always more durable when the public is brought along rather than spooked by abrupt transformation.

Without a broad-tent, brokerage Conservative Party to compete against an effective Labour Party (which we should all hope we are getting under Andy Burnham), we risk British politics falling ever further prey to unproductive (metaphorical) “heretic burning”.

(Which would be a rather unhelpful distraction while the world is literally burning.)

This article was originally posted as a Substack Note.

However, I’m also a frequent user of Substack Notes - a place where I share my musings, ask analytical questions of other writers, and occasionally attempt to be witty.

A selection of my recent Notes:

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The review took ten months and the UK government praised its speed and thoroughness upon its release. And yet it was just the latest in a series of prior 21st century inquiries and unheeded recommendations.

Time will tell whether the Amos report represents the long-awaited meaningful change to a system in desperate need of repair and reform; however, as a ‘process over progress’ inheritance from the Starmer administration, there is reason to be sceptical.

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MORECAMBE BAY

In November 2008, newborn Joshua Titcombe tragically died at Furness General Hospital (FGH) - part of the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust.

Reports at the time claimed that Joshua had contracted the same infection from which his mother, Hoa, was able to recover, but to which he would sadly succumb nine days after his birth.

Although regulatory and ombudsman bodies initially accepted that the hospital had acted appropriately, Joshua’s father, James Titcombe refused to go away quietly.

After campaigning relentlessly, the UK government was eventually forced to step in, with the Secretary of St ate for Health commissioning Dr Bill Kirkup to lead an independent investigation into the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, covering the period of 2004 through to 2013.

Published in March 2015, The Report of the Morecambe Bay Investigation concluded that the origins of the tragedy lay in the “serious dysfunctional nature of the Maternity Unit at FGH”, which resulted in a distressing chain of events causing “avoidable harm to mothers and babies, including tragic and unnecessary deaths”.

The panel led by Dr Kirkup found “clinical competence was substandard, with deficient skills and knowledge”. It also identified “a growing move amongst midwives to pursue normal childbirth ‘at any cost’’”, which frequently overrode clinical indicators when medical intervention was urgently required. And there were “working relationships [that] were extremely poor, particularly between different staff groups, such as obstetricians, paediatricians and midwives”.

Rather than investigating errors in good faith, the Morecambe Bay report posited that the trust exhibited an institutional culture of denial and that the unit suffered from a “pattern of failure to recognise [sic] the nature and severity of the problem, with, in some cases, denial that any problem existed, and a series of missed opportunities to intervene”, leaving families stonewalled or treated with callous indifference when seeking answers.

Dr Kirkup’s report did not just blame the local hospital; it also exposed how bodies like the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and local health authorities failed to act on warning signs, noting that failures spanned “almost every level of the NHS”.

For instance, Morecambe Bay had been granted coveted “Foundation Trust” status in 2010 - a designation intended to grant greater financial and managerial autonomy to high-performing NHS organizations - despite glaring, unaddressed safety crises, inferring that regulators prioritized bureaucratic corporate targets over patient safety.

What had been originally dismissed as a few isolated incidents was clearly a more systemic failure, and it was hoped that the Morecambe Bay Investigation would be a watershed moment for NHS patient safety.

Sadly, it was anything but.

SHREWSBURY AND TELFORD

In March 2009, Kate Stanton-Davies was born at the Ludlow Midwife-Led Unit with severe hypothermia and anemia, tragically dying shortly afterward.

It has been reported that in the weeks leading up to the birth, Kate’s mother Rhiannon Davies, had repeatedly expressed concerns about reduced fetal movements. When she and her husband, Richard Stanton, sought answers, they claimed they were repeatedly stonewalled by Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, of which Ludlow was a part.

The years passed and then, in April 2016, Pippa Griffiths died from a severe, preventable infection, just a day after her birth.

While a home delivery, Pippa had been under the care of the very same Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust.

Adding further insult to injury, it had been three weeks since trust executives had publicly assured Rhiannon and Richard that “significant lessons had been learned” and that maternity safety practices had been overhauled.

More time passed before, in May 2017 - two years after Dr Kirby’s investigation into Morecambe Bay - the UK government appointed Donna Ockenden - a senior midwife - to investigate maternity and neonatal services across the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford and the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital for the period since 2000.

Ockenden detailed how an obsession with keeping Caesarean section and intervention rates artificially low drove inappropriate pressures on staff, leading to ignored clinical indicators during deteriorating labours.

The review examined clinical incidents involving 1,486 families, identifying hundreds of cases of unnecessary deaths, stillbirths, maternal mortality, and profound brain damage (such as Hypoxic-Ischaemic Encephalopathy) where better care could have changed the outcome.

The review heavily criticized the Trust for failing to investigate serious incidents honestly, frequently shifting blame onto mothers, dismissing concerns as anxiety, and creating an internal culture of fear and bullying that silenced whistleblowers and staff attempting to raise safety alerts.

Issued in 2022, the final report had taken five years to reach a conclusion. From there, the recommendations quickly gathered dust, and meaningful change once again stalled.

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EAST KENT

In November 2017, Harry Richford died at just seven days old.

It was yet another avoidable neonatal death - this time at the hands of the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in Margate, Kent. When the hospital trust initially failed to properly investigate Harry’s death, refused to report it to the coroner, and provided misleading information, Harry’s family - particularly his grandfather, Derek - fought for an inquest.

Said inquest ruled in 2018 that the death was caused by neglect.

Once again, it was uncovered that there was a pattern of institutional denial dating back to at least 2009, with exponentially mounting concerns raised by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and other distressed families.

In February 2020, Dr Bill Kirkup - the very same - was formally commissioned by NHS England to lead a fresh independent inquiry.

While Kirkup’s Morecambe Bay report introduced foundational modern frameworks for such reviews, because many of its structural warnings were subsequently under-implemented across the wider NHS, we were seemingly back at square one.

Dr. Kirkup published his independent report in October 2022 - ‘Reading the Signals: Maternity and Neonatal Services in East Kent’.

Out of the 202 cases dating back to 2009 assessed by the panel, it was concluded that the outcome could have been different in nearly half (97 cases), and in 69% of the baby deaths (45 out of 65).

Although Dr Kirkup identified issues of human error and underfunding, his report also laid bare a toxic institutional culture. Maternity units were plagued by a pervasive refusal to listen to patients or grieving families, dysfunctional teams, a defensive corporate instinct to minimize mistakes, and boards that offered “undue assurance” rather than rigorous oversight.

Kirkup’s two reports - on Morecambe and East Kent - exposed the same systemic blind spots across the NHS.

He had introduced a “radical” approach of centring investigations entirely around the testimonies of victims and families, treating them as vital sources of truth rather than adversaries, while exposing how hospitals actively deflect blame, gaslit parents, and failed to learn from internal errors.

Sadly, further lessons would be required.

NOTTINGHAM

In April 2016 - the same month Pippa Griffiths had died in the West Midlands - Harriet Hawkins was stillborn, around 150 kilometres to the east at Nottingham City Hospital.

Although the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust denied any wrongdoing, blaming the tragedy on an infection, Harriet’s parents - Sarah and Jack (two hospital employees) conducted their own investigation, inspired by the actions of other grieving parents who had by this point had been tirelessly campaigning for years and years.

Because Donna Ockenden was already fully occupied leading the massive, multi-year Shrewsbury and Telford investigation, a formal national review into Nottingham could not formally open until September 2022, after her previous inquiry wrapped up.

So - more delays.

Perhaps inevitably, Ockenden identified findings consistent with the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust, highlighting chronic clinical incompetence in the basics of maternity management. This included repeated failures to monitor fetal heart rates properly (misinterpreting CTG traces), failing to recognize oxygen deprivation in babies, and poor escalation protocols when labor became abnormal.

The final report exposed deeply systemic, multi-year failings that resulted in widespread preventable trauma, death, and institutional cover-ups.

It concluded that since 2012, over 500 mothers and babies had suffered potentially avoidable outcomes due to “substandard care”, including dozens of maternal deaths, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths, alongside hundreds of infants left with severe, life-altering brain injuries like hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy (HIE).

Midwives and medical staff routinely ignored, minimized, or dismissed concerns raised by expectant mothers. Symptoms of severe pain, reduced fetal movements, and hypertension were frequently written off as “maternal anxiety,” and mothers were often actively discouraged or delayed from being admitted to the hospital.

When catastrophic errors occurred, the trust repeatedly failed to investigate them honestly. Serious incidents were routinely downgraded or categorized as “unavoidable” to dodge external accountability, protect the hospital’s reputation, and shield leadership from scrutiny.

Meanwhile, a pervasive, intimidating, and toxic internal culture infected the units. Staff who tried to raise safety concerns were often bullied or silenced by powerful cliques, creating a climate of fear that suppressed learning and institutional self-reflection.

Finally, both hospitals suffered from sustained, chronic under-funding and critical staffing shortages, leaving midwives severely overworked and unable to provide safe, compassionate care.

This report was published on June 24, 2026 - six days before Baroness Amos’ National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation on behalf of the UK government.

INVESTIGATIONS ARE LIKE BUSES

Completing a deep-dive into twelve diverse NHS trusts - in addition to reviewing the wider national landscape - Baroness Amos’ report outlined the same systemic failures, which had already been identified by Dr. Bill Kirkup and Donna Ockenden.

First, mothers’ concerns, pain symptoms, and distress were routinely dismissed or ignored.

This was exacerbated by chronic understaffing, which left maternity personnel stretched way beyond their limits. Midwives and neonatal nurses suffered from heavy workloads and severe moral injury, where empathy and compassionate care were often compromised simply due to lack of time and capacity.

Maternity triage, in particular, was heavily criticized as overwhelmed, under-resourced, and failing to catch critical signs of fetal or maternal deterioration early. Many maternity units operated in outdated, cramped, or physically deteriorating hospital environments that compromised privacy, dignity, and infection control.

Furthermore, digital record-keeping was disjointed, with multiple non-communicating IT systems forcing staff to duplicate notes on paper, creating a high-risk environment for missing critical patient history.

The report also found that staff operated under extreme fear of litigation and media scrutiny, creating an unhealthy working atmosphere.

When things went wrong, trusts often reacted with institutional defensiveness rather than transparency. Families reported being stonewalled, facing difficulties accessing medical records, or receiving insincere apologies.

In response, the report recommended that the so-called ‘Martha’s Rule’ be extended to cover maternity and neonatal wards, providing parents and families with the explicit right to demand an urgent, independent medical review if they feel a mother or baby is deteriorating and staff aren’t listening.

(In 2021, 13-year old Martha Mills died of sepsis after her family’s repeated concerns about her deteriorating condition were overlooked.)

Standard hospital monitoring systems (like basic early warning score charts) can occasionally miss subtle signs of decline. If an expectant mother, a new mother, or her family members feel that her condition - or her baby’s condition - is deteriorating, and they believe healthcare staff are not listening or taking appropriate action, they have the explicit, formalized right to trigger an urgent clinical review.

The call activates a rapid assessment by a critical care or escalation team independent of the immediate, frontline shift staff, ensuring that a mother saying “something feels wrong” cannot simply be brushed off as standard anxiety.

At the same time, Baroness Amos concluded that sub-standard, defensive, and fragmented care had unfortunately become “normalized” across parts of the NHS.

Despite being the fifth richest country in the world, the safety and quality of a mother’s birth experience in the UK is at the whim of a “postcode lottery” - it depends on which trust you fall under.

Furthermore, the review reaffirmed stark disparities in outcomes and experiences. Black and Asian women, minority ethnic groups, disabled women, and those from deprived socio-economic backgrounds faced systemic bias, stereotyping, and communication barriers (such as poor interpreter availability), leading to dangerous delays in care.

The report recommended that addressing this requires systemic anti-racism frameworks and socio-economic investment that go far beyond standard hospital management.

Baroness Amos also underscored that maternity services failed to adapt structurally to major demographic shifts - such as older mothers giving birth, higher rates of underlying chronic health conditions, and surging rates of medical interventions (inductions and C-sections).

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SO, WHAT’S NEW?

On the same day Baroness Amos published her report, Whitehall also announced that it had created a new public health role - that of the Maternity and Neonatal Commissioner.

As a permanent, statutory role accountable directly to elected representatives, the Commissioner will be expected to enforce strict minimum national standards, with the obligation to report progress every six months to the Health and Social Care Select Committee, and annually to Parliament and families.

The Commissioner will co-chair the National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce alongside the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, ensconcing the role at the centre of government decision-making and resource allocation.

The position will also oversee the regulators themselves - including the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), and the General Medical Council (GMC), with an enforcement remit for professionals who fail or cover up systemic issues.

The various aforementioned reports indicate that NHS trusts have had a tendency to massage data or downgrade incident severity to protect institutional reputations. By holding leadership and regulators accountable, an independent national commissioner makes data obfuscation much harder to sustain.

However, we’ve seen this movie before.

And it’s the length of the extended version of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Last September, the Starmer government passed the Armed Forces Commissioner Act 2025, which established a new Armed Forces Commissioner reporting directly to Parliament, tasked with investigating matters relating to the “welfare” of service men and women.

The new Commissioner is required to publish an annual report to Parliament and will be in a position to hold the government to account for any identified failures.

Polly Miller-Perkins CBE was appointed the inaugural commissioner on March 30, 2026.

Six months after the new law received Royal Assent.

And because that office has only been operational for a few months, its “progress” to date has centred around institutional infrastructure, absorbing legacy systems, and preparing for future oversight.

Bear in mind that we are only four weeks on from the Amos Report, and the inaugural Maternity and Neonatal Commissioner is yet to be named.

When that eventually happens, even before they can tackle the problem at hand, the new Commissioner is expected to pore over 750-plus outstanding maternity safety recommendations and 87 separate guidance documents with the objective of enforcing a single, coherent Modern Service Framework.

One presumes that will require a fresh consultation.

THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG

The establishment of the UK National Health Service in 1948 marked the beginning of a long and slow shift from home births.

In 1959, the Cranbrook Report recommended that the NHS aim for 70% of all births to occur in hospitals, and in 1970, the Peel Report recommended that 100% of deliveries should be under consultant-led medical care in hospitals.

By 1975, only 5% of mothers continued to give birth in their homes - a percentage that has remained largely consistent to this day.

As maternity care shifted heavily into centralized hospitals, a deep professional culture clash developed between midwives (who historically championed physiological, low-intervention birth) and obstetricians (focused on medical intervention and risk management).

And when units are understaffed - which is pretty much always - this friction often results in a breakdown of safety-based communication.

Chronic midwifery retention issues in the UK are driven by severe burnout, moral injury, and real-terms pay cuts. This domestic crisis has been drastically worsened by post-Brexit immigration rules that severed the accessible pipeline of European Economic Area (EEA) professionals.

Subsequent restrictions on international health and care visas have further constrained global recruitment efforts aimed at plugging workforce gaps. Consequently, remaining staff are forced to absorb escalating workloads, creating a vicious cycle of exhaustion and departures that continually deepens the maternity care shortage.

While the government has introduced temporary measures and funding to recruit and train staff, policy mandates cannot force skilled, experienced midwives back onto hospital floors if the working environment remains broken. Top-down accountability is meaningless when the frontline is hollowed out from the bottom up; until structural investments match political rhetoric, families will continue paying the price for a system that is not fit for purpose.

If Andy Burnham wants to differentiate himself from his predecessor in substance as well as style, he will need to avoid the trap of confusing process with progress.

And in pursuing his long-held ambition of delivering universal national care, the new Prime Minister cannot overlook the entrenched problems inherent to the existing health service.

This article was suggested by one of my subscribers - thank you for putting this crucial topic on the radar.

As I’m currently on vacation, I thought I’d mix things up a little bit today by sharing the rules of cricket, which of course are very simple, contrary to the popular refrain I’ve heard for years in North America.  

For some reason, people flat-out refuse to want to understand this amazing sport. However, once you do, you can finally watch - and generally understand the 5-day “Test” version of the game

(I’ve omitted to cover the "one-day" variation, which is for those non-purist cricket fans who need instant gratification and an actual final result that can't be a draw.  

It's basically baseball.)

So…here we go!

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THE BASICS

• Cricket is a team sport with matches played between two teams of 11 players.  (So far not so scary, right?)

• Out of a team of 11 players, typically a team has 5 "specialist" batters, 4 "specialist" bowlers and 2 "all-rounders" (they are equally adept at batting and bowling).  However, it is up to the manager, the coaches and the team captain to determine the make-up of their line-up.

  NOTE: In cricket, all 11 players take a turn to bat (think of it like the rules for pitchers in the MLB National League).

• Matches are played on a cricket field (or "green"), which is circular in shape, with an outer "boundary' and a dried out and flattened rectangle of grass in the middle of the field known as the "wicket".  On each end of the wicket are three thigh-height "stumps" with two "bails" on top linking the "off" stump and the "middle" stump on one side and linking the "middle" stump and the "leg" stump on the other side.

  NOTE: The "leg" side of the field is the side which the legs face out to when the batsman stands "side on" in front of the stumps (similar body position to baseball but with the bat held lower instead of elevated).  The "offside" is the side where the player holds their bat.

  NOTE WITHIN A NOTE: To confuse matters, the "leg" side and "off" side are different depending on whether the batsman is right- or left- handed.  Regardless, the naming of the stumps corresponds to the side of the field they are closest to.  The naming of the "middle" stump is surely intuitive.

  NOTE WITHIN A NOTE WITHIN A NOTE: It's the middle one of the three stumps.

OBJECTIVE / GENERAL RULES

• The objective of the game is to score more "runs" than the opposition team.  ("Runs" has the same meaning as in baseball.)

• In “Test” cricket, each team has two innings to score these "runs".  

• In "Test" cricket, the entire match has to be finished within 5 days, with each day lasting approximately between 11am and 6.30pm/7pm (depending on how long the sun is sufficiently bright – they have a special device to work out if it's "too dark"). 

  NOTE: In cricket, it's obviously ridiculous that two teams play the same match for 5 days – I hear this a lot.  Unlike in baseball, where the same two teams will play each other 3-4 days in a row but that's "normal" because it's a different game each day…

• There are two main breaks during each day's play – lunch and "tea".  (Of course!).  There are also water breaks. (By water, I mean…more tea.)

• A match can be won by either team or it can end in a "draw".  A draw is the result of a failure to complete a game caused by one or both teams failing to complete both of their two allotted innings – either as a result of:

  • One team realizing that they do not have enough time left in the match to score more "runs" than their opponent and simply play to "not get out" when they are batting – i.e. they "play defensive"; or

  • "Rain stops play".  Bear in mind that English summers are often wet – particularly in the early months (and later months…and often the middle months too) of the season and especially in the northern areas of England (e.g. Manchester in the north west, Durham in the north east).

• Following the coin toss, each team has two turns (that is, "two innings") to "bat" – while the other team is "in the field".  An inning is over when one of the following happens:

  • 10 of the 11 players are "out" (see the "Getting Out" section below); or

  • The batting team's captain decides they have scored enough "runs" – known as "declaring".  (Again, this is to increase the likelihood of completing all requisite innings within the 5-day timeframe.)

• Generally speaking, the teams take it in turns to bat and field, with one exception: if Team A gets a big score in their first inning and Team B gets a low score in their first inning, Team A may be allowed to direct Team B to "follow on", which means that Team B has their second inning batting immediately after their first.  This can only happen if Team B scores fewer than 200 runs than Team A in their respective first innings.  (This is the rule for a 5-day match – it is a lower threshold for shorter versions of cricket; e.g. 1-day cricket).

  NOTE: Why would Team A want Team B to have two batting innings in a row?  Because Team A feels they have "momentum in the field" and are confident of getting the other team all out PLUS Team A will know what run score it will need to "chase" when they eventually return for their own second inning – giving them a potential psychological advantage.  (It is very rare for a team that has "followed on" to be able to come back and win. Typically the best a team in this situation can hope for is a draw.)

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PRE-MATCH

• Shortly prior to the match commencing, the umpire meets with the two team captains for a coin toss.  Whoever wins the toss can decide whether they want to bat or field first. 

  NOTE: This decision is dictated:

  • How strong your batting line up is relative to your bowling line-up (a "bowler" is the cricket equivalent of a "pitcher" in baseball);

  • The weather forecast for the 5 days and the potential impact on the pitch; e.g. overcast weather impacts the movement/speed of the cricket ball hitting the "wicket" (remember this term – the dried out rectangle in the middle of the cricket field where the batsman stand) in a different way to sunny weather (see the "Bowling/Fielding" section below).

 SCORING

• There must be two batsman out at the "wicket" at all times.  The batsman waiting to receive the ball from the bowler is "on strike" at one end.  The batsman at the other end not facing the bowler is "off strike".

• When a bowler "bowls" the ball to the batsman, they can either play a "defensive" stroke (i.e. either block the ball with the bat or let the ball bounce past them) or play an "offensive" stroke by hitting the ball and running from one end of the wicket to the other without "getting out" (see "Bowling/Fielding section below). 

• Having hit the ball, when the "on strike" batsman runs to the other end of the wicket, the "off strike" batsman runs in the other direction. 

• Every time a batsman makes contact with the ball with the bat and they successfully make it to the other end of the wicket, this is 1 run.  In the professional game, if batsman hits the ball and it stays within the "field" (i.e. within the circular boundary), typically the most they can get is 3 "runs" before the ball is returned to the wicket by the fielding team (see the "Getting Out" section below).  If the "on strike" batsman scores a "1" or a "3", the next bowl (think "pitch") from the bowler is to the other batsman because they've now swapped ends.  For 2 runs, the original "on strike" batsman stays "on strike" (i.e. he gets to face the bowler again).

• If a batsman hits the ball and it bounces at least once prior to going out of the boundary edge, they score 4 runs. 

• If a batsman hits the ball and it clears the boundary without it bouncing once on the ground, they score 6 runs.

• If the run is scored by the ball coming off the batsman bat or glove, it is a run allocated to the batsman for his personal score.

• If the run is scored after the ball hit a part of the batsman's body other than the glove, this is a "leg bye" and attributed to the overall score but not the individual batsman's score.

• If the run is scored as a result of the ball flying past the batsman without it hitting his bat or body, and the wicket-keeper behind (or any other fielder) misses the ball, this is a "bye run" and attributed to the overall score but not the individual batsman's score.

GENERAL NOTE: This is why cricket scores are so high.

BOWLING / FIELDING

•  A batsman is hoping to hit a ball "bowled" by a "bowler".  Each bowler has 6 attempts – "balls" – to bowl at the batsman (with the 6 balls making up an "over") before the next bowler takes a turn.  A bowler is not permitted to bowl more than 6 "balls" in a row. 

  NOTE: An inning can potentially last a couple of days so bowlers have to be frequently "rotated" and periodically given a rest – hence why there are multiple bowlers in the line-up.  The captain can rotate them in and out as they deem fit (bowlers are not "retired" from bowling).

• A bowler "bowls" by running towards the batsman and releasing the ball towards the "on strike" batsman before their leading running foot crossed a white line (that is near the "off strike" stumps).  If their foot goes over the line, it is a "no ball", with 1 run automatically given to the batting team and the ball has to be replayed.

• Generally, balls are bowled into the ground just in front of the batsman and the batsman hits it on the bounce.  (However, this is not mandatory – there is a type of "bowling delivering" where there is no bounce which is permitted so long as it is low to the ground).

• Bowlers must have a straight arm – with an allowance for a natural bend at the elbow.  Any exaggerated bending of the arm at the elbow is a "foul ball" and not permitted.  (There's been a lot of controversy about this over the years, as I'm sure you can imagine!)

• Bowlers are either "pace"/"seam" bowlers (they bowl "fast" or "fast medium" or "medium fast"), "swing" bowlers (they use the two side cricket ball made of cork to create "swing" movement when the ball bounces – they allow one side to naturally "rough up" – it gets scuffed – while they try to keep the other side "polished" by adding saliva and rubbing it against their trousers) and "spin" bowlers (similar to "knuckleballs" in baseball).

  NOTE #1: This is why I mentioned the weather conditions up top – "swing" bowlers like overcast weather.  I don't understand the physics of why these conditions increase the "swing" once the ball gets "old" (i.e. "roughed up") but it happens.

  NOTE #2: A new ball is introduced every 80 overs (i.e. 480 delivered balls).  These "new balls" (at the beginning of the innings and at the 80-over mark are left to the "pace" bowlers because this is when the ball bounces most ferociously off the ground at the batsman.  When the ball gets older, the swing and spin bowlers are introducing due to the scuffing of the ball which creates ball movement – which is difficult for the batsman to anticipate. 

• The first bowler "bowls" to the batsman from one end of the wicket.  The second bowler "bowls" from the other end of the wicket when it is their turn.

  NOTE: This is important because if a batsman scores 1 or 3 runs on the final ball of the over, they will remain "on strike" for the next over and face the next bowler because the batsman has run to the other end of the wicket and now faces the bowler at that end when it is their turn to bowl.

• Behind the "on strike" batsman and the stumps is a "wicket-keeper" (same as a "catcher" in baseball).  At the end of each 6-ball over, the keeper jogs to the other end of the wicket to stand behind the new "on strike" batsman (remembering that the next bowler "bowls" from the opposite side).

• The remaining 9 fielders are scattered around the cricket field in either an "aggressive" formation (i.e. geared towards getting players out) or a "defensive/cautious" formation (i.e. geared towards keeping the number of runs scored low) or somewhere in between.

• The aggressive formation involves more players standing closer to the wicket to either catch the balls hit by the batsman or for a "run out" (see the "Getting Out" section below).

• The defensive/cautious formation involves more players standing near the boundary to stop the ball going over the boundary line for 4 or 6 runs (see "Scoring" section above).

• Some (funny sounding/odd) fielding positions:

  • "Slips" (1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th) – stand adjacent to the wicketkeeper on the "off side" of the field.

  • "Gully" – stands adjacent to the slip(s).

  • "Third man" – stands behind the slip(s) closer to the boundary.

  • "Point" and "Cover" – stand in line with the wicket on the "off side".

  • "Square Leg" and "Mid-Wicket" – stand in line with the wicket on the "leg side".

  • "Fine Leg" – similar position to "Third Man" on the "leg side".

     

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GETTING OUT

•  The primary ways a batsman can get out are as follows:

  • "Bowled" – the ball hits the stumps behind the "on strike" batsman and one or more of the "bails" on top of the stumps comes off (this is an important caveat because on rare occasions the bails have risen off the stumps to only fall back down on them again – the batsman is not out when this happens).

  • "Caught" – a fielder catches a ball that came off the batsman's bat (or glove) before it hits the ground (like a "fly out" in baseball).

  • "Leg Before Wicket" or "LBW" – the ball doesn't make contact with the bat AND it hits the batsman AND it is confirmed (now using "Hawkeye" technology) that if the ball had not hit the batsman, it would have gone on to hit the stumps.

  • "Run out" – the "bails" are knocked off the stumps prior to the batsman getting "home" (i.e. reaching a "crease line" in front of the stumps when running down the wicket) – either as a direct throw by a fielder or by a fielder who has the ball in their hands and they knock off the bails in one swift motion (like a "ground out" in baseball).  Either batsman could get out in this scenario – but not both (there is no equivalent to baseball's "double play").

  • "Stumped" – In front of the stumps is a "crease" line.  If the batsman fails to hit the ball and it passes them into the hands of the wicket-keeper, if the wicketkeeper can knock off the bails in one swift motion AND the batsman is "outside of his crease" (i.e. he is in front of the "crease" line rather than on or behind it.)

  • "Retired" – due to an injury, the player has to leave the field.

  • "Hit the ball twice" – self-explanatory.

  • "Obstructing the field" – a batsman intentionally "obstructs" the fielding team – e.g. they deliberately handle the ball stopping a fielder getting to it (apparently this has only happened once in a professional match).

  • "Timed out" – once a batsman is out, the next batsman has 3 minutes to "arrive at the crease" (i.e. be ready to bat).  If they take longer to leave the "pavilion" (i.e. the changing room) and get to the centre of the field, they are out.

  • "Hit wicket" – the batsman accidentally hits the stumps with their own bat knocking off the bails. 

    NOTE: Who is ridiculous enough to have this happen to them?  That's right – me – in the very first match played as an 8 year old kid.  It still haunts me.

Ok, now that wasn't so complicated, was it!?

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

Classical economists like Thomas Malthus (population theorist) and David Ricardo (comparative advantage advocate) are often remembered for their bleak outlooks on human progress.

Yet, the label “the dismal science” - coined by Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle in 1849 - was not born from Malthusian gloom. It was born of white supremacist bigotry.

Carlyle dismissed economics as “dismal” precisely because he despised contemporaneous thinkers like John Stuart Mill (and not just because he was English), who championed emancipation through the lens of market equality.

To Carlyle, the science was “dismal” because it rejected his desire for rigid, forced-labour hierarchies.

Today, critics often still accuse economics of favouring cold efficiency over human morality. But that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the discipline.

Economics should be about the art of the possible.

Once we map the boundaries of what can be done, we must apply the tools of poetry and philosophy - what was called “gay science” - to ensure those possibilities are anchored in justice and fairness.

Defining those terms may be the work of a lifetime, but it is the indispensable lodestar that keeps the science human.

THE RESEARCH

During the inter-war period, Norwegian Ragnar Frisch (the inaugural co-winner of the 1969 Nobel prize in Economics), helped transform economics from a subject based only on abstract ideas into a science that relies on math and data, insisting that if you couldn’t measure it, you couldn’t prove it.

In his 1933 paper, Propagation Problems and Impulse Problems in Dynamic Economics, Frisch created a mathematical model to explain why economies experience cycles of growth and recession. “Propagation” concerns the structure of an economy - factors such as investment habits, time lags in production (how long it takes for a decision to affect output), and consumer savings rates. Meanwhile, economies simultaneously face “impulses” (random shocks); for example, a sudden technological breakthrough, a drought, a shift in consumer confidence, or an unexpected change in global oil prices.

Frisch’s revolutionary insight was that as an economy comprises a series of internal connections, one random “shock” doesn’t just happen and disappear; it gets amplified or smoothed out by the realities of the current system, causing the economy to swing into a boom or a recession.

A domino effect.

Or ripples in a pond after skimming a stone.

And by understanding that an economy is a dynamic system (something that moves over time) rather than an equilibrium system (something that just settles), he provided policymakers with a foundation for diagnosing - and potentially solving - seemingly intractable problems at both the “macroeconomic” (as a whole) and “microeconomic” (individuals and firms) level - two new terms which Frisch had coined in his research.

For instance, governmental bodies could now build a mathematical model to estimate how long a recession would last based on current tax code, interest rate levels, and the like, informed by analyzing the data to calculate the “multiplier” effects of certain shocks.

Frisch pursued a rigorous, data-driven approach. By testing his models against historical data, when the math matched reality, he concluded that he was measuring the “physical” laws of that economy.

His approach gave birth to the discipline of “econometrics”.

Essentially, he moved economics from the realm of opinion to fact (or as close as one can get to fact).

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Jan Tinbergen (the other 1969 co-Nobel Laureate) had been building the first national-level economic models, adopting and complementing many of Frisch’s ideas to analyze the US economy for the League of Nations in the 1930s.

And this work forever fundamentally changed the goal of the economist.

THE APPLICATION

Before Tinbergen, the goal of an economist was largely to describe or predict what the economy would do. Tinbergen shifted the goal toward design. He concluded that because we could model these relationships, governments had a responsibility to “steer” the economy - using the right tools at the right time - to prevent the extreme suffering caused by massive, unchecked booms and busts.

Tinbergen showed that a business cycle cannot be understood by looking at one variable (prices, for instance) in isolation; instead, the economy needed to be modeled as a complex network of “lagged” relationships.

In plain language: economic events tend to overlap and they often have delayed effects. For example, a change in business profits today might not lead to an increase in investment (buying new machines or building factories) until months or even years later. By mathematically capturing these time delays, Tinbergen could explain why the economy didn’t just move in a straight line, but in waves (or cycles in the common parlance).

Using the statistical data of the time, he tried to distinguish between external shocks (like a drought or a technological invention) and internal dynamics (how the economy naturally reacts to those shocks). He concluded that while external shocks trigger the (growth or recession) cycle, it is the internal structure of the economy that determines whether a small bump in the road becomes a minor dip or a full-scale Great Depression.

Tinbergen’s great insight was that the economy was not a force of nature that just “happened” to us. To the contrary, policymakers could be treated as active participants in the economic model.

Such diagnostic tools, which were now ready to be put to work on a national scale.

In 1945, Tinbergen became the inaugural director of the Netherlands’ Bureau for Economic Policy, where he was able to apply his abstract economic theory to practical government planning - an approach that remains the gold standard today.

In his landmark 1952 book, On the Theory of Economic Policy, Jan Tinbergen effectively provided the operating manual for the modern interventionist state. Drawing directly from his tenure as the first director of the Netherlands’ Bureau for Economic Policy, Tinbergen formalized the relationship between political intent and economic reality, transforming policy from an exercise in rhetoric into a technical discipline.

At the heart of his contribution was the “targets and instruments” framework - a rigorous, mathematical method for governance that policymakers still rely on today. Under this model, the government must first define specific, quantifiable objectives, known as “targets.” These represent the desired ends, such as full employment, price stability, a sustainable balance of payments, or a specific rate of economic growth.

Simultaneously, the government must identify the “instruments” at its disposal. These are the levers of state power, primarily consisting of monetary policy - such as adjusting interest rates - and fiscal policy, including changes to tax levels, subsidies, or government spending.

Tinbergen’s breakthrough was the realization that for every target a government wishes to achieve, it must have at least one independent instrument available. If a government intends to reach both low inflation and full employment, it cannot rely on a single lever; it requires a minimum of two distinct, effective policy tools to move those two independent variables toward their goals.

This framework was revolutionary because it forced transparency upon the planning process. It compelled policymakers to acknowledge that the economy was not a monolithic entity that could be fixed with a catch-all solution, but rather a system of interconnected and sometimes conflicting pressures.

By treating the economy as a design problem, Tinbergen effectively ended the era of reactive governing. He provided a roadmap for how to systematically map the levers of power against the realities of the market, setting the standard for how governments worldwide - from the post-war recovery to the modern era of inflation targeting - would seek to steer the national ship through the inevitable turbulence of the business cycle.

While Tinbergen’s framework focused on macroeconomic (as a whole) levers, the core principle - that you cannot hit a target without the right, distinct instrument - remains the governing philosophy of modern regulatory oversight.

Just as a central bank needs distinct tools for inflation and growth, a financial system requires distinct, high-precision instruments to manage the risks of money laundering and capital volatility.

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THE LIMITATIONS

Ragnar Frisch famously tried to explain economic cycles through the lens of “dampened oscillations” - conceptualizing the business cycle like a pendulum that swings back and forth and gradually loses momentum until it eventually stops.

The fundamental limitation was that real-world economies do not behave this way.

Business cycles are messy, irregular, and do not simply fizzle out on their own. Because Frisch’s early linear models predicted that an economy would eventually settle into a steady state, they failed to account for why economic fluctuations persist indefinitely.

Furthermore, other contemporary leading economists began identifying technical flaws in his mathematical assumptions, noting that his original framework lacked a sufficient number of independent equations to solve for all the variables he introduced.

Figures like Hungarian economist Nicholas Kaldor, English economist John Hicks, and American mathematician Richard Goodwin pioneered non-linear models. These frameworks explained why economies fluctuate persistently from internal dynamics alone, without relying entirely on external shocks to keep the engine moving.

Consequently, while Frisch’s work laid the foundational starting point, it evolved into a much more complex theory of oscillations.

In these updated models, economies fluctuate - and occasionally swing wildly - because their internal structures contain inherent feedback loops.

Economists began using mathematics to establish structural boundaries on economic behaviour, which physicists and mathematicians later formalized as limit cycles. A limit cycle occurs when a system is pushed away from equilibrium but prevented from expanding infinitely by natural economic brakes, such as resource constraints or debt ceilings.

This creates a steady, self-sustaining, continuous loop.

In recent decades, scholars have applied techniques from statistical mechanics, originally designed to study gas molecules, to macroeconomic and financial data. Rather than treating the economy as a single aggregated rocking horse, modern agent-based models view it as a massive collection of interacting participants.

These mathematical tools help explain why financial markets frequently exhibit “fat tails” - extreme, sudden crashes that occur far more often than standard bell-curve distributions would predict - moving well beyond Frisch’s original linear assumptions to capture the persistently irregular nature of the real world.

Meanwhile, Tinbergen’s “targets and instruments” framework remains a standard tool, but its application came under fire starting in the 1970s. And, perhaps the most famous challenge is the Lucas Critique. Its argument was that policymakers cannot reliably use historical data to predict the effects of a new policy.

Because people actively change their behaviour in response to policy shifts, a model that assumes historical behavioural patterns will hold constant is bound to fail.

Critics pointed out that the relationships between economic variables, such as the link between tax changes and employment, are not as stable as Tinbergen’s models assumed. When the underlying “structure” of the economy shifts, a model’s predictive power breaks down.

Later schools of thought argued that early frameworks failed to account for forward-looking expectations, relying instead on ad hoc assumptions that collapsed under real-world pressures.

(The old, ‘it sounds good - in theory’ refrain.)

More recently, these models have come under attack for being overly reductionist. Such frameworks treat the economy like a mechanical control panel, ignoring the reality that it is a complex, adaptive system where components cannot be optimized in isolation without generating unintended consequences.

Some remain concerned that an over-reliance on top-down, expert-led mathematical modeling has historically sidelined the lived experiences and practical realities of the everyday people these policies are meant to serve.

MODERN USAGE

Although modern models are inevitably more sophisticated and vastly more complex today, central banks still apply the core logic established by Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen almost a century ago.

The direct descendant of Frisch’s 1930s work is the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model: the standard tool used by the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the US Federal Reserve, and the European Central Bank to simulate how the economy reacts to shocks.

Frisch’s simple random shocks have been succeeded by complex stochastic (random) shocks - such as global supply chain disruptions, shifts in consumer sentiment, or unexpected interest rate adjustments. To handle the propagation (to use the parlance), the modern models use sophisticated mathematics to track how these shocks ripple through the economy, affecting everything from inflation to employment.

The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, and the US Federal Reserve also all follow what is known as the Tinbergen Rule - the principle that a policymaker must have at least as many independent policy instruments as they have policy targets. In the simplest terms, if a central bank wants to achieve multiple objectives, it generally needs a distinct policy lever for each target.

Since the 1980s, most central banks treat the short-term interest rate as their primary instrument to hit an inflation target. This creates a clear link that allows the public (at least those so inclined) to understand what the bank is trying to do and what tool it is using to do it, effectively removing “political gut-feeling” and replacing it with a transparent target-instrument framework.

(Not to get partisan, but Pierre Poilievre’s long-standing narrative blaming Tiff Macklem, Governor of the Bank of Canada for enabling the absurd concept of “Justinflation” was always economically unsound because it treats a global macroeconomic shock as a uniquely domestic failure of central bank focus.

In reality, central banks operate under the Tinbergen Rule, relying primarily on a single interest-rate lever to manage complex environments that overwhelmed monetary authorities worldwide. Scapegoating the governor for global supply chain pressures fundamentally misrepresents how institutional monetary policy works.)

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Central banks across the G7 and beyond run simulations to see how a change in interest rates will ripple through the economy. By treating the economy as a system of linked equations - capturing the interaction between household consumption, business investment, and labour market dynamics, for instance - they can test the potential impact of a policy change before actually implementing it.

This is vividly illustrated by the public statement by the Bank of Canada in support of its July 15, 2026 decision to hold its target for the overnight rate at 2.25%, with the Bank Rate at 2.5% and the deposit rate at 2.20%.

In support of that decision, the Bank stated:

Recent indicators point to continued solid consumer spending. Housing activity has been weak but looks to be stabilizing. Export growth has resumed and is expected to continue to strengthen, albeit on a lower path. Business investment is projected to pick up modestly, boosted in the near term by the oil and gas sector.

Although the Canada-US-Mexico Agreement is now subject to annual reviews, more businesses report they are finding ways to navigate through the uncertainty. Government spending also contributes to higher economic activity over the projection.

— Bank of Canada, Press Release, July 15, 2026

This is the Tinbergen Rule in action.

To be clear, despite heavy reliance on these models, central bankers rarely follow them blindly, as they can only ever serve as approximations. They are used to establish a baseline view, but then human judgment must be applied to account for things the models might miss - such as sudden political shifts, geopolitical crises, or rapid technological changes like the rise of artificial intelligence.

For this reason, the BoC statement concluded:

Governing Council judges the current policy rate remains appropriate to sustain the economic recovery and bring inflation back to the 2% target, in line with the MPR projections. Uncertainty is still high. Governing Council will continue to assess the strength of the Canadian economy and the outlook for inflation, and is prepared to adjust monetary policy as needed. The Bank is committed to maintaining Canadians’ confidence in price stability through this period of global upheaval.

CONCLUSION

Ragnar Frisch’s core framework remains the “operating system” for modern economic analysis, though it has undergone massive upgrades. While his early linear models are now viewed largely as historical artifacts, the impulse-propagation logic - the dynamic interaction between random shocks and an economy’s structural resilience - remains the primary lens through which central banks and financial institutions analyze market volatility.

Where Frisch relied on manually derived equations, 21st-century economists apply his framework to massive, high-frequency datasets.

Modern computing power enables researchers to track the “irregular, persistent” fluctuations that Frisch could not capture in 1933, while machine learning algorithms identify non-linear patterns that were once invisible. This delivers a vastly more sophisticated theory of oscillations (the ripples in a pond) for the global economy.

Ultimately, Frisch’s greatest contribution was not the specific mathematics of 1933, but the methodological revolution he forced upon the discipline: you cannot manage what you cannot measure; the economy is a machine in motion, not a static state; and every part of the system is interconnected.

All the while, Jan Tinbergen’s real-world blueprint also endures. Through his pioneering “targets and instruments” framework and the foundational mandate that policymakers must wield at least as many independent tools as they have objectives, Tinbergen permanently shifted the centre of gravity in policymaking, enabling central banks to confront cycles of inflation, unemployment, and recession.

That said, while the engineering approach pioneered by Frisch and Tinbergen granted policymakers the capacity to steer through crises, it also introduced the (often misplaced) mindset of treating the economy as something that could be controlled.

As the powers that be navigate an era defined by fat tails (extreme events) and non-linear shocks (e.g. the rapid pace of technological change), the most effective policymakers will be those who master the discipline of the technician while retaining the humility of the philosopher.

Economics, at its best, is not merely the calculation of outcomes; it is the art of aligning our systems with the complex, evolving needs of society - a task requiring both the rigor of the scientist and the empathy of the poet.

By transforming economics into a mathematical, statistical science, Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen shaped nearly every major figure in macroeconomics and econometrics who followed. Separately - but in parallel - they laid the foundational bedrock for modern empirical and quantitative economics, exerting a profound influence on generations of subsequent Nobel laureates.

Starting with Paul A. Samuelson - the 1970 winner.

Economics is about providing options. Politics is about making choices through the application of power.

We must move toward judging governments not on identity or personality, but on policy. To do this, we must recognize that the policies we prefer are invariably informed by our own personal circumstances, background, and ideology.

There is nothing wrong with assessing policy through this lens - but it must be done with intention. By grounding our perspective in objective economic reality and acknowledging our own values, we can move beyond partisan noise and begin to make truly informed assessments of the choices that shape our world.

This is not just a better way to view governance; it is the only way to actually solve the problems we face.

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

While Prime Minister Mark Carney continues to dominate the Canadian political scene, it is the Premier of Manitoba, Wab Kinew, who has been increasingly cementing his claim for the most popular political leader in the country - certainly, provincially.

Yet, despite commanding approval ratings that most first ministers only dream of, public discourse surrounding his administration often swings between uncritical hagiography and knee-jerk partisan alarmism.

That disconnect is precisely why his government is a perfect candidate for a deep-dive review.

To properly assess a Canadian leader frequently whispered about as a future prime minister, we have to look past the brand and examine the machinery of his government. Over the past three years, it has quietly overseen an ambitious, heavy-handed, and fundamentally transformative legislative agenda.

In the first of a new series, we look at the economic policies of the Kinew administration.

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“BUY CANADIAN”

Responding to attacks on the Canadian economy by the Trump Presidency, on June 3, 2025, the Manitoba legislature delivered Bill 42, The Buy Canadian Act (Government Purchases Act Amended), which formally enabled provincial authorities to grant preferential treatment to Canadian suppliers when purchasing on behalf of the public.

Although critics voiced concerns that the amendment had the potential to dilute the existing strict, measurable accountability mechanisms hitherto demanded of government rule-making, given the current political climate, prioritizing domestic goods, services, and commercial entities in government contracting, was a popular - and politically astute - move.

Despite some delays in formal implementation, provincial reporting has already pointed to a notable 31% reduction in American procurement, indicating that the policy’s intent has already been actively shaping purchasing behaviours.

Also receiving Royal Assent on June 3 last year was Bill 31, The Property Controls for Grocery Stores and Supermarkets Act (Various Acts Amended), which amended The Law of Property Act and The Real Property Act to ban new restrictive covenants and exclusivity clauses that block the development or operation of grocery stores and supermarkets.

Proponents of the legislation heavily praised the move for dismantling anti-competitive clauses written into commercial leases or property titles by dominant supermarket chains, which previously legally blocked landlords from renting nearby spaces to competing grocers and left neighborhoods underserved. Under the law, existing property controls were rendered legally void unless the right-holder formally registered them on-title via the Property Registry within a strict 180-day limited registration period.

To oversee these changes, the legislation also amendeded The Municipal Board Act to empower the minister or other individuals to initiate a review of any registered property control. Advocates welcomed this mechanism, allowing the Municipal Board to review and discharge restrictive covenants found to be contrary to the public interest without forcing taxpayers to compensate large corporate entities.

Independent grocers and consumer advocates argued that banning and strictly reviewing these real estate monopolies would open the door for new market entrants, discount supermarkets, and independent stores, ultimately driving down food prices for Manitoba families.

Conversely, critics contended that commercial developers frequently rely on exclusivity clauses to secure anchor tenants necessary to make multi-tenant retail plazas financially viable, warning that removing these covenants could slow the construction of new retail complexes. Major commercial landlords and retail associations also voiced concerns that voiding existing contractual agreements retroactively undermines the sanctity of private contracts and property rights in commercial real estate development.

Furthermore, some legal and corporate critics took strong issue with provisions explicitly barring individuals or corporate entities from suing the provincial government for financial losses resulting from the legislation, viewing it as an aggressive use of state power to interfere directly in private commercial agreements.

Meanwhile, the legislation successfully prompted the submission of dozens of property controls for either removal or confirmation by the registration deadlines.

The Manitoba government has actively moved forward by targeting remaining property controls, bringing formal challenges against major chains like Sobeys before the Municipal Board to force competition into the market.

Premier Wab Kinew and provincial officials have hailed the early outcomes as a success, pointing to dropped property controls as proof that the policy is working to give families more choices and lower grocery bills. On the other hand, groups like the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers (CFIG) have argued that a blanket prohibition misses the mark and that many grocers remain unconvinced that the law will fundamentally transform the competitive landscape or bring down prices on its own.

While a number of large corporations objected to Bill 31, on November 6, 2025, Bill 216, The Manitoba Small Business Month Act came into law, formally recognizing the economic and social contributions of small businesses across the province.

Small businesses make up over 95% of all enterprises in Manitoba, generating critical local employment and acting as the cultural heartbeat of neighbourhoods. This is further supported by the community multiplier effect of shopping locally, with data showing that a significantly larger portion of every dollar spent at a local small business stays within the provincial economy compared to large multinational retailers or online giants.

Advocates praised the act for explicitly acknowledging diverse trailblazing entrepreneurs who build businesses while overcoming systemic, socioeconomic, or intersecting barriers.

The legislation amended The Commemoration of Days, Weeks and Months Act to establish an official annual observance, statutorily proclaiming October as Small Business Month throughout Manitoba. It encourages government bodies, municipalities, educational institutions, and community organizations to use the month to highlight local entrepreneurship, celebrate small business achievements, and promote local economic development.

While the law was being debated, critics argued that the government was merely introducing symbolic recognition bills at a time when other concurrent administrative decisions, tax shifts, and regulatory changes ran counter to the financial interests and daily operational needs of small business owners, dismissing the measures as empty gestures or “lip service” if not backed by substantive fiscal policies.

That critique was particularly notable given that, on the very same day, the government also enacted Bill 46, The Budget Implementation and Tax Statutes Amendment Act, 2025, alongside the provincial budget.

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BUDGETARY ACTIONS

Bill 46 was an omnibus piece of legislation that amended several key financial and taxation statutes to implement fiscal measures, adjust corporate and health tax thresholds, and execute government policy priorities, including support for small businesses in Manitoba.

The exemption threshold for the payroll tax, often called the health and post-secondary education levy, was raised to reduce the tax burden for small and medium-sized businesses by adjusting exemption cut-offs to $2,500,000 and scaling the phase-in threshold up to $5,000,000.

Supporters flagged these significant adjustments to The Health and Post-Secondary Education Tax Levy Act as providing tangible, direct financial relief to thousands of growing businesses, freeing up capital for hiring and operations.

Defenders of the bill also defended ancillary updates to The Corporation Capital Tax Act and The Income Tax Act as essential clean-up measures that remove obsolete classifications, such as Crown corporation exceptions and subsidiary structures, while streamlining financial institution rules. Furthermore, these updates adjusted definitions for trusts and estates relative to individuals, modified tax bracket indexing mechanics, and refined provisions supporting family and low-income tax credits to match provincial budgetary frameworks and current economic realities.

Opposition critics strongly pushed back, arguing that despite minor targeted exemptions, the broader suite of budgetary measures failed to protect Manitobans from rising financial pressures. They contended that cumulative tax and fee structures continue to squeeze households and cool the province’s economic competitiveness.

As is expected in partisan politics, the Progressive Conservatives took issue with combining diverse and complex tax amendments into a single omnibus bill, arguing that it limits detailed scrutiny on individual provisions. However, the government defended the omnibus approach as a critical tool for efficiently implementing fiscal measures designed to lower costs, support economic growth, and maintain stable public services.

Bill 46 was not the first time that the Kinew administration had been criticized for its approach to budgetary measures.

Passed on March 14, 2024, Bill 25, The Interim Appropriation Act, 2024, was presented as a routine statutory supply measure designed to provide the Government of Manitoba with temporary financial authority at the start of the 2024-2025 fiscal year (beginning April 1, 2024).

Like similar interim supply bills, it allowed the government to draw from the Consolidated Fund to maintain public services and ongoing operations before the full Main Estimates and primary appropriation acts were formally debated and passed based on a budget inherited from the prior Progressive Conservative administration of Heather Stefanson.

To underline the point, in November, Bill 43, The Appropriation Act, 2024, provided the statutory authority for the Manitoba government to withdraw funds from the Consolidated Fund to finance public services, capital projects, and government programs for the 2024 - 2025 fiscal year, thereby subsuming the interim supply act.

(The province would subsequently return to historical norms the following year, adopting Bill 45, The Interim Appropriation Act, 2025 - in March, as is standard.)

The government championed Bill 43 as the essential legal mechanism to fulfill Budget 2024 commitments, specifically directing significant investments toward rebuilding Manitoba’s health care system, hiring front-line medical staff, reducing surgical backlogs, and supporting public education.

Officials also emphasized that approving these main estimates ensured uninterrupted funding for targeted cost-of-living relief, housing construction initiatives, and expanded social safety nets for low- and middle-income families, while providing long-term financial predictability for government departments, school boards, and municipal delivery partners.

However, the opposition Progressive Conservatives and other commentators strongly opposed the scale of the $17.92 billion operating budget, arguing that heavy state spending pushed the province into steep financial deficits and heightened long-term debt-servicing risks. They contended that expansive government spending amidst broader macroeconomic pressures threatened to exacerbate local inflation without offering broad-based, permanent personal income tax cuts to working Manitobans.

Critics also questioned whether the government could deliver measurable improvements in public outcomes to justify the increased operational outlays, raising concerns about departmental accountability and spending allocation transparency.

The following year, Bill 51, The Budget Implementation and Tax Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (2) - another omnibus bill - was enacted to execute specific supplementary fiscal and tax measures, principally to amend Manitoba’s Income Tax Act once more, as well as The Retail Sales Tax Act.

Accordingly, as of July 1, 2026, businesses are no longer required to pay the standard 7% Retail Sales Tax (RST) on the purchase of eligible manufacturing and processing machinery and equipment, replacing the previous administrative model where tax was paid upfront and later refunded via the manufacturing investment tax credit.

Supporters of the Act argued that an immediate point-of-sale tax exemption makes Manitoba a more attractive jurisdiction for industrial investment, encouraging local manufacturers to upgrade equipment, scale operations, and enhance productivity. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), for one, strongly praised the change, framing the elimination of this friction as a direct way to free up vital working capital for businesses.

Advocates also welcomed the preservation of the 1% non-refundable component and the continuation of the full 8% investment tax credit structure for other qualifying assets (such as industrial buildings) that do not fall under the direct RST exemption, maintaining balanced support for capital growth.

However, some critics and representatives from adjacent industries - such as construction, agriculture, and wholesale trade - pointed out that the reform left other vital commercial sectors out. They noted that businesses in those sectors still had to pay RST on critical productivity-enhancing tools and capital properties.

Furthermore, broader economic critics have long argued that provincial sales taxes on general business inputs and capital assets create structural disadvantages compared to provinces utilizing Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) frameworks, prompting ongoing calls to expand exemptions across all commercial capital expenditures.

As a corollary to Bill 43, Bill 37, The Budget Implementation and Tax Statutes Amendment Act, 2024 enacted fiscal measures announced in the April budget, again making omnibus amendments to various tax and financial statutes in Manitoba.

Opposition Conservatives protested the reliance on yet another massive omnibus bill to push through wide-ranging tax and administrative adjustments under tight timelines, leading to intense overnight legislative debates and procedural standoffs.

Proponents highlighted that the bill enacted vital increases to homeowner and renter tax credits, alongside funding mechanisms aimed at stabilizing public services and health care. Government supporters also emphasized that the legislation operationalized key commitments from Budget 2024, notably paving the way for the removal of provincial taxes on certain grocery items to help families manage affordability pressures.

The legislation also modified administrative provisions across multiple financial Acts, including structural amendments governing Crown corporations and public fiscal accountability. The Government of Manitoba defended the scope of the measures as a balanced approach to implementing public policy while keeping the province on a predictable trajectory toward fiscal stability. Meanwhile, critics maintained that the broader financial framework failed to adequately address the ongoing cost-of-living crisis and pushed the province deeper into operational challenges. Progressive Conservatives argued that targeted measures, such as specific food tax cuts, offered minimal real-world savings that paled in comparison to broader cost burdens like property taxes and fuel prices.

More recently - ratified on June 1, 2026 - Bill 53, The Budget Implementation and Tax Statutes Amendment Act, 2026 enacted the legislative, fiscal, and tax measures outlined in the 2026 Manitoba Budget. The legislation removed the Provincial Sales Tax (PST) from store-bought food, snacks, and non-alcoholic beverages purchased for home consumption (taking effect July 1, 2026), while keeping PST applicable to restaurant meals, catering, and alcohol.

It also also refined eligibility criteria and thresholds for film and video production tax credits.

To address housing affordability, the bill also increased the Homeowners Affordability Tax Credit to $1,700 and raised the Renters Affordability Tax Credit to $675, while introducing a high-value phase-out for properties assessed over $1,000,000. It also established a graduated tax on the acquisition or increase of a “beneficial interest” in land where a formal land title transfer is not registered, closing loopholes and aligning compliance structures with standard land transfer taxes.

Additionally, the legislation empowered municipalities to enact short-term accommodation tax by-laws, establish local fee classes, and audit compliance.

The Progressive Conservative opposition (and some retail analysts) criticized the grocery PST cut as nominal, pointing out that basic staples like milk, fresh meat, and produce were already tax-exempt. Critics argued that the savings - estimated at roughly $100 annually for an average family - did little to offset broader financial pressures like rising property taxes and utility costs.

Other external stakeholders, such as restaurant associations, attacked the grocery tax carve-out for creating an uneven playing field, arguing that prepared foods sold in grocery stores are exempt while identical items purchased in restaurants remain subject to the PST.

During protracted legislative debates, the opposition pushed to amend the bill to substantially raise the Basic Personal Exemption (the threshold at which an individual starts paying income tax), arguing that systemic tax relief would provide a much deeper and more permanent benefit than selective retail tax exemptions.

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THE ENERGY AGENDA

Continuing a multi-year effort following prior tax implementation acts, Bill 53 also updated carbon storage exploration licensing rules, royalty frameworks for captured carbon injection.

Back in June 2024, Bill 31, The Captured Carbon Storage Act had already established a comprehensive legal and regulatory framework governing the exploration, development, and permanent underground storage of captured carbon dioxide in geological formations across Manitoba. Critically, it clarified that all subterranean pore space below the surface belonged to the provincial Crown - independent of ownership of surface title or mineral rights - while also explicitly barring compensation claims or lawsuits regarding the vesting.

Property and legal commentators noted that vesting all pore space directly in the Crown while legally barring compensation claims or lawsuits amounted to a legislative expropriation of subsurface rights without recourse for private property and mineral title holders.

At the same time, grassroots environmental organizations (including the Manitoba Eco-Network, Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition, and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) strongly criticized the government for introducing the bill without prior public consultation or robust legislative committee review.

Other critics argued that CCS is an expensive, energy-intensive, and largely unproven technology that fails to address the root causes of emissions, pointing out that it often increases facility energy demand and acts as a subsidy or lifeline for fossil-fuel-reliant industries.

On the other hand, supporters - including fertilizer producers, energy firms, and manufacturing representatives - welcomed the legislation for establishing a clear, predictable legal framework. They argued that a formalized licensing and oversight mechanism was essential to give industry the confidence to invest in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

Advocates also noted that vesting subterranean pore space directly in the Crown and replacing fragmented oil and gas rules with a dedicated regime removes administrative bottlenecks for major emissions-reduction projects.

Defenders of Bill 31 consistently maintained that CCS is a proven, safe technology capable of significantly reducing large-scale industrial emissions - preventing hundreds of thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere - thereby aligning economic development with environmental targets.

To mitigate potential environmental impacts, the law mandates rigorous project requirements, including comprehensive risk assessments, risk management plans, monitoring, measurement and verification (MMV) protocols, as well as formal site closure and well abandonment plans.

It simultaneously empowers an appointed director to carry out inspections, issue administrative orders and penalties, and prosecute contraventions, with an appeals mechanism directed to an administrative board.

While Bill 31 also established a structured application process for industry proponents - encompassing exploration reservations, geophysical exploration permits, test well licences, and long-term carbon storage licences - environmental and legal analysts expressed deep concern over potential long-term financial liabilities falling on the public.

Ultimately, the long-term success of the act will be judged by whether the projects it intends to govern can safely and effectively scale up emissions reductions without triggering environmental hazards or leaving taxpayers on the hook.

A year later - on June 3, 2025, royal assent was granted to Bill 11, The Oil and Gas Amendment Act, which amended The Oil and Gas Act to formally extend provincial regulatory frameworks and definitions beyond traditional oil and gas infrastructure to incorporate helium and natural hydrogen, positioning the province to safely oversee and encourage next-generation energy exploration.

The legislation also established strict notification rules requiring pipeline operators to notify the responsible government minister within 24 hours if a pipeline operation needs to be suspended in the event of an emergency. Furthermore, the Bill prohibits pipeline operators from interrupting the supply of refined petroleum products in the province without prior ministerial consent. In response, government officials emphasized that these measures were vital for protecting the public interest, ensuring that refined petroleum product supplies remain stable, and preventing unexpected interruptions that could impact everyday consumers.

However, industry representatives and petroleum sector stakeholders cautioned that certain provisions - such as potential permit cancellations or penalties stemming from minor administrative or reporting omissions - are overly punitive and do not target the root causes of poor compliance. Operators expressed apprehension that broad discretionary powers to alter or rescind existing permits after millions of dollars in capital have already been invested could introduce uncertainty and deter future energy investment in the province.

Finally, Bill 11 established a clear legal requirement forcing holders of freehold oil and gas leases to fully abandon wells or related facilities within 180 days of a lease expiring. Supporters noted that tighter well-abandonment requirements for freehold lands and enhanced inspection programs close regulatory gaps, ensuring that inactive infrastructure is cleaned up responsibly rather than left as a liability.

Critics, meanwhile, pointed out that the strict 180-day (six-month) deadline fails to reflect practical operational realities. Industry groups stressed that multi-well abandonment is typically coordinated in batches to manage costs and minimize disruptions to local agricultural land use, making a rigid six-month turnaround logistically difficult.

Also passed in June 2025 was Bill 28, The Manitoba Hydro Amendment Act, which amended The Manitoba Hydro Act by repealing statutory sections that previously subjected certain capital expenditure proposals and major project plans to specific regulatory oversight and review thresholds by the Public Utilities Board.

The legislation modernizes the utility’s core statutory purpose to explicitly incorporate modern economic development goals, regional grid integration, and strategic decarbonization initiatives, while updating provisions concerning internal planning and ministerial reporting requirements to streamline long-term resource development.

Proponents argued that Manitoba’s clean, reliable baseload hydroelectricity is the province’s greatest competitive economic advantage, and ending the rigid first-come, first-served queue approach was essential to prevent speculative or low-value projects from tying up grid capacity. Supporters emphasized that prioritizing large grid connections based on criteria like job creation, GDP impact, and decarbonization allows the province to strategically court major investments - such as data centres, green manufacturing, and hydrogen production - that deliver maximum public benefit.

Advocates also supported updating the utility’s mandate to reflect modern regional grid integration and economic realities, arguing that the changes give Manitoba Hydro the operational flexibility needed to navigate complex modern energy markets.

However, opponents heavily criticized provisions granting the minister discretionary power to direct Manitoba Hydro to prioritize specific customer requests in the “public interest,” arguing this opens the door to political interference in Crown corporation management and commercial decision-making.

Consumer and ratepayer advocates also questioned whether prioritizing heavy industrial or large-scale commercial power users could inadvertently shift financial or infrastructural burdens onto residential ratepayers, demanding stricter public accountability safeguards. Additionally, critics raised concerns that moving away from a clear, objective queue to a discretionary framework creates uncertainty for investors and businesses, making the allocation process opaque and vulnerable to subjective political favouritism.

Following Bill 11, Bill 20, The Manitoba Hydro Amendment Act (ratified on June 1, 2026), modernized the utility’s mandate and governance to align with contemporary energy priorities, electrification goals, and provincial grid planning.

The legislation enabled Manitoba Hydro to establish a curtailable power program specifically for customers engaged in cryptocurrency operations, allowing the corporation to temporarily reduce power supplies during periods of peak demand, system constraints, or emergencies. It also codified frameworks to facilitate deeper equity partnerships and long-term economic collaboration with First Nations on new energy and transmission developments.

Proponents - including provincial energy authorities and consumer advocates - strongly praised the bill for safeguarding domestic electricity stability. They emphasized that cryptocurrency mining operations consume massive amounts of energy while delivering minimal permanent economic value or job creation relative to their draw. Giving the utility a direct legal mechanism to curtail power during winter peaks ensures that residential and essential commercial customers do not face reliability risks or inflated costs.

However, industry representatives, tech-sector advocates, and commercial stakeholders raised concerns that carving out specific legislative restrictions targeting a single emerging sector could create a jittery investment climate. Affected crypto-mining operators warned committee hearings that sudden curtailment rules and higher operational pressures threatened to drive existing local businesses toward bankruptcy.

Some legal and energy market analysts also questioned the operational complexity of defining, tracking, and executing real-time curtailment orders across decentralized tech infrastructure, warning that poorly defined boundaries or sudden regulatory changes could lead to compliance friction or legal challenges from affected operators.

In response, the government maintained that as electrification and demand grow, utilities must have agile tools to manage abnormal operating conditions and system constraints without needing to prematurely build expensive, capital-intensive new generation facilities to feed low-value computational loads.

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PLANNING LAWS

Ratified on June 3, 2025, Bill 25, The Public-Private Partnerships Transparency and Accountability Act established strict governance frameworks for major capital infrastructure projects undertaken by public sector entities - including the provincial government, municipalities, and reporting organizations - where the projected total cost is $20 million or more.

The legislation formally defined public-private partnerships (P3s) as contractual arrangements where a private sector entity assumes responsibility for substantially all of the design and construction alongside long-term financing, operation, or maintenance, while the public sector retains ultimate ownership. It requires heightened public disclosure, rigorous upfront evaluation of P3 models versus traditional procurement, independent fairness monitors, and comprehensive contract summaries to ensure public accountability.

Labour groups, public-interest watchdogs, and proponents of public infrastructure championed the legislation for establishing mandatory upfront analysis to ensure that P3 models deliver genuine economic value rather than hidden long-term costs. Advocates also praised provisions requiring public consultations and regular reporting to the Auditor General, ensuring that public works remain under public ownership rather than being permanently encumbered by private equity stakes.

Meanwhile, opponents argued that the extensive preliminary analysis, mandatory public consultations, and independent oversight requirements add months - if not years - and significant administrative costs to project timelines. Business and construction sector critics contended that the heavy regulatory burden and stringent reporting thresholds ($20 million or more) unfairly single out and stigmatize P3 models, potentially discouraging top-tier private firms from bidding on major Manitoba infrastructure projects.

Also implemented in June 2025 was Bill 4, The Planning Amendment Act, which amended The Planning Act, which empowers individual municipalities to choose whether or not to sit at the regional planning table and extends the statutory timeline for the Capital Planning Region (CPR) to prepare and adopt its initial regional plan to January 1, 2027 (with provisions allowing the minister to prescribe a later date if necessary).

Additionally, the legislation ensures that regional municipal obligations concerning drinking water and wastewater management planning are preserved and continued independently of whether a municipality chooses to remain a member of the Capital Planning Region.

The Association of Manitoba Municipalities (AMM) strongly championed the bill for respecting local democracy, arguing that democratically elected municipal councils know their communities best and should not be legally compelled to participate in a top-down regional body if it does not serve their taxpayers’ interests. Supporters also noted that previous mandatory structures had created severe friction, resentment, and stalemates between Winnipeg and its surrounding regional municipalities, framing voluntary membership as a pragmatic “reset” button to clear the air, build trust, and bring genuinely willing partners back to the table.

Conversely, urban planning experts criticized the move as a major step backward for long-term provincial development. They argued that issues like urban sprawl, transportation networks, flood mitigation, and regional water systems do not stop at municipal boundaries, making a patchwork of voluntary memberships counterproductive. The bill’s detractors also warned that allowing suburban and rural municipalities to opt out of a unified regional plan could trigger fragmented development decisions, making it harder to attract major economic investments that rely on predictable, region-wide coordination and potentially weakening the collective bargaining power of the Capital Planning Region.

Bill 3, The City of Winnipeg Charter Amendment and Planning Amendment Act amended The City of Winnipeg Charter and The Planning Act (again) to streamline development approvals, enhance local autonomy, and curb costly appeals by raising the thresholds required to trigger a mandatory Manitoba Municipal Board hearing on zoning by-laws.

For Winnipeg and larger municipalities or planning districts with populations of 6,000 or more, the public objection threshold was raised from 25 to at least 300 eligible voters. For smaller municipalities or districts under 6,000 residents, the threshold became the greater of at least 100 eligible persons or 5% of the population.

The Manitoba Home Builders’ Association argued that the old threshold of just 25 objectors was far too low, allowing small groups of vocal residents to easily stall vital housing and infrastructure projects. Raising the bar was framed as a necessary step to tackle the housing crisis by fast-tracking developments.

The legislation also repealed previous provisions that forced a mandatory Municipal Board hearing if objections were received from at least 50% of landowners located within 100 metres of a particular parcel of land. The Association of Manitoba Municipalities (AMM) strongly backed the changes, pointing out that defending single zoning appeals at the Municipal Board could cost local governments anywhere from $60,000 to over $100,000 in legal and administrative fees.

Advocates emphasized that municipal funds should be spent on community infrastructure rather than defending decisions made by democratically elected councils against repetitive or vexatious challenges. Supporters also maintained that democratically elected municipal councils, rather than provincially appointed boards or small pockets of objectors, should have primary authority to make balanced land-use decisions for broader community growth.

However, civic critics argued that jumping the requirement from 25 objectors to 300 or 5% in smaller districts sets an impossibly high hurdle for ordinary residents, effectively silencing localized community opposition against major developments that directly impact neighbourhoods.

Other opponents of the legislation - including some municipal councillors - asserted that the changes tilt the planning playing field heavily in favour of developers.

By stripping away mechanisms like the mandatory 50% landowner rule within a 100-metre radius, immediate neighbours lose a powerful tool to challenge disruptive commercial or high-density projects near their properties. Local politicians also expressed concern that the legislation is disingenuous to the public, removing important checks and balances that previously ensured contentious zoning alterations faced thorough, independent review by the Manitoba Municipal Board before final approval.

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“LET’S MAKE LIFE BETTER. TOGETHER”

Bill 17, The Workplace Safety and Health Amendment Act - passed in June 2024 - amended The Workplace Safety and Health Act to formally re-establish the Advisory Council on Workplace Safety and Health, restoring structured, tripartite consultative structures regarding occupational health and safety policy in Manitoba.

Labour federations and worker advocates strongly welcomed the re-creation of the Advisory Council, arguing that collaborative engagement is essential for addressing modern occupational health risks. Supporters emphasized that mandating equal representation from workers, employers, and technical or professional bodies ensures that safety regulations remain practical, well-informed, and reflective of real-world frontline conditions.

Proponents also noted that an active advisory council provides a vital mechanism to review safety statutes and recommend timely improvements - such as addressing emerging physical and psychological hazards - before tragedies occur.

The legislation empowers the minister-appointed council to provide ongoing expert advice and recommendations regarding workplace safety, health regulations, and the administration of the Act, ensuring diverse representation from worker, employer, and public stakeholder groups.

Meanwhile, some business associations and employer representatives questioned the necessity of codifying a formal statutory council, expressing concern that rigid tripartite structures could introduce bureaucratic delays into regulatory updates. Critics also cautioned that advisory bodies can occasionally become overly focused on theoretical policy debates rather than streamlining practical, day-to-day compliance measures for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Passed in November 2024, Bill 27, The Labour Relations Amendment Act amended The Labour Relations Act to modernize union certification processes, alter certification thresholds, and reshape collective bargaining dynamics in Manitoba.

The legislation reinstated the single-step card-check certification model, allowing a union to be certified without a mandatory secret-ballot vote if a specified high percentage (greater than 50%) of employees in the bargaining unit sign membership cards. It also refined provisions governing first-collective-agreement arbitration and enhanced mechanisms designed to facilitate timely dispute resolution and fair labour practices.

Labour organizations, such as the Manitoba Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress, strongly championed the changes, viewing single-step card-check certification as a necessary correction to power imbalances. Supporters argued that eliminating mandatory secret-ballot votes when a clear majority has already signed membership cards protects workers from prolonged anti-union campaigns, intimidation, or pressure tactics by employers during the voting window.

Advocates also asserted that refined first-collective-agreement arbitration and clear dispute-resolution mechanisms promote stability, reduce protracted bad-faith delays, and foster healthier, more predictable long-term bargaining relationships.

As a rebuttal, business associations and employer advocacy groups heavily criticized the card-check model, arguing that removing the mandatory secret-ballot vote is undemocratic and deprives employees of a private, pressure-free choice. Critics contended that signing a membership card publicly or in the presence of peer organizers lacks the confidentiality of a government-supervised secret ballot, leaving workers vulnerable to peer pressure or aggressive union sign-up drives.

Furthermore, employer representatives expressed concern that shifting the balance too steeply toward organized labour could increase operational frictions, discourage business investment, and lead to more rigid workplace environments across the province.

Passed in November 2024, Bill 43 (enacted via Schedule D of The Budget Implementation and Tax Statutes Amendment Act, 2024) amended The Labour Relations Act to comprehensively reform union certification, reshape dispute resolution, and establish rigorous new frameworks for essential services and replacement worker restrictions in Manitoba.

The legislation updated provisions governing collective bargaining, conciliation, and mediation processes to encourage effective dispute resolution and minimize prolonged disruptions. It reintroduced single-step card-check certification, mandating that if a union demonstrates support from more than 50% of employees via signed membership cards, the Manitoba Labour Board must automatically certify the union without a secret-ballot vote (while retaining a 40% to 50% threshold for mandatory representation votes). It was argued that eliminating mandatory secret-ballot votes when a clear majority has already signed cards protects workers from prolonged, high-pressure anti-union campaigns and employer interference during the voting window.

Furthermore, the bill enacted a comprehensive prohibition on the use of replacement workers during strikes or lockouts, while establishing a mandatory framework requiring unionized workplaces to negotiate and file Essential Services Agreements (ESAs) ahead of any job action.

Proponents praised the restrictions on replacement workers for preventing employers from undercutting lawful job actions and forcing meaningful, good-faith bargaining at the negotiating table.

Somewhat understandably, business associations and employer advocacy groups heavily criticized the removal of mandatory secret-ballot votes, arguing that public or peer-pressured card signing lacks the vital privacy and confidentiality of a government-supervised ballot. Critics contended that comprehensive replacement worker bans and complex, front-loaded essential services agreement frameworks impose severe operational friction, making it exceptionally difficult for businesses to maintain baseline security or manage continuity during labour disputes.

Industry representatives expressed concern that shifting the legislative pendulum too heavily toward organized labour could increase operational costs, discourage private investment, and foster a less flexible economic climate across the province.

Predictably, labour federations and union advocates nevertheless strongly championed the legislative overhauls, viewing the changes as vital to correcting an inherent imbalance between employers and workers.

Passed in June 2025, Bill 24, The Workers Compensation Amendment Act amended The Workers Compensation Act to establish that if a worker dies from a workplace injury on or after May 31, 2021, and leaves behind no current or former spouse or common-law partner, the death benefit lump sum is paid directly to the worker’s estate or to another individual designated by the Workers Compensation Board (WCB).

The legislation also introduced a formal requirement obligating the board to resolve an issue in favor of the worker or dependant if the evidence supporting each side of a compensation claim is evenly balanced, while similarly mandating that the benefit of the doubt be given to an employer if evidence is evenly balanced on an assessment issue (with worker/dependant claims taking precedence in any conflict).

Additionally, it extended the annual reporting deadline for the WCB appeal commission to submit its performance report to the minister from April 30 to May 31.

Labour organizations, such as the Manitoba Federation of Labour (MFL), strongly praised the provisions ensuring that death benefits for single workers go directly to an estate or designated individual, correcting an outdated exclusion that penalized non-traditional families. Advocates also supported codifying the benefit-of-the-doubt principle, viewing it as an important step to reduce needless delays and facilitate fairer access to entitled benefits.

Nevertheless, some labour and worker advocates expressed frustration that the legislation did not go far enough. Critics from worker advocacy backgrounds highlighted that the bill left major systemic hurdles unaddressed - such as removing arbitrary restrictions on psychological injury claims, eliminating the reliance on WCB-contracted healthcare advisors whose opinions often override treating physicians, and striking down the restrictive “dominant cause” rule for occupational diseases.

Meanwhile, Bill 29, The Workplace Safety and Health Amendment Act, amended The Workplace Safety and Health Act to establish explicit requirements for employers to implement specialized safety procedures, communication protocols, and hazard controls for workers who operate in isolation or under high-risk conditions.

The legislation broadens the authority of workplace safety and health officers to issue stop-work orders, impose immediate administrative penalties, and mandate corrective actions when systemic safety non-compliance is identified. It also strengthens enforcement mechanisms by increasing maximum financial penalties for corporate and individual infractions while cracking down on bad-faith employers attempting to evade penalties or stop-work orders by re-registering under new corporate names.

Furthermore, the bill explicitly incorporates psychological health and safety into the Act’s core framework, clarifying legal thresholds and requiring risk assessments to be performed by competent persons.

Labour federations and worker advocates strongly praised the explicit inclusion of psychological health and safety, emphasizing that employers must be held to the same legal standard to prevent mental and emotional harm as they are for physical injuries. Supporters highlighted that these measures give workers clearer, more enforceable rights to speak up and refuse unsafe conditions without fear of reprisal.

On the other hand, business associations and industry stakeholders cautioned that introducing broad new obligations - particularly around proactive psychological safety management and mandating certified competent persons for specific assessments - will increase compliance tracking and operational costs for small and medium-sized enterprises. At the same time, legal commentators noted that while terms like “psychologically safe” modernize the statute, they also introduce subjective criteria that can lead to friction during inspections, disputing improvement orders, or navigating overlapping administrative penalties.

Finally, passed on June 1, 2026, Bill 11, The Employment Standards Code Amendment Act (Sick Notes for Employee Absences), amended The Employment Standards Code to restrict when an employer may require a sick note for employee absences in Manitoba.

Under the legislation, employers are prohibited from demanding a sick note unless an absence continues for more than seven consecutive days or the employee has already been absent due to injury or illness for more than 10 scheduled workdays in that calendar year. Furthermore, the law mandates that employers must accept sick notes from a broader range of qualified health professionals (such as nurse practitioners, nurses, and psychologists) rather than physicians alone, and requires employers to reimburse employees for any reasonable fees charged by practitioners to provide the documentation.

Doctors’ organizations, medical associations, and healthcare advocates strongly championed the legislation. They pointed out that general practitioners spent countless hours writing sick notes for routine, short-term colds or flus - time that should have been spent treating patients with actual medical needs.

Proponents also argued that forcing sick workers to visit a clinic solely to obtain a piece of paper for their employer was an inefficient use of public healthcare resources and added unnecessary administrative friction for employees who should be resting at home. Labour advocates, meanwhile, emphasized that eliminating the barrier of securing a sick note prevents contagious workers from feeling pressured to drag themselves into a doctor’s office or onto the shop floor.

On the other hand, business associations, chambers of commerce, and employer groups raised concerns that restricting medical notes could make it harder for managers to monitor or address patterns of chronic, unverified absenteeism. Critics noted that while doctors’ notes are burdensome for minor illnesses, employers occasionally rely on them to confirm fitness to return to work or to manage legitimate accommodation needs in complex cases.

They argued that organizations need alternative, clear internal policies to handle potential misuse without imposing undue administrative strain.

CONCLUSION

It is clear that the Kinew-led NDP government has to date pursued a deliberate, assertive, and remarkably active legislative agenda with regards to the Manitoba economy. From reshaping provincial labour laws to restructuring commercial real estate; from aggressive state-led energy frameworks around carbon storage and hydroelectric prioritization to sweeping municipal and budgetary overhauls - the government has used every tool in the legislative toolkit to bend policy toward its vision.

But this is just the beginning of the analysis.

We will also need to examine other core pillars of the Kinew administration’s policy agenda, diving deeper into topics such as public health, education, and human rights.

To ensure you get the complete assessment of the contemporary Manitoban public policy scene direct to your inbox, make sure you’re subscribed to Policy Over Personality.

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

Get ready for From Academia to Accountability, a new bi-weekly series by Policy Over Personality.

Economics is about providing options.

Politics is about making choices through the application of power.

We must move toward judging governments not on identity or personality, but on policy.

To do this, we must recognize that the policies we prefer are invariably informed by our own personal circumstances, background, and ideology.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with assessing policy through this lens - but it must be done with intention.

By grounding our perspective in objective economic reality and acknowledging our own values, we can move beyond partisan noise and begin to make truly informed assessments of the choices that shape our world.

This is not just a better way to view governance; it is the only way to actually solve the problems we face.

THE PREMISE

Every other Saturday at 8:00 AM Eastern Time Zone, we will chronologically examine the winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, beginning with its inception in 1969.

However, this is not just a history lesson. This is a practical, rigorous audit of the ideas that built our world.

I want to cut through the noise of daily headlines and examine the foundational blueprints of the modern state. To understand why our systems work the way they do (and why they often fail), we must look at the architects who designed them.

For each Nobel laureate, we will break down their contribution using a consistent framework:

• The Research: The academic breakthrough - explained (as far as possible) in plain language.

• The Application : How was the theory adopted (and maybe adapted) for the real world?

• The Limitations: What were the blind spots, the unintended consequences, and the dangers of applying rigid mathematical models to unpredictable human behaviour.

• The Modern Mandate: What is the relevance of the historical breakthrough today?

WHY THIS MATTERS

To be completely transparent, I’m not an economist, but I’m on a personal quest of discovery - and I want to share my learnings along the way.

Why?

Because you cannot steer a ship without understanding its engine. And, in a healthy democracy, we must hold those steering the ship accountable for their actions (and protect ourselves from the seemingly ubiquitous populist charlatans).

On July 25, we start our journey in 1969, analyzing the moment economics moved from a descriptive philosophy to an applied science of measurement and design.

I hope you will enjoy.

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Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

In advance of today’s grudge match between England and Argentina Messi, much of the punditry has naturally gravitated toward the 1986 World Cup quarter-final in Mexico - a match defined by Diego Maradona’s Jekyll and Hyde personality: the “hand of God” goal and a truly extraordinary solo effort that remains the benchmark for individual brilliance in the sport.

However, the roots of this fierce rivalry lie two decades earlier, in another quarter-final clash at Wembley Stadium.

A BIT OF ARGY BARGY

Reporting from the time suggests that from the opening whistle, the 1966 encounter felt less like a football match and more like a cage fight.

The game rapidly devolved into a “kicking contest,” with German referee Rudolf Kreitlein struggling to contain the escalating aggression. The whole ordeal was so violent that England manager Sir Alf Ramsey famously branded the Argentine side “animals” in the aftermath.

The flashpoint arrived in the 35th minute when Argentine captain Antonio Rattín was sent off for “verbally abusing” the German official.

Because red cards did not yet exist, the dismissal was a messy, purely verbal affair. Language barriers proved insurmountable; Rattín, baffled and insisting he only wanted to “discuss” the persistent fouling with the official, refused to leave the pitch for nearly ten minutes.

The spectacle only ended when the Metropolitan Police intervened, escorting the Argentine captain off the field.

(Funnily enough, this chaotic scene directly influenced FIFA’s subsequent decision to introduce the red and yellow card system to ensure clear, non-verbal communication in the future. And, obviously, prevent any potential future controversy…)

Reduced to ten men, Argentina mounted a stubborn defensive stand against the Three Lions. However, the dam finally broke in the 78th minute.

Geoff Hurst glanced a header past Argentina’s goalkeeper from a precise Martin Peters cross, and without a Maradona or a Messi to conjure a moment of solo magic, England went on to seal a 1-0 victory.

Argentina decried the result as el robo del siglo - “the robbery of the century” - a label that solidified a deep-seated resentment toward English football.

IT’S COMING HOME?

While England would go on to win the trophy that summer, it also marked the beginning of a 60-year wait for a second major international title.

Now, our lads find themselves just two victories away from finally ending our long and torturous national wait; hopefully, aided by the match going to penalties and Lionel Messi taking all five.

Come on England!

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

Less than a month ago, I wrote an appraisal of the policies of Count Binface.

At its denouement, I iterated the following words: “Trust me, you haven’t heard the last of the Count; he’s just waiting for the next rubbish Prime Minister to give him another opening.”

And I was prescient. Although instead of a “rubbish Prime Minister”, it is a rubbish wannabe Prime Minister.

On August 13, the people of Clacton-on-Sea are being dragged to the polls.

The catalyst?

One Nigel Farage has resigned his seat to trigger a by-election, essentially turning our parliamentary process into a summer-long, ego-driven spectacle. (And to distract from a few reputational and/or legal “difficulties”.)

Farage frames this as a “people versus the establishment” crusade.

But with the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat parties boycotting the contest, the reality is far more “Python-esque.”

By turning a legislative vacancy into a high-octane theatre of the absurd, Farage is seemingly seeking to crudely “Americanize” British politics.

As things stand, challenging the man most reponsible for Brexit for his seat in the House of Commons include:

• Laurence Fox: Representing the anti-Woke, anti-gender ideology, climate change sceptic, British nationalist right-wing populist Reclaim Party;

• Kai Stephens: For the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam British Democrat Party;

• Luke Worley: Of Married at First Sight UK fame;

• Adham Alkhatip: The Forward Party;

• Piers Corbyn: The conspiracy theorist and brother of former Labour leader Jeremy;

• Robert Elwes: Running in protest against inheritance tax changes for farmers;

• Mr. Fishfinger*: A veteran of the 2017 general election, now returning to offer a sea-based alternative; and

• Count Binface: The intergalactic overlord, who - despite a modest outing in Makerfield - is ready to trash the competition.

THE MANIFESTO OF THE BIN

We are still waiting for the writs to be issued, but at first blush the Count’s platform remains a beacon of “consistency and reason” in an age of populist flip-flopping.

First, he remains steadfast in his commitment to ensuring 99 Flake ice creams cost exactly 99 pence.

He has also renewed his crusade against the “auto-renew” function on online subscriptions - following the sensible example set by California.

And, on the ongoing housing crisis, Binface has promised to build “at least one affordable home” noting that this would be one more than any of his rivals.

However, whether he will continue his mission against public transport speakerphone-users remains to be seen.

Will he once more propose conscription?

Or, perhaps, something more draconian - like an internship with Nigel Farage?

And surely, although Binface knows his greatest selling point is simply that he is not the man he is challenging, his flagship policy must remain:

“I will cut your taxes, and raise everyone else’s.”

It’s so simple.

It’s so needed in this time of economic frailty.

And so, as we approach polling day, let us reflect on the audacity of this by-election.

Reform has offered to foot the £200,000 bill for this exercise - an expensive way to prove a point that arguably no one asked for. (But it’s a drop in a bucket compared to the original £5 million donation/gift/“encouragement” that led to this whole thing in the first place. And it won’t be allowed anyway.)

But when all’s said and done, one thing is certain: the future is garbage.

*A fish finger is known as a fish stick in Canada and the USA.

Since 2015, a generation of private property developers in Canada thrived on a “pre-sale” model: 70% of units needed to be sold before any shovels hit the ground.

The model thrived in an age of low interest rates and a seemingly endless supply of investor-buyers who assumed that house prices could only move in one direction.

However, when interest rates rose significantly - ten times - between 2022 and 2023, it effectively decapitated that model. Across the nation, buyers who signed contracts at the market peak are now reaching ‘completion’ in a much cooler market.

In many cases, the current market value of their unit is significantly lower than their original contract price. Banks are refusing to fund mortgages for the full amount, forcing buyers to either cover the difference in cash or face forfeiting their deposits and potential legal action.

The math of Canadian development has been upended: construction costs are soaring, interest rates have squeezed the financing out of the room, and the investor class has largely evaporated.

We are no longer just looking at a bad year for housing; we are staring at a structural supply crunch that will ripple through 2027 and 2028 because developers can no longer meet the bank-mandated 70% pre-sale threshold required to break ground.

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THE BRITISH-COLUMBIA INTERVENTION

Against this backdrop, the provincial and federal governments announced the Canada-British Columbia Partnership on Condo Conversion in June 2026.

Their stated objective is to address both the housing supply crisis and the surplus of over 4,300 vacant, completed condos in Metro Vancouver by acquiring more than 2,200 units for a rent-to-own framework. The program carries a total potential cost of roughly $1.45 billion: the federal and provincial governments are each providing $150 million in direct contributions - acting as a deposit - with the remaining $1.15 billion financed through mortgage debt

The government’s decision is a tactical move to “clear the market” - using public capital to buy stalled units to provide immediate rental supply, thereby avoiding the multi-year lag of waiting for new projects to break ground.

However, the plan has triggered intense backlash.

Critics label it a “bailout”, arguing the government is shielding private developers from the financial consequences of their own overbuilding. This has been exacerbated by the irony that the province recently paused key non-market housing funds.

Whether this constitutes a genuine market correction or a strategic “bailout” remains the subject of intense debate; while critics emphasize the socialized risk, proponents point to the necessity of immediate rental supply that would otherwise remain vacant or be absorbed by large institutional investors.

THE NEW YORK STRUCTURAL SHIFT

While British Columbia is attempting to salvage the private development model, New York City is testing whether that model should exist at all.

With Mayor Zohran Mamdani at its head, the current administration’s “Block by Block” agenda is less a policy and more a declaration of war against the status quo.

This plan is a systemic attempt to reshape the city’s economic foundation. It is characterized by a “top-down” regulatory approach combined with massive, long-term public investment.

The administration is using every tool at its disposal - from aggressive code enforcement against “negligent landlords” to high-wage mandates for construction - to turn the city into a permanent “market actor” capable of acquiring properties and setting labor standards.

Where the BC plan seeks to partner with private developers to stabilize liquidity, the NYC plan seeks to shift power away from private property owners toward tenants and public control.

The primary difference lies in the intent of the intervention.

NYC is attempting to rewrite the rules of the housing market to favour tenants and public ownership, often facing fierce opposition from property interests. In contrast, BC’s plan is a market-clearing mechanism - using public capital to purchase private assets to achieve a social goal, while effectively providing a floor for developers who cannot move their current inventory.

TORONTO’S INSTITUTIONAL PIVOT

British Columbia is currently the most prominent example of a Canadian government intervening to “clear” the market. But it is not the only province facing such challenges.

Toronto offers a unique domestic counter-perspective to BC’s interventionist model.

While BC has opted for direct government acquisition, Toronto’s strategy has relied more heavily on market-driven institutional absorption. Canada’s largest city is currently grappling with a record-high inventory of over 4,200 unsold completed units, with some analysts identifying a “76-month inventory trap”.

Rather than a state-led buyout, Toronto has seen deep-pocketed private investors and government-backed funds stepping in to bulk-buy units for rental conversion, alongside temporary tax incentives like the HST rebate to spur individual interest.

TRIAGE VERSUS TRANSFORMATION

The ultimate tension here is between the “emergency” and the “structural”.

BC’s condo conversion (and Toronto’s private-institutional pivot) are essentially triage measures - ways to stop the bleeding of the private sector - but they do little to prevent the next cycle of speculative overbuilding.

The NYC approach attempts to redefine the role of the city entirely, though at the risk of creating a regulatory environment that could induce its own version of capital flight.

Perhaps the solution lies somewhere in the middle of the Eby and Mamdani plans: a shift toward non-market housing that is permanent, publicly supported, and insulated from the volatility of investor-driven pre-sales.

However, above all, resolving the affordable housing crisis requires returning to the aggressive public supply generation that characterized the era prior to the 1995 federal budget - the moment Ottawa effectively exited the social housing business - coupled with a cultural shift that again views a house as a home rather than a speculative asset.

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

It was a triumphant victory - efficient, brutal, and necessary to maintain the integrity of the nation. Yet, the win proved a pyrrhic one; having expended his best resources, Godwinson left the English line brittle, only for it to be dismantled by the French (at Hastings) soon after.

There is an omen in that sequence for today’s quarter-final. One can win the battle - squeaking past a resilient Norway through sheer force of will - only to find the squad’s structural integrity compromised for a potential future final.

Even so, if we do prevail against the Vikings, one can only hope that the path leads next through Argentina. It would be a delight to pen something equally "pointless" regarding the Falklands War - a historical anchor that makes for easy, if entirely superficial, copy.

At least the Swiss don't offer such convenient historical baggage; as far as I can tell, England has never fought them (has anyone?), which is a structural vacuum I’m not sure how to fill with the usual brand of manufactured geopolitical drama!

History whispers a warning: the most vulnerable a nation - or a squad - ever is, is the moment after it wins a battle. Let us hope England manages their resources better today than Godwinson did in the autumn of 1066.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes - as Mark Twain almost certainly never said.

Sod it - just enjoy the football!

For 18 long, painful months, the global economy was in freefall.

What started in 2008 as a localized mess in the American housing market - fueled by the wild idea that real estate prices would just go up forever - quickly turned into a global contagion. (And don’t we all know what that’s like?)

As it turned out, the world’s financial system had become little more than a giant, interconnected game of Jenga, where everyone was pulling blocks from the bottom to stack them on top.

In a state of inebriation.

The lasting lesson from that wreckage is that stability is never a given.

True institutional resilience isn’t about predicting the future perfectly; it is about building a system that can absorb the completely unexpected - whether that means a sudden global credit crunch or a chaotic wave of Trumpian tariffs.

How a country behaves - and more importantly, how it prepares for - when the rules change overnight tells you everything you need to know about its ability to survive the next inevitable crisis.

The 2008 crisis served as a brutal, real-world stress test. It revealed that when the "Jenga" tower falls, the cost of the cleanup is socialized, while the profits of the tower-builders were privatized.

This realization shifted the focus of a new generation of policymakers: if we want to sustain a liberal, open economy, we must stop treating stability as a bureaucratic annoyance and start viewing it as the primary public good.

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KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON

Gordon Brown had recently taken over from Tony Blair as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Within only a few short months, his government was forced to respond to the first run on a British bank in 150 years.

Northern Rock - prior to 1997, a building society (think the savings and loan in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life) - had spent the prior decade seeking to grow as quickly as possible.

To deliver on its aggressive vision, the fledgling bank had relied heavily on wholesale funding and securitization - bundling individual debts into “new” securities for sale - to fund its loans, rather than stable customer deposits.

Northern Rock packaged its mortgages and sold them as bonds to global investors simply to raise more capital to lend right back out.

Having borrowed heavily in short-term global interbank markets, by the summer of 2007, plain vanilla retail deposits accounted for only about 23% of its total funding. This structural design left the bank highly dependent on the continuous, smooth functioning of the global credit markets.

Sadly, that dependency proved fatal when the US subprime crisis spooked global investors in August.

If you’ve seen (or read) The Big Short, you know the mechanics of the US subprime crisis. Wall Street had built a massive, lucrative machine that relied on issuing mortgages to Americans who ultimately couldn’t afford them.

To keep the machine running, they bundled thousands of these high-risk loans together, paid rating agencies to label them as virtually risk-free, and sold them worldwide.

When the US housing bubble popped and subprime borrowers began defaulting by the millions in 2007, the entire global chain of securitization broke.

Financial institutions suddenly realized the “safe” assets on their balance sheets were actually toxic waste, destroying the trust required to keep interbank lending markets functioning.

(I’m no Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, but I do my best.)

Unable to fund itself, on September 13, Northern Rock was forced to approach the Bank of England for an emergency loan as the “lender of last resort.”

It was during this tense period that the UK government and media popularized the term “credit crunch” to try and simplify the abstract reality of freezing global liquidity for the public.

When news of the emergency bailout leaked to the BBC the next day, it triggered immediate panic among customers who feared the bank was completely broken. Queues formed outside branches across the UK as depositors rushed to pull their savings, draining an estimated £1 billion on the first day alone.

To halt the panic a few days later, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (British for “Finance Minister”) announced an unprecedented government guarantee for all existing deposits at Northern Rock.

Crucially, Northern Rock did not actually have massive exposure to toxic US subprime mortgages. Its failure was purely a liquidity and cash flow problem. It held fundamentally good assets (primarily UK residential mortgages), but it simply could no longer access the frozen short-term funding markets needed to execute its daily operations.

And so, once the government guarantee was active, the queues outside the branches immediately subsided.

The UK government spent the next few months trying to engineer a sale to a suitable private sector buyer. However, after commercial hopes were dashed one too many times, the Treasury was left with little option but to fully nationalize Northern Rock in February 2008.

DON’T GET SHORT WITH ME

Across the pond, the situation was escalating.

The US Federal Reserve was forced to engineer an emergency rescue of Bear Stearns, one of America’s largest investment banks, which had become dangerously exposed to American mortgage-backed securities.

The really toxic kind.

Washington provided a $30 billion financial backstop to facilitate a buyout by JPMorgan Chase for the fire-sale price of $2 a share - a staggering collapse for a stock that had reached an all-time high of $172 just over a year earlier in January 2007.

(JPM was forced to raise the offer to $10 per share a week later to appease furious Bear Stearns shareholders and secure their vote.)

Entering the summer of 2008, the US housing market was on the verge of complete collapse.

And yet, the prevailing attitude on Wall Street was perfectly captured by Chuck Prince, then CEO of Citibank, who famously remarked: “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”

Though he had made this comment a month before the collapse of Northern Rock, it still rang true a year later.

Despite Northern Rock, and despite Bear Stearns, financial markets remained stubbornly unwilling to face reality.

Investors distracted themselves with a massive surge in global commodity prices, pushing oil to an all-time record of $147 a barrel. (Perversely, central banks were briefly more concerned about fighting inflation than treating the underlying systemic credit rot.)

But there comes a time when the elephant in the room can no longer be ignored.

On September 7, 2008, the US government stepped in to take control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As the backers of roughly half of all American mortgages, these institutions were truly too big to fail”.

Uncle Sam had no choice but to intervene, placing the American taxpayer on the hook for trillions of dollars of mortgage debt.

And so, the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007 was the canary in the coal mine - the first warning sign that the air was turning toxic.

The fall of Bear Stearns in March 2008 followed as the first structural collapse in the tunnel, a sign that the damage was no longer localized.

By the time the government took over Fannie and Freddie, it looked like a desperate, last-ditch attempt by the rescue team to prop up a failing mine shaft.

But the rescue team had arrived too late. The entire mine was about to come down.

On September 15, 2008, the music finally stopped.

Lehman Brothers, a 158-year-old Wall Street titan and fourth largest investment bank in America, filed for the largest bankruptcy in US history. Holding over $600 billion in assets and an exposure to subprime rot that was essentially Bear Stearns on steroids, Lehman was deeply vulnerable.

But with the political capital of the US government exhausted by the intervention in Fannie and Freddie, and facing immense public backlash against “fat cat” bailouts, Washington decided a line had to be drawn.

Lehman was allowed to fail.

The subsequent panic forced desperate, unprecedented measures.

During the transition period between President George W. Bush and President-elect Barack Obama, the US launched the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) to stabilize the banking sector.

Concurrently, the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to near-zero and pioneered Quantitative Easing (QE) - buying trillions of dollars in bonds to inject liquidity directly into the frozen financial system.

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

Nevertheless, when the smoke cleared, US GDP had fallen by 6% with unemployment peaking at 10%.

Desperate times indeed.

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THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

If all politics is local, in the modern age, all economics is global.

Lehman’s collapse in September 2008 didn’t just wipe out a bank; it nuked global confidence.

Overnight, the all-important interbank lending market dried up completely. Banks stopped trusting one another entirely, credit evaporated, and a crisis that had been simmering for a year transformed into a full-blown, systemic wildfire.

The shockwaves crossed back over the Atlantic almost instantly.

In October 2008, the UK government announced the multi-billion-pound nationalization of both the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds TSB, finalizing the structural deals over the winter.

And in March 2009, the Bank of England followed in the footsteps of the US Federal Reserve, implementing its own aggressive rounds of quantitative easing alongside historic near-zero interest rates in a desperate bid to reboot the British economy.

Even still, the UK would see a 3.8% drop in GDP and an 8.5% unemployment high.

Germany had no domestic housing bubble, but its economy was - and remains today - highly dependent on capital goods and automotive exports. When global trade froze, Germany’s industrial engine stopped.

Its GDP fell by 5.6%, while unemployment peaked just below 8%.

However, exacerbating matters, Germany’s Landesbanken (regional banks) had quietly bought billions in toxic US subprime debt, requiring state-backed rescue funds.

To cushion the blow, Germany deployed its highly successful Kurzarbeit (Short-Work) subsidy scheme. Instead of laying off workers, companies reduced hours and the government topped up worker paychecks. This kept unemployment from spiking and allowed German manufacturing to ramp up instantly when global trade resumed.

Meanwhile, France weathered the initial storm relatively well. Its economy is structurally less reliant on exports than Germany’s and lacks the extreme financial engineering seen in the UK (let alone the US).

France’s massive public sector and robust social safety net also acted as automatic stabilizers, propping up domestic consumer demand when corporate investment fell.

That said, the French government had to inject €40 billion into its major banks, including BNP Paribas and Société Générale, as subordinated debt rather than taking them over, allowing them to stabilize quickly.

Even so, the global devastation pulled France down; its GDP fell by 3.1% and unemployment peaked at 9.5%.

Italy did not experience a major banking collapse or a housing boom in 2008. Its conservative commercial banking sector largely avoided toxic US assets. However, the country entered the crisis plagued by structural industrial decline, stagnant productivity growth, and a mountain of public debt exceeding 100% of GDP.

The resulting downturn triggered a 5.5% fall in economic output and pushed unemployment to 8.8%.

Because global credit markets grew deeply suspicious of highly indebted nations, Italy’s borrowing costs began to creep up, laying the groundwork for a massive sovereign debt crisis a few years later.

This brings us to the Eurozone, which - collectively - faced a 4.5% decline in GDP and a 10.2% peak in unemployment, while exposing a unique, systemic design flaw.

Despite sharing a single currency and a single central bank (the European Central Bank), fiscal policy and bank bailouts remained the responsibility of individual nations. In countries like Ireland and Spain, real estate bubbles burst, destroying local banks. When those governments stepped in to save them, the sheer cost overwhelmed the sovereigns’ own credit ratings.

This created a vicious sovereign-bank “doom loop”: weak banks dragged down governments, and weak governments could no longer support their banks.

(Even so, during the course of this unfolding crisis, three additional member states - Cyprus, Malta, and Slovakia - willingly swapped their domestic currencies for the Euro.)

This doom loop eventually descended into a rolling, multi-year sovereign debt crisis that required massive structural interventions from the IMF and the ECB to keep the Eurozone from fracturing entirely.

However, there was one G7 country that fared even worse than the others.

Japan had spent the 1990s and early 2000s cleaning up its own domestic banking bubble and had virtually zero exposure to US subprime mortgages. Yet, it suffered the worst economic contraction in the G7 - a whopping 8.6% drop in GDP.

As panicked global investors fled the greenback and the Euro, they piled into Yen as a safe haven. This caused Japan’s currency to skyrocket, completely crushing the competitiveness of crucial exporters like Toyota and Sony.

The Bank of Japan was forced to return to its long-standing policy of near-zero rates and aggressive asset purchases to combat a renewed wave of domestic deflation, while national unemployment peaked at 5.7%.

When America sneezes, Japan (and the world) catches a cold.

BRING IT HOME

And so we finally turn to Canada.

The Canadian economy finally succumbed to the global crisis in the fourth quarter of 2008, plunging into a technical recession following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

While our version of the Great Recession was shorter and less destructive than those experienced elsewhere, the speed and scale of the downturn still set historic records.

The turmoil on Wall Street had triggered a sharp contraction in both Canada’s real economy and financial markets.

The Toronto Stock Exchange was heavily weighted in natural resources, energy, and materials - wonderful news during the five-year commodity boom that followed the millennium’s dot-com crash. But, unfortunately, this heavy weighting meant the TSX was uniquely vulnerable to the subsequent collapse in global oil and commodity prices alongside frozen credit markets.

After hitting an all-time high above the 15,000-point mark in June 2008, the index fell off a cliff, dropping over 48% before finally bottoming out near 7,700 in early 2009.

(Remarkably, almost two-thirds of that pullback occurred during a massive panic sell-off in October and November of 2008 alone.)

Canada’s real Gross Domestic Product fell by 3.3% between its peak in the third quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009, culminating in an overall contraction of 2.5% by the end of that year. Hardest hit were the goods-producing sectors, with business investment in machinery and equipment plummeting by nearly 20%.

This nightmare period also witnessed a swift wave of layoffs, with over 400,000 Canadian jobs - a 2.3% decline - lost within a single year of the Lehman bankruptcy.

These redundancies, primarily full-time positions in the private sector, caused the national unemployment rate to jump from a stable 5.9% during the first half of 2008 to a peak of 8.7% in August 2009.

The manufacturing sector alone bled over 200,000 jobs as exports plunged roughly 14% in response to evaporating global demand, while the construction and retail sectors suffered major blows.

A collapse in consumer demand coupled with a dramatic 24% year-on-year drop in energy prices in mid-2009 briefly drove the annual inflation rate to -0.3%, which marked Canada’s first experience with deflation since 1994.

And yet, despite the intensity of the contraction in late 2008, Canada’s recovery was remarkably swift compared to past domestic recessions in 1981 or 1990.

By the fourth quarter of 2009, GDP rebounded by 1.2%, and by late 2010, Canada had fully recovered all of the economic output and jobs lost during the crisis.

Crucially, core inflation - which excludes volatile food and energy prices - remained stable and aligned with the Bank of Canada’s 2% target, keeping long-term economic expectations grounded.

Above all, Canada entered the crisis from a position of distinct fiscal strength (it still had some money floating around), boasting consecutive federal budget surpluses for ten consecutive years and a net debt-to-GDP ratio under 25%.

In stark contrast, the rest of the G7 entered the storm burdened by deep structural deficits, forcing their debt loads past 80% to 110% of GDP and sentencing them to a grueling decade of public austerity throughout the 2010s.

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THE OTTAWA PLAYBOOK

When credit markets froze globally, the federal government and the Bank of Canada (BoC) stepped in with a massive, coordinated rescue plan to inject liquidity, keep credit flowing, and stimulate the real economy.

Led by then Governor Mark Carney (whatever happened to him?), the central bank focused on slashing borrowing costs and keeping the banking system from running out of cash.

Starting in late 2007, the BoC steadily lowered its target overnight interest rate.

Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, those cuts became aggressive. By April 2009, the Bank had slashed its policy rate to 0.25% - the lowest level in history at that time.

Along with dropping the rate almost to its floor, the BoC took the unprecedented step of formally committing to keep the rate that low until the middle of 2010 - conditional on inflation.

This conditional commitment gave businesses and consumers the confidence required to borrow and spend.

Meanwhile, as trust between commercial banks collapsed and interbank lending stopped, the BoC also stepped in as the lender of last resort. It expanded its Term PRAs (Purchase and Resale Agreements) to inject short-term collateralized loans into the banking sector, peaking at over $40 billion to keep daily banking operations functioning.

Initially, the federal government - headed by limited-government enthusiast Prime Minister Stephen Harper - resisted big spending.

During the October 2008 federal election campaign, Harper notoriously dismissed the severity of the downturn. However, Ottawa was effectively forced to reverse course by late autumn as commodity prices crashed, Canada entered a recession, and a fierce opposition coalition threatened to topple his minority government if he didn’t spend.

The Insured Mortgage Purchase Program (IMPP) became the single largest intervention to support the financial sector.

Through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the government bought up to $69 billion in existing, top-quality insured mortgage pools from Canadian banks. While critics labeled this a “bailout,” it functioned very differently than the interventions on Wall Street.

The Canadian government only bought mortgages it had already backstopped and insured. This effectively cleared illiquid assets off banks’ books, providing them the immediate cash needed to keep lending to ordinary Canadians - all without shifting new risk onto the taxpayer.

Abandoning promises of a balanced budget, the government launched a $40 billion temporary stimulus package branded as the Economic Action Plan, which injected massive capital into “shovel-ready” (a now ubiquitous term) infrastructure like roads, bridges, and transit, while introducing a home renovation tax credit to prop up the construction sector and expanding Employment Insurance (EI) benefits for laid-off workers.

This aggressive public investment, combined with Canadians’ ongoing willingness to maintain consumer spending (read: max out our credit cards), successfully prevented the country from falling victim to a deep depression.

Additionally, alongside Washington and the province of Ontario, the Government of Canada provided billions of dollars in emergency loans and restructuring packages to keep Canadian subsidiaries of General Motors and Chrysler from going bankrupt, saving tens of thousands of auto manufacturing jobs.

Thanks to these aggressive moves - and a Canadian dollar that depreciated sharply to boost manufacturing exports - Canada became the first G7 country to fully recover its lost output and jobs by the end of 2010.

Yet, while Canada’s federal policy framework kept the macroeconomy safer than its international peers, the “Big Five” Canadian banks (RBC, TD, Scotiabank, BMO, and CIBC) still had to take swift, aggressive internal measures to navigate the crisis.

Instead of fighting for survival or undergoing emergency structural overhauls like Wall Street institutions, Canadian banks survived by shifting into an intense defensive posture: hoarding capital, tapping available liquidity channels, and aggressively purging their balance sheets of any risky investments.

SAFE AS MONEY IN THE BANK

Canadian banks did not completely escape the subprime mortgage contagion, but they recognized the danger early and aggressively scrubbed their balance sheets.

CIBC and RBC were the hardest hit.

CIBC held the largest exposure to US subprime debt via structured credit products, leading to over $10 billion in write-downs, while RBC faced notable losses through its US retail banking subsidiary, RBC Centura. Rather than hiding or slowly trickling out bad news, these institutions bit the bullet and took massive, immediate write-downs on their toxic assets in late 2007 and 2008, clearing the air and preserving crucial investor trust.

To satisfy both regulators and jittery investors, Canadian banks shifted their priority from aggressive growth to absolute safety.

Led by BMO and CIBC, the banks issued new common and preferred shares to private investors throughout 2008 to bolster their Tier 1 capital ratios - the core measure of how much money a bank holds in reserve to protect itself against financial trouble.

Though Canadian banks are famous for consistently raising their dividends, they froze increases during the crisis to preserve cash. Crucially, however, none of the Big Five actually cut their existing dividend payouts - a stark contrast to major US and European giants, which slashed dividends to zero.

Because their core domestic business remained highly profitable and stable, some Canadian banks even used the global chaos as a rare buying opportunity, purchasing beaten-down foreign assets at a steep discount.

TD Bank aggressively expanded its footprint along the US East Coast, acquiring Commerce Bancorp in 2008 to establish an American retail banking network larger than its Canadian one. Scotiabank leveraged its strong financial position to expand across Latin America and Asia where asset prices had cratered, while BMO and RBC acquired struggling regional wealth management firms and banks in the United States to build up their North American market share.

By executing these defensive maneuvers, Canada’s banking system earned a rating from the World Economic Forum as the soundest in the world for several consecutive years following the crisis.

No Canadian bank failed, none required a direct taxpayer-funded equity injection, and all returned to solid profitability by 2010.

But they didn’t do it alone.

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THE SPIRIT OF THE REGULATORS

During the length and breadth of the crisis, Canadian regulators didn’t have to scramble to rewrite the rules or save collapsing institutions.

Instead, their actions were defined by a rigorous, proactive approach that had been put in place years before the crisis hit, combined with strict hands-on oversight as it unfolded.

The most important actions taken by Canadian regulators happened well before 2007.

The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) enforced strict structural limits that protected Canadian banks from the fatal traps that caught Wall Street.

First, OSFI enforced a strict, non-negotiable asset-to-capital multiple limit of 20:1.

This capped how much debt banks could take on to juice their profits.

In 2008, major Canadian banks operated safely at an average leverage ratio of 18:1, whereas US banks regularly exceeded 25:1, and some European banks spiked past a frankly preposterous 30:1.

Unlike the fragmented regulatory silos in the United States - where multiple agencies like the SEC, Fed, and FDIC overlappingly watched different pieces - OSFI regulated Canadian banks on a consolidated enterprise basis.

This meant OSFI watched a bank’s retail, commercial, investment, and wealth activities globally under a single lens, leaving no hidden shadow-banking corners.

Furthermore, OSFI required Canadian institutions to maintain Tier 1 capital ratios well above the minimum international requirements set by the Basel Accords, forcing banks to keep massive cash cushions for a rainy day.

Once the global system froze, OSFI and other regulatory bodies pivoted to an active defense posture to prevent panic from spilling into the domestic market. Regulators abandoned hands-off compliance and stepped up intensified, hand-in-glove oversight. They significantly increased the frequency of mandatory meetings with bank executives and boards of directors, explicitly pushing them to aggressively write down their bad assets early and benchmark their daily liquidity.

Canada did, however, experience a major localized scare in August 2007 when the $32 billion non-bank Asset-Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP) market froze.

The crisis was triggered when unregulated firms, most notably Coventree Capital Group, were caught pooling toxic US subprime mortgages and selling them as “safe” short-term investments to pension funds, corporations, and retail investors.

Because provincial regulators lacked the power to execute a federal-style bailout, they actively enabled a private-sector standstill agreement known as the Montreal Accord.

By granting the necessary legal and structural exemptions, regulators allowed for a massive restructuring that converted frozen, short-term toxic notes into long-term floating-rate notes, preventing catastrophic bankruptcy liquidations for major institutional investors. Following the freeze, provincial regulators - coordinated through the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) - launched intensive forensic investigations.

The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), in particular, pursued aggressive enforcement actions that led to historic settlements and penalties for firms that failed to properly disclose subprime risks to their clients.

This episode exposed deep structural gaps in provincial securities laws regarding how sophisticated debt products were marketed.

In response, the CSA implemented sweeping policy changes, most notably amending National Instrument 45-106 to eliminate the “short-term debt exemption.” This ensured that complex, securitized investment products could no longer bypass rigid prospectus disclosure requirements simply by carrying a short-term timeline.

While provincial regulators managed the shadow market fallout, federal institutions acted in parallel: the CMHC provided liquidity via mortgage purchases, and OSFI ensured that lending standards remained tight.

By blocking Canadian banks from offering the volatile, zero-down-payment subprime loans that triggered the US collapse, federal regulators preserved systemic stability.

The effectiveness of this dual-layered approach - coordinated provincial enforcement paired with firm federal oversight - became a global case study.

When the G20 established the Financial Stability Board to overhaul global banking after the 2008 crisis, they chose Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney to lead it, heavily modeling the global “Basel III” regulatory reforms after Canada’s pre-existing frameworks.

Regulators also recognized that credit rating agencies had blindly rubber-stamped toxic products with triple-A ratings, prompting provincial regulators to establish a strict new regulatory framework requiring rating agencies to comply with an international code of conduct and forcing them to publicly disclose the data and assumptions used to evaluate asset-backed securities.

As equity markets plunged globally in 2008, provincial regulators in Canada shifted into an intense market-protection mode to preserve retail investor confidence. They conducted rapid-response sweeps and compliance reviews of retail mutual funds and portfolio managers to assess their exact exposure to frozen credit assets, ensuring funds maintained enough genuine liquidity to fulfill regular client withdrawals without collapsing.

Alongside international regulators, provincial bodies also clamped down on predatory trading practices by significantly increasing surveillance on short-selling activity - particularly targeting financial stocks - to prevent manipulative “short raids” from triggering artificial panics in Canadian equity markets.

The fragmented, province-by-province response to the 2007–09 crisis also sparked a fierce, multi-year political debate in Canada.

It led directly to a major push by the federal government to establish a single, unified national securities regulator to streamline systemic risk tracking.

While that proposal ultimately faced intense constitutional challenges from provinces like Quebec and Alberta (same old) - keeping the decentralized system in place - it permanently forced provincial regulators to cooperate far more deeply than ever before.

THE WORLD NEEDS MORE CANADA

When the smoke finally cleared on the Great Recession, the global financial landscape was permanently disfigured.

The United States entered a grueling recovery defined by political polarization and Main Street stagnation.

The UK plunged into a decade of public sector austerity, Brexit, and a general malaise of political chaos.

Europe found itself trapped in a rolling sovereign debt crisis that pushed the single-currency experiment to its absolute breaking point, and Japan slipped right back into its familiar, icy waters of domestic deflation.

And then there was Canada.

By late 2010, Canada had pulled off an economic magic trick: it became the first G7 nation to fully recover every single dollar of lost output and every single lost job.

It entered the storm with pristine balance sheets, navigated the worst of the turbulence on the strength of strict regulations, and exited without a single domestic bank collapse.

At a time of irrational exuberance, Canada followed the long-trodden path of risk-averse conservatism.

Wall Street and the City of London had spent decades mocking the Canadian financial system as slow, uncreative, and terminally boring. But when the global securitization machine detonated, Canada proved that in banking, boring isn’t just safe - boring is beautiful.

This brings us to the present day.

The structural legacy of the 2007–09 crisis became the global playbook, and the architects of Canada’s survival were propelled onto the world stage.

Chief among them was Mark Carney, whose knack for steering through economic wreckage made him the ultimate cleanup man for global finance - a reputation that eventually brought him to the centre of gravity in Canadian politics, where he now serves as Prime Minister, tasked with charting a new course for economic growth during a time of profound global peril.

A Liberal proponent of institutional conservatism such as Carney exhibits a commitment to the boring, often invisible work of maintaining the “guardrails” of the system.

This is the essence of his Liberal Defence of Institutional Conservatism: it is not a defence of the status quo for its own sake, but a recognition that volatility is the enemy of liberty. Populism thrives on the wreckage of institutions; it promises that a strongman or a radical shift can bypass the “boring” rules that failed us.

But history shows that the “boring” rules - central bank independence, rigorous capital requirements, and transparent oversight - are the only things preventing the next catastrophic slide.

Defending these institutions is not an act of blind loyalty; it is a pragmatic, liberal act of public service - ensuring that when the next inevitable shock hits, the entire system doesn’t have to be rebuilt from the rubble.

And if Canada’s primary economic challenge today is a structural growth deficit compounded by absolute global uncertainty, the country requires a leadership style rooted in deep institutional execution rather than political performance.

Carney’s unique career trajectory - steering the Bank of Canada through the global financial crisis of 2008 and later navigating the Bank of England through the structural shocks of Brexit - gives him an unprecedented practical playbook for managing systemic risk.

Since taking office in 2025, Carney has shifted the core focus entirely away from partisan rhetoric and directly onto G7 productivity gaps, industrial capital deployment, and structural housing supply mechanics via initiatives like the Build Canada Homes agency.

(Although at some point, he may have to do something about the federal debt.)

In an era defined by trade friction, an ongoing housing affordability crisis, and the institutional pressures of an AI-driven economy, Canada no longer has the luxury of vibes-based governance. It needs a cold, analytical focus on outputs, capital allocation, and raw growth.

The same holds true for our financial sector.

Canadian banks cannot afford to sit out the revolution in AI, digital assets, and real-time payments, but they cannot afford to stumble either. The challenge ahead is to capture the immense upside of technological modernization without trading away Canada’s historic premium on institutional caution.

To navigate the next inevitable crisis, Canada must marry that competitive drive with our historic, unyielding caution. That is the promise - and, I would argue, the necessity - of a liberal institutional conservatism.

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

During the 2025 New York City Mayoral election, former Governor Andrew Cuomo repeatedly dismissed his young challenger, Zohran Mamdani, as a man lacking the executive maturity to manage their city’s massive administrative apparatus.

In the end, despite the backing of a $25 million super PAC, Cuomo’s attempts at fear-based rhetoric to character assassinate his rival - including a warning that he would turn the Big Apple into a “socialist hellhole” - largely fell on deaf ears. On January 1, 2026, Mamdani was inaugurated as the 112th Mayor of New York City.

Leading up to his victory (not to mention in its aftermath), extremist narratives online framed Mamdani as a “terrorist” or “jihadist”, frequently weaponizing his Muslim faith to imply an inherent incompatibility with American civic values.

But the new mayor was determined to prove his critics wrong.

And he was going to do it his way.

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IF YOU BUILD IT, HE WILL COME

Throughout the fall, Mamdani had traded insults with President Trump - barbs, which included “communist lunatic” from one and “despot” from the other.

(I think you can guess who said what.)

However, this combative dynamic shifted almost immediately upon Mamdani taking office.

Finding common ground (albeit for different reasons) in their shared status as New Yorkers obsessed with the city’s development, the two have engaged in high-stakes, direct communication, most notably in their meeting at the White House on February 26, which focused on an audacious proposal to deck over the Sunnyside Rail Yards for 12,000 units of housing.

The Sunnyside Yard is a massive, 180-acre active rail facility located in western Queens, serving as a critical hub for Amtrak, the Long Island Rail Road, and New Jersey Transit.

And because it occupies a significant footprint between the neighbourhoods of Sunnyside, Long Island City, and Astoria, it has long been viewed by urban planners as a “gap” in the city’s urban fabric.

For decades, the site has been the subject of ambitious redevelopment proposals.

The primary challenge is its nature as an active, high-traffic rail yard; any development would require “decking over” the tracks - building a massive structural platform above the trains to support housing, schools, and parks.

Previous plans, such as those during the Bloomberg (2002-2013) and de Blasio (2014-2021) administrations, were hampered by the extreme technical complexity and the enormous cost of constructing such a deck.

And so, the proposal to build 12,000 housing units atop a massive new deck represents one of the most ambitious infrastructure goals in the city’s history - one requiring a high-level federal partnership just to fund the platform itself. (Hence the oft-noted transactional alignment between Mamdani and President Trump.)

The resurrection of this mega-project is the centrepiece of the administration’s broader housing strategy.

To break the gridlock of the city’s ingrained housing crisis, City Hall has deployed specialized task forces to accelerate land development while leveraging public forums to aggressively tackle predatory landlord practices.

Very early in his mayoralty, Mamdani signaled his prioritization of housing stability and administrative accountability by revoking controversial, late-term executive orders from the previous administration and launching new oversight offices for tenant protection and deed theft prevention.

Meanwhile, as the flagship of his “Day 1” commitment, Mamdani signed Executive Orders 4 and 5. These directives mandate the accelerated development of affordable housing on underutilized, city-owned property by integrating new residential spaces with essential public infrastructure like schools and libraries. This “co-location” strategy works directly within the parameters of land scarcity - historically the primary barrier to municipal development.

As one would expect from a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist,” the municipal government is not putting all of its eggs in the private-sector basket; the city itself is being repurposed as an active developer. Indeed, the administration is shifting New York’s primary housing focus from market-rate development to a model of public-led production and aggressive tenant stabilization.

On the permitting side, City Hall has adopted the SPEED agenda, which slashes pre-certification and zoning timelines from years to months - effectively removing 18 months of bureaucratic red tape. (Pre-certification is the initial, historically opaque period of the land-use review process where projects undergo extensive technical review before officially entering the public approval pipeline.)

By standardizing the requirements for zoning changes, the agenda reduces the arbitrary delays that have historically stalled affordable housing.

In tandem, the city is introducing the “fast lane” Expedited Land Use Review Procedure (ELURP) to accelerate development on underutilized city-owned property, such as vacant lots, municipal facilities, and parking structures. For qualifying developments, ELURP replaces the legacy Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) - a notorious bottleneck that routinely dragged on for years. By eliminating layers of discretionary review, ELURP prevents public-led projects from grinding to a halt.

Mamdani frames these reforms as positioning municipal government as an accelerator, rather than a barrier, to city-wide construction. The primary objective is to get affordable projects to the breaking-ground phase faster, driving down carrying costs and increasing the velocity of supply.

To finance these ambitions, the city is investing $28 billion into its housing strategy, earmarking $5.6 billion specifically for the New York City Housing Authority to address systemic repair backlogs and modernize aging infrastructure.

Concurrently, the Mayor intends to preserve and stabilize 200,000 existing rental units by prioritizing rent-stabilized tenants under the new “Rental Ripoff” initiative, while strengthening the Office of Tenant Protection to combat displacement and predatory landlord practices.

The administration is also restructuring New York’s housing lottery system, aiming to slash the time between project completion and resident move-in from an average of 210 days to under 100 days. At present, move-in ready units sit vacant for seven months due to administrative bottlenecks - a massive operational drag that requires zero additional taxpayer funding to fix.

By targeting this gap between a project’s completion and actual occupancy, City Hall is increasing the velocity of housing delivery without requiring new legislative approval.

This operational push complements the broader “Block by Block” Agenda launched in May, which targets the creation of 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade.

Then, on June 25, Mayor Mamdani delivered on a signature campaign promise when the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7–1 to implement a 0% rent freeze for one- and two-year renewals. This move impacts approximately 1 million rent-stabilized units and will take effect for leases beginning between October 1, 2026, and September 30, 2027.

Looking ahead, the administration plans to introduce the City-Backed Housing Insurance Program, which aims to reduce premiums for affordable housing providers by 20%.

The program draws heavily on the concept of “captive insurance” and the social housing models of northern Europe. Rather than mimicking a specific foreign municipal department, however, the policy adapts the “Housing as a Social Good” framework popularized in Vienna, Austria, where housing is decoupled from the volatility of speculative insurance markets through public-sector backstopping.

While captive insurance is standard practice for major private corporations, New York is one of the first major U.S. cities to apply this de-risking model to affordable housing providers to directly lower rent-burdened operating costs.

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WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE, YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR (FAST FOOD) CHAINS

In the early weeks following his inauguration, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a landmark settlement with three major restaurant delivery platforms: Uber Eats, Fantuan, and HungryPanda.

A prior investigation by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) had revealed that these applications systematically failed to pay workers mandated minimum rates - including compensation for time spent on canceled trips - between December 2023 and September 2024.

While the Mamdani administration inherited the core findings of the probe, its aggressive enforcement posture during its first month in office converted a pending wage-debt dispute into a high-profile, worker-reinstatement resolution.

Under the leadership of DCWP Commissioner Samuel Levine, the city finalized a settlement securing $5.19 million in restitution and penalties for nearly 50,000 delivery workers. Crucially, the terms also mandated the reinstatement of up to 10,000 wrongfully deactivated workers.

By forcing the apps to offer both back pay and job reinstatement, the administration directly challenged how the gig economy uses secret algorithms to manage and fire workers without consequences.

This enforcement framework was heavily informed by international regulatory shifts- notably the European Union’s GDPR provisions granting a “right to explanation” for automated decisions.

The city’s January settlement also effectively anticipated the normative standards later formalized in June by the United Nations International Labour Organization’s Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention (No. 193).

This settlement set the tone for the administration’s first 100 days. During this period, the city recovered more than $9.3 million for fast-food, retail, and service workers who were victims of wage theft and unfair scheduling.

Concurrently, the administration has overseen a significant expansion of statutory worker protections via sweeping amendments to the Earned Safe and Sick Time Act (ESSTA), which took effect on February 22,. Originally enacted in 2014 to mandate basic medical and safety leave, the modernized ESSTA framework significantly broadens when and how New Yorkers can claim time off.

Under the updated regulations, employers must provide an additional 32 hours of unpaid leave per year, available immediately upon hire or at the start of the calendar year, entirely separate from existing paid accruals. The framework also integrates New York State’s mandate for 20 hours of paid prenatal personal care leave per 52-week period, requiring it to be tracked as an independent bank.

Furthermore, the amendments expand the statutory definitions of caregivers and care recipients, allowing employees to secure protected leave to attend legal proceedings, housing court, or social services appointments.

The revised ordinance significantly lowers documentation barriers: employees are no longer required to provide verification for leave unless it spans four or more consecutive workdays, and they retain strict privacy protections regarding the underlying reasons for its use.

The scope of protected leave also now explicitly covers unexpected operational closures at schools or daycares due to public disasters, climate-driven severe weather events, or instances where an employee has been a victim of workplace violence.

To ensure these statutory rights translate into operational reality, the DCWP has launched a comprehensive compliance campaign, issuing warnings to over 56,000 businesses to update their internal payroll and leave policies. Non-compliance carries severe fiscal penalties, including a mandatory minimum fine of $500 per affected employee per year for failing to offer the mandated leave banks.

And only weeks ago, Mayor Mamdani signed Executive Order 17.

The directive mandates comprehensive heat-illness prevention plans for all municipal employees and contractors, instructs the Department of Buildings to stiffen construction-site heat safety enforcement, and charges the Department of Health with evaluating heat-related illness as a reportable workers’ compensation condition.

(And not a moment too soon. It’s been a hot one!)

SUMMERTIME, AND EARNING A LIVIN’ SHOULD BE EASY

Also in June, the city launched a new online portal allowing small businesses, community groups, and cultural organizations to submit and promote free, family-friendly events for young New Yorkers.

Integrated into the city’s broader “Summer in NYC” website, the platform acts as a centralized directory for activities across all five boroughs. It automates the promotion and permit processes for local hosts launching youth-focused programming, such as workshops, sports camps, and educational events. By moving these processes from a paper-based bureaucracy to a digital platform, the city has cut the administrative burden on small business owners and non-profits.

This shift is a core piece of the administration’s broader governance strategy: leveraging digital infrastructure to decentralize city programming and empower neighbourhoods to manage their own summer initiatives.

Alongside these community initiatives, the administration is focusing heavily on marketplace transparency.

Seeking to protect consumers and local merchants alike, Mamdani has moved to create a transparent marketplace where honest small businesses are not undercut by competitors who inflate profit margins through hidden charges.

To achieve this, the city is cracking down on “subscription traps” - where canceling a service is intentionally made difficult - and hidden service fees that are not clearly disclosed upfront. And a specialized interagency task force, led by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), has been granted the authority to investigate companies, issue cease-and-desist orders, and levy civil penalties.

The administration frames this crackdown on deceptive “junk fees” as both a consumer-rights issue and a defence of ethical entrepreneurship.

Meanwhile, to further boost the local economy, the Mamdani administration has prioritized public-facing programming to strengthen neighbourhood cohesion and improve city life during the summer of 2026.

This strategy includes transforming public spaces - including streets, parks, and plazas - into accessible hubs for community activity.

Most notably, the Department of Transportation has converted streets and plazas into over 100 free public watch parties for the 2026 FIFA World Cup (noting that New York New Jersey is hosting the final on July 19).

These “Soccer Streets” locations feature live performances and local programming designed to celebrate the diverse cultures of the city’s neighbourhoods.

For residents looking for alternative summer activities, the city has distributed 100,000 free tickets for prime viewing areas at Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Seaport in Manhattan. This public programming is paired with expanded fireworks displays across the East and Hudson Rivers, alongside a new citywide public art project launched in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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TACKLING THE TERRIBLE TWOS

Early in his administration, Mamdani introduced the “2-Care” Program, a historic expansion of the city’s childcare infrastructure to include two-year-olds.

This first-in-the-nation initiative provides universal, full-day, full-year care for toddlers, effectively bridging a critical developmental gap that historically left working families without public options between infancy and pre-K.

In designing the program, the administration drew heavily from international models.

Municipal policy research explicitly cited Sweden’s system for its use of capped fees pegged to a small percentage of household income, ensuring universal access from the toddler years. Similarly, Quebec’s heavily subsidized childcare program served as a primary blueprint for the New York City plan.

The Quebec model demonstrated to NYC policymakers how a publicly funded, non-means-tested system can effectively increase maternal labour force participation while boosting overall disposable family income.

For the initial rollout, City Hall is prioritizing 2,000 childcare seats in high-need neighbourhoods, including Washington Heights, Inwood, Fordham, Kingsbridge, Canarsie, Brownsville, Ocean Hill, Ozone Park, and the Rockaways. However, the administration plans to scale the program citywide within four years.

Rather than building a parallel system from scratch, the city is integrating these new toddler seats directly into the existing New York City Department of Education infrastructure.

Concurrently, the administration has committed to expanding the existing 3-K program to eliminate waitlists and improve neighborhood-level availability.

These expansions are funded by a joint $1 billion investment from New York State and the City of New York, with $73 million already released for the first phase of the 2-Care Program. By leveraging state capital to convert existing toddler spaces and build new capacity in identified “childcare deserts,” the administration aims to establish childcare as a permanent, non-means-tested public good.

In doing so, Mamdani has demonstrated an ability to navigate state (in addition to federal) partnerships to advance his core municipal agenda.

THE RULES OF THE ROAD (AND THE REFUGE)

Within the parameters of “Sammy’s Law” - the 2024 legislation granting New York City the authority to set its own speed limits - the Mayor has launched a citywide initiative to reduce speed limits to 15 MPH.

The administration cites safety data showing that pedestrians struck by a vehicle at 15 MPH are significantly less likely to suffer serious injury than those hit at 25 MPH, framing the move as a critical life-saving measure for students and families.

While advocates and the Mayor have expressed interest in broader, citywide speed reductions, the administration notes that a universal change - rather than the current neighborhood-specific approach - would require further legislative action by the City Council to amend the local administrative code.

Consequently, the administration is focusing its current efforts on 2,300 eligible school locations.

Beyond updated signage, the Department of Transportation (DOT) is upgrading intersection designs and installing speed bumps at high-risk locations to physically force traffic to slow down. Furthermore, these new limits will remain in effect 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, removing the confusing patchwork of “school hours only” or “school days only” restrictions that previously existed.

The city has already implemented these zones at 800 locations, with the objective of bringing the total number of 15 MPH school zones to 1,300 by the end of 2026.

The remaining zones will be phased in over the following years, with full completion targeted for 2029.

If the Mayor’s approach to the streets is defined by a shift toward heightened oversight, his approach to the city’s role in federal enforcement is defined by an equally precise administrative boundary

On February 6, Mamdani signed Executive Order 13.

This directive reinforces New York’s status as a sanctuary city by restricting federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) access to city-owned premises - including schools, shelters, hospitals, and parking facilities - unless agents present a valid judicial warrant.

The order aims to protect both the personal data and physical safety of immigrant New Yorkers by preventing information sharing unless explicitly required by law.

As a supplemental action, major city agencies - including the Police Department, the Department of Correction, the Administration for Children’s Services, and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene - must conduct internal audits of their protocols regarding interactions with ICE. (The findings of these audits, released in May, identified key areas for reform, including new NYPD communication procedures for 911 calls involving immigration enforcement and improved training for Department of Social Services staff regarding building access.)

Additionally, each agency must designate a privacy officer to guarantee compliance with New York’s strict data protection laws.

To support this rollout, the city distributed over 30,000 multilingual educational flyers through community and faith leaders to inform residents of their rights when interacting with federal agents.

The Mamdani administration maintains that the order does not block federal law enforcement, but rather ensures that city agencies serve the public without becoming an extension of federal immigration enforcement.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Finally, coinciding with Pride Month in June, the administration allocated $15 million to expand access to gender-affirming health services across the city. The funding will be split between a new Direct Care Access Fund, dedicated care-navigation support lines, and localized public health research to guide future municipal investments.

As part of this rollout, a pilot program in Corona, Queens, will offer gender-affirming hormone therapy for New Yorkers aged 19 and older.

To put this spending in perspective, New York City operates on an annual budget of $125.8 billion. This initiative represents approximately 0.01% - roughly one-hundredth of one percent - of the city’s total fiscal output.

Despite the inevitable culture-war rhetoric that surrounds municipal funding of this nature, the actual data reveals a comparatively microscopic operational expenditure.

However, the true long-term fiscal weight of this policy lies not in the programmatic funding, but in the looming constitutional friction with Washington.

As the federal government moves to restrict gender-affirming care access and threatens to claw back funding from major private hospital systems, City Hall is shifting to a defensive footing. Mamdani has instructed the New York City Law Department to prepare for protracted litigation to shield municipal health infrastructure from federal interference - setting the stage for a costly legal battle over local administrative autonomy.

THE MAMDANI DOCTRINE: A POLICY OF TRANSLATION AND ADAPTATION

It is increasingly clear that the claims of radicalism leveled against Mamdani during the mayoral campaign were overstated.

Much of the administration’s agenda builds directly upon operational and legislative foundations laid by previous City Hall occupants, either by accelerating their implementation or expanding their statutory scope.

The flagship land-use reforms, for instance, rely entirely on established municipal centres of gravity like the Department of City Planning and the Economic Development Corporation.

The SPEED agenda and ELURP are not revolutionary rewrites of property law; they are procedural optimizations of the legacy ULURP framework designed to eliminate pre-certification friction.

Similarly, the 15 MPH school-zone initiative is a direct expansion of Sammy’s Law, a 2024 state-level legislative victory.

While targeting 2,300 school sites citywide is executionally aggressive, the legal mechanism remains a continuation of established traffic-calming strategies.

Even Executive Order 13 merely audits and reinforces New York’s long-standing sanctuary city posture. It optimizes agency communication protocols and privacy officer oversight to ensure compliance with existing local laws rather than forging a new legal precedent.

Finally, the $15 million allocation for gender-affirming care functions as a localized support mechanism for existing infrastructure. It mirrors and solidifies work already underway via NYC Health + Hospitals and independent community providers, serving as a tactical buffer against shifting national political conditions.

However, this continuity does not mean the administration lacks a distinct ideological direction.

Mamdani’s real innovation lies in policy translation: importing long-established international social-democratic models and retrofitting them into the rigid administrative constraints of an American municipal framework.

Navigating a legal system built on ironclad property rights and intentionally limited local government scope requires leveraging specific, hyper-local levers - such as licensing, zoning, and audit powers - to achieve outcomes that European or Canadian states pursue through sweeping national mandates.

The structural workarounds are evident across the administration’s core initiatives.

On childcare, while Sweden and Quebec utilize provincial or national tax architectures and state-run networks, New York City lacks the jurisdiction to overhaul tax codes or create independent regional ministries.

Consequently, City Hall is utilizing its existing universal pre-K infrastructure as the primary delivery mechanism, plugging the new “2-Care” seats into current school facilities and authorized community daycares. By framing childcare as an expansion of the public education mandate rather than a social welfare program, the city bypasses the need for a broad provincial-style social security framework.

A similar translation occurs within labour enforcement.

Where European Union frameworks like the AI Act rely on top-down, multi-national prohibitions and global turnover fines, NYC operates under the narrower Local Law 144 framework, which focuses on automated employment tool audits. The Mamdani administration has weaponized this by moving from passive transparency to active enforcement.

By treating algorithm-driven deactivations as violations of local labour codes, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) effectively uses the city’s regulatory licensing power over delivery platforms as a proxy for European-style “just cause” termination mandates.

Housing insurance follows this same pragmatic pattern.

In European models like Vienna’s, social housing is largely constructed and managed by city-owned entities backed by sovereign credit. Because NYC cannot assume that scale of state-level liability, its Housing Insurance Fund adapts the corporate concept of “captive insurance.”

Acting as an underwriter of last resort, the city does not directly manage the housing stock; instead, it uses municipal capital to backstop insurance pools, de-risking the private and non-profit operators who do. This stabilizes affordable housing operating costs - which have ballooned due to market and climate risks - without expanding the municipal balance sheet to an unsustainable degree.

This method of governing reveals three recurring structural points of friction that the administration must constantly manage.

First, the “patchwork problem” stems from the fact that unlike international models that rely on whole-of-government execution, NYC’s adaptations are piecemeal. Every policy must be retrofitted into existing municipal agencies, creating bureaucratic silos that threaten to slow down implementation.

Second, the administration faces a structural insular vulnerability. Because these policies rely heavily on executive orders and municipal ordinances rather than broad statutory rights, their longevity is tethered to the current administration’s priorities, meaning a subsequent shift in political leadership can easily halt algorithmic audits or defund insurance pools.

Third, home-rule restrictions create an ongoing boundary line. Every attempt to regulate private platforms or mandate housing standards must be carefully engineered to avoid state or federal preemption. This structural barrier explains why City Hall relies so heavily on process-based regulations - audits, licensing, and zoning - rather than sweeping economic dictates.

Ultimately, the Mamdani administration is proving highly adept as a policy translator, taking the high-level social objectives of foreign frameworks and successfully coding them into the complex machinery of America’s largest city.

POLICY OVER PERSONALITY?

Mamdani’s success is driven largely by his capacity to deliver iteratively for his constituents.

During his first month in office, he established the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement (OME) to institutionalize public feedback within the policymaking process. Furthermore, his decision to prioritize a rent freeze over sweeping tax reform illustrates a keen understanding of municipal authority, focusing on regulatory levers that yield immediate, tangible output rather than protracted legislative battles in Albany.

While tax increases on top earners remain a foundational platform promise, the administration has spent its first six months prioritizing land-use reform and corporate compliance over structural tax overhauls. This strategic focus reflects a realistic appraisal of jurisdictional limits; significant fiscal changes require state-level authorization that the Mayor currently lacks.

By maximizing the executive leverage of the Rent Guidelines Board to secure immediate relief - thereby side-stepping the inevitable paralysis of state-level legislation - the administration demonstrates a disciplined focus on governance over proselytizing.

This output-based pragmatism provides a framework for understanding the Mayor’s complex relationship with President Donald J. Trump.

For Mamdani, this is neither ideological drift nor duplicity; it is an exercise in realpolitik. He has maintained a careful two-track strategy: cultivating a candid, results-driven partnership with the White House on infrastructure and housing, while simultaneously acting as a fierce public adversary on the Iran war, immigration, and federal overreach.

By keeping their most contentious friction points private and focusing the public-facing relationship entirely on the machinery of New York City, Mamdani has effectively leveraged federal access to secure capital investment where ideological rigidity would have failed. It is a high-wire act proving that, even in a hyper-polarized era, the demand for tangible urban results can bridge the widest partisan divides.

Recent electoral dynamics confirm the potency of this model.

The June Congressional primaries proved that the political gravity in New York City has fundamentally shifted. Mayor Mamdani’s endorsement - once a risky bet for an insurgent - has overnight become the gold standard for candidates challenging the status quo.

By backing a clean sweep of his progressive slate in late June - Brad Lander in NY-10, Darializa Avila Chevalier in NY-13, and Claire Valdez in NY-7 - Mamdani’s movement is no longer just surviving; it is scaling.

Yet, there is a danger that observers focus too heavily on the Mayor’s personal charisma.

If the remainder of Mamdani’s term continues to mirror the policy successes of his first six months, it will undoubtedly justify the public enthusiasm surrounding him. However, if admirers fixate on his personal magnetism rather than the structural moves that enables his governance, they risk drawing the wrong conclusions.

The Mamdani lesson should be less about the who and entirely about the how.

In a city as complex as New York, a relentless focus on measurable output is the only mechanism that moves the needle and sustains a political movement.

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

Look, I know you’ve spent years in the trenches (and at Pierre Poilievre rallies) forcefully lamenting the “Laurentian” status quo and championing the cause of separatism.

I get it.

You’re exhausted by a feeling - perceived or otherwise - that Alberta’s destiny is being managed by people who view the province as little more than a cash cow.

A Hays Converter cash cow.

But before you do anything rash, it’s probably worth going through some of the small print of creating a new country.

(WEST OF) CENTRAL BANKING

First things first, a sovereign Alberta will need its own central bank.

And, unlike a private enterprise, a central bank cannot be launched with venture capital; any stand-on-its-own-two-feet new Government of Alberta would need to transfer a massive portion of its existing wealth - gold, foreign currency reserves, or sovereign assets - to the bank to form its initial balance sheet.

This must be accompanied by an explicit, legally binding sovereign guarantee that the state will cover any future losses, because without that ironclad promise, any new Albertan currency (assuming there is one) is effectively just toilet paper.

The fledgling Bank of Alberta must also be able settle transactions between Albertan commercial banks, complemented by a financial supervisory authority to monitor those banks, involving - and I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you - a terrifyingly complex infrastructure of oversight and emergency liquidity windows.

Actually, come to think of it, as all banks are currently federally regulated, the new nation would first have to wait for the new wave of Albertan commercial banks. (After all, a central bank cannot act as a lender of last resort for institutions that do not yet exist or that operate in a regulatory vacuum!)

So you have some time.

It’s a good thing too as, in order to grant a central bank with the power to set interest rates and control the money supply, the government will need to pass a foundational piece of legislation akin to the Bank of Canada Act.

A Bank of Alberta Act, if you will.

I would caution that the federal version took over a year to pass and receive Royal Assent - and that was back in the 1930s.

However, I’m sure you’ll retort that that’s because they’re all slow and inefficient over in Ottawa.

So, hopefully - hopefully - your new law will breeze through the legislative stages and be signed off by Alberta’s new head of state (whoever they may be) at rapid speed.

And fingers crossed that it plays out that way because the central bank will need to quickly deliver on its most immediate priority - to gain the trust of global bond markets; a feat that can be achieved only through an unwavering commitment to price stability.

But finally free from ‘Justinflation’, that should be no problem, right?

Which brings us to the human element.

To gain even a shred of credibility with global markets, the Board of Governors cannot be a collection of political allies.

The Government of Alberta will need to recruit seasoned technocrats - veterans of the Bank of Canada, the Bank for International Settlements, or the IMF, for instance - who would only accept the post if they are granted complete political insulation.

Somewhat ironically, you would essentially have to pay a premium to hire the very people you spent years campaigning against.

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OK, OK - I get it.

If the prospect of building a central bank from scratch sounds like a logistical nightmare - which, to be fair, it is - I can suggest a few “alternative” paths.

One option could be to just keep using the Canadian Dollar.

It’s simple, it’s stable, and it means Alberta doesn’t have to learn how to manage its own currency.

Unfortunately, there is a catch: it would mean allowing those blasted “Laurentian elites” running the Bank of Canada to keep setting interest rates for Albertans - but this time without any incentive to consider your specific needs.

No, no - stay with me.

It’s the perfect sovereign arrangement: you get the flag, and Ottawa gets to decide whether or not Albertans can afford a mortgage.

Good deal, eh?

But if sticking with the Canadian Dollar feels too close to the status quo, Alberta could always pull a “Panama Pivot” and adopt the U.S. dollar.

Unfortunately, however, it would mean that the new independent Alberta would essentially be outsourcing its entire monetary policy to the “Washington swamp dwellers” of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

(But so long as Alberta’s monetary policy needs perfectly aligns to the personal interests of Donald J. Trump, all should be fine…)

Alternatively, for those who prefer even more rigidity, there’s always the “Currency Board” emergency option.

How best to describe it..

Well, Albertans would essentially have a central bank that isn’t allowed to have any of its own ideas and make any of its own decisions.

The trick here is to lock the new currency to the USD or CAD at a fixed rate, and the state would be legally barred from creating a single cent that isn’t backed by cold, hard foreign cash.

To be perfectly frank, it’s a bit of a “hands-tied” policy, which would make it impossible for the Government of Alberta to do anything useful or helpful the next time the economy hits a rough patch—

Say if oil prices drop.

Has it been tried before, you ask?

It has!

Sadly, the European Fixed Exchange Rate Mechanism was such a disaster for the UK in the 1990s that the principal long-term outcome was to convince an increasing number of citizens to abandon the overarching EU project altogether.

(Side note: it’s not going well.)

The good news for Alberta is because you would have already abandoned a collective project in advance of pegging your currency to another one, there’s nothing to worry about!

Apart from the economic hit that is.

There are no simple solutions.

TO BE HONEST, IT’S ALL A BIT TAXING

As a corollary to a new central bank, Alberta will require its own national tax agency to raise funds from those non-existent Albertan commercial banks and the wider public.

And it may come as a bit of a surprise that building an “Alberta Revenue Agency” from the ground up isn’t just about setting up a website to collect income tax; it is an exercise in becoming everything you feared—

Ottawa.

But before that can happen, you will need to overcome the problem of a data vacuum.

Currently, as Canadians, Albertans are processed through the Canada Revenue Agency, a massive, multi-decade accumulation of digital files, proprietary algorithms, and interconnected databases.

Sadly, on day one of independence, you don’t inherit that data.

Bizarrely, Alberta would have essentially become a nation of strangers to its own new national government.

While that may sound delightful to the most hedonistic amongst you, in reality, it’s…not great.

Therefore, to function, you’d need to find a way to convince Ottawa to securely hand over the sensitive financial records of five million people. Otherwise, you’re effectively starting your tax base from scratch.

(And no amount of oil revenue is going to tide Alberta over in the meantime.)

Scarily, that’s the easy part.

Modern taxation is not just about skimming a percentage off a paycheque; it is a tangled web of international tax treaties, inter-corporate transfer pricing, and cross-border investment rules.

To maintain a modern economy, Alberta will need to immediately draft, sign, and ratify a complex network of bilateral tax treaties with the rest of the world - presumably starting with Canada.

(Or the United States.)

Otherwise, all of the proud, patriotic Albertan businesses will face double taxation on every export, meaning foreign investors will flee your jurisdiction faster than you can print the tax forms.

Worse still, you’d be going cap in hand to the very “globalist” World Economic Forum-friendly institutions to recognize your fledgling tax code as legitimate, all while trying to explain to a multinational corporation why they should pay taxes in a province that hasn’t yet figured out how to audit a T4.

Finally, a tax agency is only as effective as its ability to enforce.

In the current system, the CRA is a formidable beast with the power to garnish wages, freeze assets, and ruin reputations.

To build an equivalent, Alberta will need a cadre of highly specialized auditors, forensic accountants, and legal hawks who are, quite frankly, too expensive for a fledgling government to afford.

You’d need to offer these people job security and competitive salaries - things that are hard to promise when the entire sovereign budget is currently a question mark.

In sum, to create a credible tax authority, the new government would have to build an organization that is, by definition, the most hated institution in the new country.

While Albertans would no longer be sending their hard-earned money to those Laurentian fat cats in Ottawa, they’d still be handing them over to their less qualified cousins in Edmonton.

Now, I know building an entire fiscal apparatus from the ground up sounds like a bureaucratic suicide mission - which, again, to be fair, is because it is.

But rest assured - I’ve got you.

You could simply hire the CRA to continue collecting our taxes on Alberta’s behalf!

For a fee, of course.

No dice?

Alternatively, you could chance your arm with a flat tax.

Slash complexity to lure in investment.

Unfortunately, there is a downside. You would still be betting the entire survival of the state on a hope and a prayer that businesses move to Alberta to save on accounting fees.

(I’m sure they are unlikely to all be “Better Call Saul” types.)

It’s a high-stakes poker game where the chips you are betting are the ongoing funding of Albertan hospitals, schools, and roads.

And government salaries.

But at least you’d be in charge of your own destiny, right?

I’m not going to lie to you. You’re going to end up spending billions in startup costs and years of legal warfare just to arrive at the exact same point where you started: government seizing tax dollars from the people. (But without the extra billions in federal transfers.)

And you’d no longer be able to blame it on Ottawa.

There are no simple solutions.

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GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR (YOU’LL NEED SOMEONE ELSE TO BLAME)

A sovereign state of course needs a visa regime.

The new nation of Alberta will have to negotiate entry requirements, work permits, and residency pathways. And if you want to maintain your status as an economic powerhouse, you will need to both retain and attract new talent.

I’m sure that a high-skilled engineer from the other side of the world is going to apply for a visa to an unproven, politically iffy, “sovereign” Alberta, over the established, recognized, and stable alternative of Canada.

(Who is already struggling to compete with our neighbour to the south.)

If Alberta can’t compete on a level playing field, you’ll be forced to pay a “sovereignty premium” - offering higher wages and faster permanent residency just to convince people to move to a country that is yet to sign up to the full array of applicable international treaties.

And what about securing the border?

As a landlocked state, Alberta’s “borders” are coastlines patrolled by frigates; they are miles of prairie fence, remote mountain passes, and a massive international airport that currently relies on the Canada Border Services Agency for everything from customs clearance to baggage screening.

Get this—

On the morning of your independence, you don’t inherit these assets.

(Wait. What?)

Furthermore, to be a functioning modern state, Alberta really ought to become a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention.

(Otherwise, you’d be joining Guyana - you’ve heard of it, right? - as the only non-signatory countries in the Americas.)

Unlike Canada, which has the luxury of being surrounded by oceans and the United States, an independent Alberta is essentially an island in the middle of a larger country.

(Like Lesotho!)

You would be responsible for every individual who manages to cross the border and claim asylum. (Fingers crossed that there will be a qualified central banker or tax expert amongst them.)

If any money is left over from setting up your administrative frameworks (and if you ever actually work out how to tax the people), you will need to build detention centres, fund immigration tribunals, and staff a border force capable of patrolling hundreds of miles of wilderness.

Meanwhile, it is possible that Canada (not to mention the US) gets a little lax in securing its side of the fence to let plucky Alberta deal with the processing costs.

(See Turkey during the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015.)

And yet most of your time and energy will be spent trying to convince others that your official documents are actually worth something.

It will cost millions of dollars to print passports that aren’t yet recognized (and probably won’t be until Alberta is formally acknowledged by at least Canada and the US) and training border agents to do a job that the people you’re separating from have been doing on your behalf for over a century.

Of course, if the thought of building a 24/7 border patrol across the Rockies sounds like a logistical nightmare, once more there are the “alternative” paths.

(You don’t look very hopeful?)

One option is to simply leave the borders wide open, declaring, “We are a nation of free movement!”

It’s a bold move, provided you are also okay with the possibility of Canada closing its side - sorry sides - of the border.

Nothing says “sovereign nation” like being placed under an economic quarantine because you didn’t find the time and means to build a customs office.

Or…why not hire Ottawa to manage immigration and customs for you?

For a fee.

An “equalization” payment so to speak.

It is the perfect arrangement for the performative separatist: you get the thrill of the “Alberta” stamp in your passports (I recommend a nice blue one to match the now “free” British), but the actual security and administrative heavy lifting are handled by your old friends in the east.

There are no simple solutions.

I REPEAT: THERE ARE NO SIMPLE SOLUTIONS

At the end of the day, what really is the point of all of this?

You’re going to spend billions in startup costs, years of legal warfare, and a lifetime of bureaucratic misery, all to likely arrive at a lesser version of the point where you started.

Even if you somehow successfully break away from the sinister ‘Laurentian’ collective, is it a given that you will be left with a utopia with everyone living in domestic harmony in the Garden of Eden/Edmonton?

And what if after all that effort, you end up with separatist movements within this new nation-state of Alberta?

A Wexit within a Wexit, if you will?

A Russian doll of Wexits?

In the 1990s, the former Yugoslavia became Serbia and Montenegro, only for this country to fracture further into the independent states of Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo within a generation.

I’m not saying Alberta is Albania but be it Belgrade or Banff, populist chicanery feeds on perpetual polarization, purity tests, and perfidy.

The algorithm is never satisfied.

And it’s the slippery slope to economic suicide.

So, let’s just stop this self-destructive nonsense now before it gets any further out of hand.

Instead, why not enjoy our Canadian summer.

Grab a coldie.

And watch our Canadian football team do amazing things at our Canadian World Cup.

Together.

Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.

For too many millennials across the G7 - despite now being in our 30s and 40s - the dream of owning a home feels further away than it did for previous generations.

While each country has its own economic landscape, a shared trend has emerged: housing costs are rising faster than wages, making it harder to get a foothold on the ladder.

In Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, millennials are facing significant hurdles.

Real house prices have grown much faster than disposable incomes since the 2008 financial crisis - the moment many of us entered the job market.

And because homeownership is becoming increasingly expensive, more millennials are delaying household formation.

(Because we of course prioritize our addiction to Starbucks and avocado toast.)

For the entirety of our adult lives, the system has regarded rising property values as a sign of economic success, which unintentionally creates a structural barrier for those trying to enter the market for the first time.

Across the pond, the experience varies.

In Germany, a strong focus on rental protections offers millennials more stability, reducing the immediate pressure to own.

In Italy, the combination of high homeownership and wage stagnation creates a distinct generational dynamic. Many Italian millennials inherit family property, which acts as a “wealth hedge” against stagnant wages; however, this anchors young professionals to regions with fewer career prospects, creating a tension between asset ownership and professional growth.

And, in France, while millennials face a widening wage-asset gap similar to the Anglosphere, governments have historically employed social housing initiatives and tax incentives to balance affordability, though pressure on urban hubs remains intense.

On the other side of the world, Japan stands out as a unique case.

Unlike its fellow G7 nations currently dealing with high prices, Japan experienced a major housing “bubble” in the 1990s that burst, leading to three decades of stagnant prices.

While this means assets haven’t skyrocketed, the country faces a shrinking population and stagnant wage growth, creating a different set of challenges.

In summary, across the G7, the systems that allow our housing markets to function are broken for young adults.

And simply building more homes won’t be enough; we need to rethink how we approach housing as a fundamental pillar of a healthy economy.

Above all, we need to change how we measure success.

Today, the way governments track housing inflation masks the true scale of the crisis, making it easier to ignore the reality facing young workers.

As with many other problems (climate change, rising debt), it is time we stopped sweeping things under the rug.

We must prioritize long-term affordability over inflated asset values.

For too long, the focus has been on driving up property values as a measure of economic health - a paradox that has made housing unaffordable for the very generation expected to drive future growth. If policy does not actively work to close the gap between what people earn and the cost of the homes they live in, it will continue to fail the largest, most active demographic in the labour market.

And this trajectory suggests an even harsher reality for Gen Z and the cohorts who follow.

At the end of the day, this isn’t just about housing; it is about ensuring that we have a stake in the societies we contribute to every day. Otherwise, we know what comes next.

People turn to the “easy fix” populists calling for “common sense” solutions that are anything but, and self-assured (but ill-informed) nativists who declare that closing borders is the solution to every complex economic problem, completely ignoring - intentionally or otherwise - how modern economies actually function.

There is a door number 3; however, our parents won’t like it.

We all just sit back and hope for a Japanese-style bubble burst just to bring the market back to earth.

Although, I suspect that even if this meant finally having enough money for a down payment to secure a one-bedroom apartment, you probably wouldn’t have a job left to make the monthly payments.

So…structural change it is.

THE DATA

Data Sources

Charts and analysis utilize historical economic benchmarks, national statistical data (including Statistics Canada), and representative index growth rates across G7 nations.

Where longitudinal cohort data was unavailable, figures are based on statistical simulations designed to reflect the trajectory of the 1981–1996 birth cohort.

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Image Disclosure: The illustration above was generated using AI tools. I utilize these to create conceptual visuals based on the content of my article.