00:04:59.000So I feel like I'm right kind of in the heart of the people who are trying to progress, you know, maybe take the next stage in their life.
00:05:06.060And I can tell you, the dream of home ownership, right, which I think used to be a dream for people like my parents' generation and their parents, it's so hard now because the cost of living is so hard that people are just struggling to get by.
00:05:21.580And when you're just struggling to make the day-to-day bills work out for you, you have a hard time thinking into the future, right?
00:05:28.680You have a hard time aspiring to buy the home.
00:05:32.520Yeah, I mean, when you were growing up, a middle-class family had a home.
00:05:37.140It was a foregone conclusion that if one or both of your parents were employed, you likely lived in a home that they owned.
00:05:44.120And if you talked to somebody in your neighborhood who was renting, it seemed like a strange thing to do.
00:05:58.500You're right in the category of somebody who's experienced, okay, it's completely normal to own a home.
00:06:03.440And now you're at the other end of it experiencing how difficult that is.
00:06:08.020The government has really made no moves in this regard, in this facet of the cost of living.
00:06:14.260Yeah, look, and when it comes to homes, right, the big problem is just that it's so hard to build homes in Canada, right?
00:06:21.860We are one of the largest landmasses in the entire world, right?
00:06:25.820Look at all the ample space that we have.
00:06:28.380But you know what makes it very hard for people to build homes?
00:06:31.380And that is the true problem that is driving up the housing affordability crisis, is that it's just become so hard to actually build homes, right?
00:06:39.800You have these home builders that have to go through how many different hoops, regulations, different types of taxes.
00:06:46.300You also have different types of taxes that are driving up the cost of the home building material, right?
00:06:51.500So it's all these government regulations.
00:06:57.360There's all of these policies and procedures to be a profitable company, providing materials to the building industry must be a real challenge in this country.
00:07:06.100Yeah, and it's all levels of government, right?
00:07:34.840It almost sounds like a developer's name.
00:07:38.120He's kind of good at naming these things, huh?
00:07:40.000Look, another government bureaucracy to improve homes, like home affordability, that's an oxymoron because it's government bureaucracy that is the problem to building more homes, to bring home prices down so more Canadians can finally realize the dream of becoming homeowners.
00:07:59.440Let's look at groceries for a second, which is, you know, sort of a, it really is the canary in the coal mine, I think, for a lot of us looking at the cost of living.
00:08:08.340And yet, some of the major corporations in this country, Empire, Loblaw, Metro, Walmart, have all had record-breaking profitable years.
00:08:18.060While we're paying 3% to 5% more for groceries, the grocers themselves are netting anywhere from 12% to 35% profit increases year over year.
00:08:30.580Yeah, so I'm not the best person to talk about the industry per se, right?
00:08:36.080Like, it's just not really where my expertise lies, but where I can really speak to it is a couple different things that governments are doing.
00:08:43.900So, you know, when you look at how governments are influencing food prices, you've got to start with certain types of taxes, right?
00:08:52.020So, before the last election, the microscope was really on the carbon tax, right?
00:10:21.340It's just the large businesses that are going to pay this industrial carbon tax.
00:10:24.520Well, you know, fortunately, Canadians don't buy that at all.
00:10:27.280We just released some Leger polling showing that about 70% of Canadians say, no, no, no, no, no.
00:10:33.920The industrial carbon tax, most or some of those costs are going to be passed on to the consumer at the end of the day through higher prices.
00:11:21.460Food prices are the next to surge, driven by fuel costs, carbon taxes, fertilizer prices, transport, supply chain, fragility and market concentration and grocery retail that limits real competition.
00:11:34.700We only have three energy, maybe four energy and fuel costs ripple through everything.
00:11:40.880Higher gas, diesel, home heating, push up the cost of transporting goods, running businesses, even just getting to work.
00:12:21.800This is like kind of – this is – I mean economists very – well, the good economists at least have been talking about this for a very long time, whereas the government that originally creates the problem and then the government tries to fix the problem it created and then the government makes the situation even worse.
00:12:37.800I think if you approached any Canadian and said to them, it's a good thing to keep printing money, right?
00:12:44.800They would – everybody to – I think 100% of people you asked would say, no, don't print more money.
00:12:53.520And I think that we've been – I don't know how that we've succumbed to this pressure to allow the deficits to get this high, to allow taxation to get into a place where it's the only way to solve the problem.
00:13:05.000Do you see any cracks on the horizon of light that we can look at that might make it better for Canadians from a cost of living standpoint, Franco?
00:13:16.420Well, hey, let me just explain the inflation tax real quick because this is really one of the worst forms of taxation.
00:13:23.320It's a fundamentally undemocratic form of taxation and make no mistake about it, it is a form of taxation.
00:13:29.460And that's when the central bank creates new dollars right out of thin air, buying financial assets, largely government bonds, i.e., financing massive deficits in Ottawa, okay?
00:13:41.160And the key problem – this is where inflation really stems because throughout the economy, you can get some prices going up, but if you're not creating new dollars, then other prices would go down, right?
00:13:51.940If there's only so many dollars in the economy, one price goes up, another price goes down.
00:13:56.060Now, what creates this general increase in inflation year after year after year is the money printer, okay?
00:14:03.960The fact that through the central bank, the government can essentially create a new dollar out of thin air with a click of a keypad.
00:14:11.160Well, the problem for normal people is that you can't create farmland with a click of the keypad.
00:14:16.920You can't create gasoline with a click of a keypad.
00:14:19.640So, through the central bank, and we saw this big time during the pandemic where the Bank of Canada printed up more than $300 billion out of thin air, is that you create the perfect storm of inflation, which is too many dollars chasing too few goods.
00:14:35.420And, oh, by the way, Canadians never voted on that, right?
00:14:42.040Now, I like to think of myself as an optimist, so if I can see any optimism here, it's that at least the governing liberals under Carney, at least they have to admit that they need to control spending, right?
00:14:58.540They're still increasing spending by $38 billion this year, but they're starting to understand that they can't lose any more credibility on the finances, so they at least have to pay lip service to reining in spending.
00:15:11.180Now, they're not reining in spending, but they at least have to pay lip service to it.
00:15:16.120That just sounds like Ozzy Osbourne waking up after a night of partying in his hotel room after trashing it and saying, you know what, I really got to slow down.
00:15:24.380But it's already, the damage is already done.
00:15:27.400But having said that, it does seem to me that we might be in for a long haul because a lot of money was printed.
00:16:49.600We say that we're the biggest resource rich country within any stretch of the eye, and yet we have so many restrictions put upon us to get those resources.
00:17:02.060You know, we got them, but we don't process them.
00:17:36.660Not significant government regulations strangling our ability to grow, specifically our natural resource sector.
00:17:44.260Like, we should be a natural resource powerhouse, right?
00:17:47.900But, hey, the federal government brings in a carbon tax, then a second carbon tax, then an industrial carbon tax, then a no more pipelines law, then a discriminatory tanker ban on the West Coast.
00:17:57.000The government flirts with the production cap on oil and gas, right?
00:18:00.540Look, the government moves the regulatory goalposts on the Energy East pipeline, rejects the Northern Gateway pipeline.
00:18:14.860Ottawa would be better to just stand to the side for a moment.
00:18:18.700Maybe while Mark Carney's offline around wherever his next trip is, everybody could just take a step to the side and we'll get back to work.