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New Canadian Politics Thread

That's easily the best performance we've ever seen out of him, but I'm still so tired of people not understanding the root of our productivity issues.

Extraction is low value economic activity. Point, blank, fucking period. Why do we have such low GDP per capita? Because our economy is based around pulling shit out of the ground, and selling it to other economies who then turn it into higher value items.

Here's a simple example. A Boeing 737 has about 72,000 pounds of aluminium in it's construction. Most of it sourced from Canada. That aluminium costs approx 100K USD to purchase. The raw aluminium is processed in the US by air frame parts manufacturers, and finally assembled by Boeing in the US. The plane then sells for 120 million dollars. We were a completely essential, almost irreplaceable part of making the aircraft. We've spent shit tons of money on public infrastructure to be able to support the industry that produces that raw material. But in the end, we only receive about .8% of the economic benefits of the finished product.

So when you're arranging your society around that economy, you don't need a lot of people with specialist educations to produce your portion of that product. When your society produces them, they're going to go to where they're needed....which leads to your most productive people exiting your economy (which doesn't have enough specialized knowledge jobs for them) for another economy. To help to create the 99.2% of the plane instead of the 0.8%.


So I said all of that to say this. Red tape slowing down our extraction economy from strip mining the country isn't the problem, and no we wouldn't be the richest people on the planet based on natural resources alone. Albertans make so much fucking money because the resources are in the middle of fucking nowhere and you have to pay people extra for them to either live in the middle of nowhere, or travel to the middle of nowhere to partake in the extraction economy. As someone who was formerly a part of that, I can tell you from experience that when I was looking at leaving the patch to a parallel job in the same industry at an energy company's head office in Calgary, the pay difference between the two situations were extreme. There's nothing magical about the energy industry that inflates wages.
 
MindzEye said:
That's easily the best performance we've ever seen out of him, but I'm still so tired of people not understanding the root of our productivity issues.

Extraction is low value economic activity. Point, blank, fucking period. Why do we have such low GDP per capita? Because our economy is based around pulling shit out of the ground, and selling it to other economies who then turn it into higher value items.

Here's a simple example. A Boeing 737 has about 72,000 pounds of aluminium in it's construction. Most of it sourced from Canada. That aluminium costs approx 100K USD to purchase. The raw aluminium is processed in the US by air frame parts manufacturers, and finally assembled by Boeing in the US. The plane then sells for 120 million dollars. We were a completely essential, almost irreplaceable part of making the aircraft. We've spent shit tons of money on public infrastructure to be able to support the industry that produces that raw material. But in the end, we only receive about .8% of the economic benefits of the finished product.

So when you're arranging your society around that economy, you don't need a lot of people with specialist educations to produce your portion of that product. When your society produces them, they're going to go to where they're needed....which leads to your most productive people exiting your economy (which doesn't have enough specialized knowledge jobs for them) for another economy. To help to create the 99.2% of the plane instead of the 0.8%.


So I said all of that to say this. Red tape slowing down our extraction economy from strip mining the country isn't the problem, and no we wouldn't be the richest people on the planet based on natural resources alone. Albertans make so much fucking money because the resources are in the middle of fucking nowhere and you have to pay people extra for them to either live in the middle of nowhere, or travel to the middle of nowhere to partake in the extraction economy. As someone who was formerly a part of that, I can tell you from experience that when I was looking at leaving the patch to a parallel job in the same industry at an energy company's head office in Calgary, the pay difference between the two situations were extreme. There's nothing magical about the energy industry that inflates wages.
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I agree entirely and this is my biggest reservations with Carney so far. He's working hard to shore up all of our inputs and infrastructure, but done littleto kickstart growth higher-up the value chain.

IMO they need to pick a few techs and invest heavily to give them enough meat to make a self-sustaining ecosystem and leading edge research. Also need to find a way to free-up capital / lower risk for investment but that's above my pay grade.

If I had to pick I'd invest big into agro tech, health care, mining technology. With receding arctic hairlines canada is going to have some interesting food production opportunities I think.

But feds will have to go big or it doesn't work, and Canadians need to accept that many of these investments WON'T pan out.
 
Aberdeen said:
I agree entirely and this is my biggest reservations with Carney so far. He's working hard to shore up all of our inputs and infrastructure, but done littleto kickstart growth higher-up the value chain.

IMO they need to pick a few techs and invest heavily to give them enough meat to make a self-sustaining ecosystem and leading edge research. Also need to find a way to free-up capital / lower risk for investment but that's above my pay grade.

If I had to pick I'd invest big into agro tech, health care, mining technology. With receding arctic hairlines canada is going to have some interesting food production opportunities I think.

But feds will have to go big or it doesn't work, and Canadians need to accept that many of these investments WON'T pan out.
Click to expand...

I don't think he has a lot of levers to pull there though aside from procurement requirements tbh and we seem to be poised to pull those (F35/Gripen decision pending) in the few areas we're committed to spending big in (military, rail travel, shipbuilding). It's a multi generational problem that doesn't get solved in even a single term imo.

But yeah, I'm all for us picking a few techs (I'd lean towards future energy tech personally, specifically solar + battery + inverters and medical technologies that can reduce/minimize future health care liabilities) but there's the risk of big ass boondoggles in those hills, when sitting politicians are making decisions like that.
 
MindzEye said:
That's easily the best performance we've ever seen out of him, but I'm still so tired of people not understanding the root of our productivity issues.

Extraction is low value economic activity. Point, blank, fucking period. Why do we have such low GDP per capita? Because our economy is based around pulling shit out of the ground, and selling it to other economies who then turn it into higher value items.

Here's a simple example. A Boeing 737 has about 72,000 pounds of aluminium in it's construction. Most of it sourced from Canada. That aluminium costs approx 100K USD to purchase. The raw aluminium is processed in the US by air frame parts manufacturers, and finally assembled by Boeing in the US. The plane then sells for 120 million dollars. We were a completely essential, almost irreplaceable part of making the aircraft. We've spent shit tons of money on public infrastructure to be able to support the industry that produces that raw material. But in the end, we only receive about .8% of the economic benefits of the finished product.

So when you're arranging your society around that economy, you don't need a lot of people with specialist educations to produce your portion of that product. When your society produces them, they're going to go to where they're needed....which leads to your most productive people exiting your economy (which doesn't have enough specialized knowledge jobs for them) for another economy. To help to create the 99.2% of the plane instead of the 0.8%.


So I said all of that to say this. Red tape slowing down our extraction economy from strip mining the country isn't the problem, and no we wouldn't be the richest people on the planet based on natural resources alone. Albertans make so much fucking money because the resources are in the middle of fucking nowhere and you have to pay people extra for them to either live in the middle of nowhere, or travel to the middle of nowhere to partake in the extraction economy. As someone who was formerly a part of that, I can tell you from experience that when I was looking at leaving the patch to a parallel job in the same industry at an energy company's head office in Calgary, the pay difference between the two situations were extreme. There's nothing magical about the energy industry that inflates wages.
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I guess the next question is, why don't we make some airplanes in Canada then, and sell them? Can we make more profit and jobs by refining a little bit more oil in Canada rather than exporting over 2/3 of it? I think the answer as far as oil refining may be no. But can we better optimize the way we handle our mineral, timber and energy industries?
 
axlsalinger said:
I guess the next question is, why don't we make some airplanes in Canada then, and sell them?
Click to expand...

Good question. I mean, we kind of do, but it's complicated. Bombardier has a history of designing good planes but struggling to sell them. There's also a bag of WTO rules that keep national governments from too blatantly subsidizing their companies. Companies like Boeing and Airbus skirt that by soaking up huge amounts of military procurement money to build military aircraft, missiles, etc which allows them to get through bad times in the airline industry in a way Bombardier can't.

axlsalinger said:
Can we make more profit and jobs by refining a little bit more oil in Canada rather than exporting over 2/3 of it?
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Maybe, but there's a few problems 1) We don't actually own the oil, energy corporations do and they like the way things are now. They have decades old, long paid off refineries situated in the US , set up specifically to process our heavy crude and selling the value added products back to us, so they're not paying for this.

We could of course spend public money on the problem, but that brings us to problem 2) The economics of it just don't make sense in 2026. Any refinery we started planning now (even ignoring the political realities of a project like that) wouldn't be done until the late 2030's and would cost probably somewhere in the range of 10 billie? For a project that could maybe crank out 250-300K barrels a day on average (these projects always quote bigger max production numbers, but you have to account for shut downs, turnarounds, etc). 300K barrels sounds like a lot, but assuming that you're a 3rd party refinery, you're buying feedstock from market at say, 80 USD a barrel (WCS sells at a discount due for a few reasons both technical and economic) and that same barrel can be turned into about a half barrel of gas, a quarter barrel of diesel, a bit of jet fuel and then random cheaper stuff (asphalt, industrial lubricants, etc). It's been years since I was in the industry, but 12-15 bucks (CAD) a barrel used to be the number I heard thrown around for net profit per barrel. Which sounds like a lot, and it is, but that would still take 10 years to recover a 10 billion dollar investment. Do we really want to be making a bet that requires the energy market of the 2040's to look enough like our market of the 10's and 20's and that we're not just building a future stranded asset?

axlsalinger said:
But can we better optimize the way we handle our mineral, timber and energy industries?
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I think our job here is to break free of that paradigm where we're just resource extractors. We're already really good at digging up stuff, cutting down trees, extracting petroleum products, etc. World class at all of them, there's not a whole lot for us to get better at there. They're all just really low value industries. We need to build industries on top of those industries, to utilize the cheap and plentiful inputs and create value added products out of them.
 
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zeke said:

View: https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2098205028301381865?s=20
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