If you feel squeezed, Kris Sims said, you are not broken. You are not alone.
The Alberta director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation sat on The Really Big Show with Jim Czech and Ian Burns and put the official story next to the kitchen table. Ottawa talks affordability as if the country were sailing. Sims hears the other mail. Adult children stuck at home. Streets that feel less safe. Fuel that punishes every fill. Working parents lining up for donated peanut butter.
She cited an MNP-style rolling poll she watches every year. More than 40% of Canadians say they are within $200 of missing the minimum payments on their bills. Not paying down a line of credit. Not clearing a car loan. The minimum. Lights. Debt service. The floor. She called that the edge of basic insolvency, month after month.
Food banks tell the same story if you phone the volunteers, she said. Foreign students get blamed in some reports. The people pouring soup say something else. Working Canadian families are showing up in numbers they have not seen. Jobs, and still counting on cans of soup. That is not a boom. That is a country that has been managed into a corner.
A Narrative Built to Protect the People Who Built the Mess
Sims said she knows why the “you’ve never had it so good” line keeps coming. The people in power want to keep their jobs. Maybe it feels true in a gated block. Maybe it feels true in a bureaucratic house in Ottawa. It is not the sentiment she heard on an August pancake tour through Alberta. People were tired in a deeper way. They did not think yelling still moved anything. They were losing hope.
She still gave credit where she thought it was due. Mark Carney extended the federal fuel-tax cut after thousands of emails from August into September. About 70% of Canadians with an opinion said do not put the gas tax back. She does not think Justin Trudeau would have made that call. Carney also scrapped the consumer carbon tax. On paper, new capital deductions tied to an investment summit look like a lower bar for real industry — oil, gas, mining — not another solar sermon. She wants the fine print. She does not want another battery-plant gift wrapped around a ban on the cars people actually drive.
That is the method. Praise the rare useful move. Then ask why the rest of the machine still fails.
The Walls Coming at the Same Household
Czech laid out the next hits. Mortgages written under 2% are resetting into the fours and fives. People cannot always refinance into a longer term. They have to requalify. Many will not. Oil heading toward $150 a barrel, if it comes, is not a chart on Bay Street. It is $30 to $50 more at the pump the same week. Stack that on a $200 cushion and the month breaks.
Then tariffs. Then jobs. Sims will not call the U.S. fight a “trade war.” She called that language cheap heat against an ally. Two-way trade is about $3 billion a day. That is not Brussels. That is the neighbour. A year and a half in, there is still no deal.
She put salaries on the table. The prime minister, about $400,000. Cabinet ministers on the file, about $300,000. Top deputy ministers near half a million, plus staff, plus the consulates in New York and Washington. An employment contract, she said, and no product. Elbows-up theatre, mean memes, renaming a lake — that is noise. It is meant to move your feelings so you stop asking why the people on those salaries have not closed a deal.
Families in southern Ontario steel and auto parts are not sleeping. Parliament, she said, should have been back at work. Instead the country watches a vacant House and a prime minister addressing a foreign parliament first.
Europe Is a Trade File Until It Becomes a Rulebook
Sims split the EU talk in two. Selling widgets without import taxes is fine. Stephen Harper already liberalized a lot of that trade. You see it on labels: Poland, Malta, Italy. Governance is another animal. Nobody in Lethbridge, Kelowna, London, Ontario, or Digby elected Ursula von der Leyen. Most Europeans did not either. A council of office-holders picked her. Tea-kettle rules. Air-conditioning lectures. Gun laws. Pickup-truck rules. If “unique relationship” means that, voters never put it on a ballot.
Money is already moving that way without a vote, she said. About $140 million more to the CBC this year. Part of it for Eurovision — a continental talent show on a continent Canada does not sit on. Part of it, as she heard the file, to make the state broadcaster a referee of “misinformation.” Taxpayers pay the ref. The government names the foul. That is not a free press. That is a captured one with a song contest on the side.
Justin Trudeau starting a media company raised the same question. She does not yet know if public money is in it. She asked listeners not to laugh too soon.
The Resource File Is Why the Furniture Is for Sale
Czech asked about airports built with Canadian cash now up for private operators, including foreign sovereign money. Sims said the federation is wait-and-see on leases. Private management often beats public cost overruns. The deeper point she would not soften. Canada choked its resource sector for a decade. Now it begs capital to return and talks about selling the furniture.
Norway’s oil fund, the hosts said, is around $2.2 trillion U.S., on the order of $400,000 per person, invested abroad so local politicians cannot raid it. Canada got a slogan fund. Sims called Carney’s version credit-card cash parked in a savings account. More debt. More interest. Not wealth.
Trust is the missing permit. Kinder Morgan already owned the line from Edmonton to Burnaby. It wanted to twin its own ditch — a strip of grass through the woods, deer on top — with private money, about $8 billion. Ottawa dragged the file. The company walked. Taxpayers bought the existing pipe and twinned it for more than $30 billion. Teck walked away from Frontier after $1.1 billion already spent. Northern Gateway. Energy East. A new west-coast memorandum with maybe 10% private interest and a public cost north of $40 billion in the documents they found. Keystone XL still has private barrels behind it because the path south is believed. Fool me twice, the companies decided, and they will not leave the purse on this park bench.
Heather Exner-Pirot’s point, as Czech relayed it, sat on the same pile. Carbon capture still has no real global buyer. The state still wants taxpayers on a multi-billion first cheque. Sims’s image was Lucy and the football. Ottawa talks about lifting a production cap. Private proponents still do not rush the field.
Voters Can Smell a Press That Works for the Podium
Sims took off the federation hat for a minute. She is a former parliamentary press-gallery reporter, more than a decade in the building, including CTV and Sun News. The job used to be the five W’s, then a response from power. Now most of the old outlets sit on a government payroll. She said they are not journalists. They are propagandists. If old colleagues hate the word, tough.
She carved out Joe Warmington at the Toronto Sun, who showed up every day on the file she was discussing. She named Conservative MP Mike Dawson of Miramichi–Grand Lake, the drywaller who went to court to refuse an MP raise and sat through hearings while the House was dark. Dean Allison’s inquiry, in her view, was still useful because people spoke on the record.
The contrast was a Carney press conference. First question: thank you for your hard work and your intelligent approach — then a local VIA Rail plea. Sims said it would not matter if Don Cherry were prime minister. You do not pat the head. You ask how many jobs tariffs will cost. You ask why Donald Trump can sign a stack of deals and Canada cannot. David Cochrane’s “he signs in pencil” line she filed with elbows-up and David Eby’s harbour sign and Doug Ford pouring out booze. Cheap sugar. Six months later you feel worse.
Stephen Harper once wanted a question list so an introverted prime minister could take them in order. The gallery exploded about a free press. Those same shops, she said, now count on the equivalent of about $30,000 a paycheque from the government they cover. Local Journalism Initiative reporters are not 30% captured. They are paid as a program. That used to be a scandal. Now it is a Tuesday.
How Serial Mismanagement Shows Up at the Ballot
This is the voter problem in one chain.
Households live $200 from a missed payment. Food banks see paycheques. Fuel and mortgage resets eat the cushion. The U.S. deal that pays the country $3 billion a day is unfinished. The people paid to finish it do theatre. The resource engine that could have funded a real sovereign fund was tied down until private money left. Pipelines that companies once built with their own cash are now nationalized hopes with $30 billion and $40 billion price tags. A state broadcaster gets more money to play Europe and police speech. A press that should interrogate power praises intelligence instead.
People are not “negative.” They are counting. When the official story says the country is stupendous and the fridge says otherwise, they stop trusting the story. That is how governments lose more than a poll. They lose the right to be believed.
Sims’s advice was not despair. Yell about the gas tax and it moved. Do not get bought by a renamed lake. Hold the $400,000 job to the $3-billion-a-day file. Credit the rare useful act. Then keep the receipt for the decade that put working families in a food-bank line.
Disclaimer
Based on Kris Sims’s appearance on The Really Big Show with Jim Czech and Ian Burns. Poll figures, salaries, pipeline costs, and deal values are as stated on that program or as commonly cited by the speakers and may not match later audited numbers. This article is not investment advice.