Chris Gray

OTTAWA – A new Bank of Canada report, yes, that Bank of Canada, just confirmed what millions of working Canadians already feel in their bones: the economy is unraveling. Consumer sentiment, the baseline mood of the average Canadian family, has collapsed. And what triggered this historic plunge? Not inflation. Not interest rates. Not even Pierre Poilievre. No—it was Donald Trump. According to the report, which was quietly released this month, it all started on February 1, 2025. That’s when former President Trump signed an executive order slapping massive tariffs on Canadian exports, steel, aluminum, energy, potash, lumber. You name it. Up to 35% tariffs. And then, because he’s Trump, he doubled down, casually suggesting in speeches that Canada should just become the 51st state. That’s not a joke. That’s annexation rhetoric. And here’s the kicker, the numbers don’t lie. The Bank of Canada developed a new tool, the so-called CSCE Indicator, to measure consumer expectations. It tracked 2,000 households in real time, right as the trade war ignited. And what did they find? A total wipeout of all economic optimism from 2024. Jobs? Vanishing. Spending intentions? Cratering. Financial outlook? Bleak. So here’s what we now know, and it’s not a guess. According to their latest report, Canadian consumer sentiment has collapsed. Not dipped. Not softened. Collapsed. Across the board. They tracked three critical things: how people feel about their financial health, their job security, and whether they’re planning to spend money. Every single one fell off a cliff. The number of Canadians who believe they'll be worse off financially next year? Surging. The odds that someone thinks they'll lose their job? Skyrocketing—especially in regions that actually produce things, places that export goods, like steel, aluminum, and lumber. And major purchases? Cars, homes, furniture? Forget it. People aren’t buying. They’re holding their breath. And here’s where it gets truly damning. This decline—this emotional and economic freefall—can’t even be explained by the usual suspects. Not inflation. Not unemployment. The Bank of Canada ran the numbers, built a full regression model, and what they found was a massive unexplained drop—a "residual" in economist speak. Translation: this isn’t about what’s happening right now. It’s about what people believe is coming next. And what’s driving that fear? The answer is plain. A trade war launched by a former U.S. president, and public threats—threats—to annex Canada. A very large portion of this crisis is the fault of the Liberal Party of Canada. That’s not a talking point—it’s a fact. It’s a fact backed by years of missed opportunities, ideological sabotage, and deliberate inaction by two successive Liberal regimes. And now the consequences have arrived, right on schedule. Let’s be clear. This didn’t start with Trump’s tariffs. This started long before, when Justin Trudeau, and now his heir Mark Carney, decided that building energy infrastructure was just too messy, too politically inconvenient. For nearly a decade, the Liberals rejected every opportunity to make Canada energy independent. Northern Gateway? Cancelled. Energy East? Killed off. Teck Frontier? Abandoned after the government strangled it in red tape. Trans Mountain? Purchased with your tax dollars, then stalled into irrelevance. Every time a project came forward that could have helped this country get oil and gas to global markets, the Liberals caved to foreign-funded environmental groups and elite climate activists with Ivy League degrees and no skin in the game. They had no vision—none—for a national energy corridor. They didn’t want one. A pipeline that could move Alberta crude to tidewater, or LNG from B.C. to the Atlantic, was dismissed as a relic of a bygone era. It wasn’t woke enough. Instead, they chose Paris climate targets, photo-ops with Greta Thunberg, and empty moral lectures at Davos. The result? When America decided to weaponize energy policy and slap tariffs on Canadian oil and gas, we had no fallback. No leverage. No global customers. Just bottlenecks and apologies. And then there’s the LNG disaster. Remember when Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said there was “no business case” for LNG on the East Coast? She wasn’t alone. Her former Natural Resources Minister, Jonathan Wilkinson, said the same thing. No business case. This, as Qatar signed over $60 billion in LNG deals with Europe. As the United States became the largest LNG exporter on Earth. As Germany, desperate for alternatives to Russian gas, pleaded with Canada to send help. We said no. Not because we couldn’t do it. But because the Liberals didn’t want to. It wasn’t aligned with their green ideology. It would offend the climate lobby. And so they let the opportunity pass. And this—this is exactly what happens when you let a part-time drama teacher run a G7 country like it’s a college theater troupe. This is what Liberal governance looks like in practice: performative, reckless, and utterly disconnected from the real world. They chased applause at climate conferences while dismantling the industries that built this country. They ignored working Canadians, sabotaged our energy sector, and hollowed out our economic defenses in the name of "progress." And now? Now we’re supposed to hand the firehose to the very people who started the fire. The same elites who told us there was “no business case” for LNG. The same crowd who canceled pipelines, ignored warnings, and left us totally exposed to a geopolitical and economic assault. It’s 2025. The country is staggering. And the architects of this collapse—the Trudeau-Carney Liberals—have the audacity to ask for our trust again. They want more time. More power. More control. No. They’ve had a decade. They lit the match, doused the economy in kerosene, and now they’re pretending they smell smoke for the first time. Canadians shouldn’t fall for it. We don’t need more empty virtue signaling. We need competence. Backbone. And leadership grounded in reality—not staged in front of a mirror.