U.S. ambassador and Trump's former presidential rival to speak in Ottawa
The B7 conference in the nation's capital is a partner event to the G7 summit set for next month in Alberta.
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National Post
14 minutes ago
- National Post
Laryssa Waler: Stop the tariff tit for tat — let's build a Canada the world wants to bet on
Donald Trump's threat to impose sweeping tariffs on Canada landed with all the grace and subtlety of a toddler in full meltdown mode. He and his team are considering duties as high as 35 per cent on everything from lumber to autos. Predictably, Canada is preparing retaliatory measures. Article content We've seen this movie before, but as any parent knows, reasoning with a tantrum rarely works. With two sons and 13 years spent honing my skills in tantrum diplomacy, I've learned firsthand that yelling louder or digging in rarely helps. You win by stepping back, staying calm, and changing the game entirely. Article content Article content Article content Article content First: cut the cost of capital. Canada's combined federal-provincial corporate tax rate sits around 26.2 per cent — among the highest in the G7, and significantly above the OECD average of 23.9 per cent. And with falling corporate and personal tax rates in the U.S., we're lagging even further behind. If Canada does nothing, we risk losing investment to our neighbours south of the border for good. Article content Consider Ireland, home to just 5.5 million people, where a 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate attracted giants like Apple, Intel, and Pfizer. Far from gutting public services, this strategy created a 24 billion euros (C$38.5 billion) surplus in 2023 and gave Ireland the fiscal strength to establish a sovereign wealth fund. Similarly, Singapore's statutory corporate tax rate of 17 per cent often drops even lower thanks to smart exemptions and streamlined processes. Last year, Singapore, with a population of nearly six million people, attracted nearly $190 billion in foreign direct investment — almost double Canada's performance. Article content Of course, reducing taxes and regulations won't be painless. In the short term, this transition will mean challenges — especially for those industries that have come to rely on our overly regulated, taxpayer-subsidized, Ottawa-knows-best, economy. Instead, let's shift current subsidies toward retraining programs, job transition assistance, and targeted support to help workers adjust and thrive in a more competitive, forward-looking economy. Article content Tax reform alone isn't enough — we need to replace cumbersome red tape with red-carpet service. Investors don't just look at costs; they're closely watching timelines and value predictability. Right now, Canada is infamous for project delays. Ottawa needs to deliver on its promised 'one-door, one-year' approvals guarantee. If regulators can't reach a decision within 12 months, the default answer should become yes. Article content Let's also make livability our defining advantage. Corporations don't just invest in markets — they move their families. Canada used to be a natural winner here, but our shine has dulled. Carjackings in Toronto have more than doubled since 2019, violent crime rates are climbing, and housing costs have soared — starter homes in Toronto and Vancouver regularly exceed seven figures. Our education system often seems more focused on woke social justice initiatives than on mastering the basics, and our students' math and reading scores are slipping. The reality is, the highly skilled immigrants that accompany foreign direct investments are beginning to look elsewhere.
Winnipeg Free Press
6 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Can his golf course ‘further' US-UK relations? Trump will use meeting with prime minister to try
EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) — President Donald Trump once suggested his golf course in Scotland 'furthers' the U.S.-U.K. relationship. Now he's getting the chance to prove it. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is meeting Monday with Trump at a golf property owned by the president's family near Turnberry in southwestern Scotland — then later traveling to Abderdeen, on the country's northeast coast, where there's another Trump golf course and a third is opening soon. During his first term in 2019, Trump posted of his Turnberry property, 'Very proud of perhaps the greatest golf course anywhere in the world. Also, furthers U.K. relationship!' Starmer is not a golfer, but toggling between Trump's Scottish courses shows the outsized influence the president puts on properties bearing his name — and on golf's ability to shape geopolitics. While China initially responded to Trump's tariff threats by retaliating with high import taxes of its own on U.S. goods but has since begun negotiating easing trade tensions, Starmer and his country have taken a far softer approach. He's gone out of his way to work with Trump, flattering the president repeatedly during a February visit to the White House, and teaming up to announce a joint trade framework on tariffs for some key products in May. Starmer and Trump then signed a trade agreement during the G7 summit in Canada that freed the U.K.'s aerospace sector from U.S. tariffs and used quotas to reduce them on auto-related industries from 25% to 10% while increasing the amount of U.S. beef it pledged to import. The prime minister's office says Monday's meeting will also touch on Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza, and that it hopes to welcome the Trump administration working with officials in Qatar and Egypt to bring about a ceasefire. Starmer plans to stress the urgent need to cease the fighting and work to end starvation and other suffering occurring amid increasingly desperate circumstances in Gaza. Also on the agenda, according to Starmer's office, are efforts to promote a possible peace deal to end fighting in Russia's war with Ukraine — particularly efforts at forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table in the next 50 days. Protesters, meanwhile, have planned a demonstration in Balmedie, near Trump's existing course, after demonstrators took to the streets on Saturday to decry the president's visit. Discussions with Starmer follow Trump meeting Sunday with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen at his Turnberry course. They announced a trade framework that will put 15% tariffs on most goods from both countries — though many major details remain pending. On Tuesday, Trump will be at the site of his new course near Aberdeen for an official ribbon cutting. It opens to the public on Aug. 13 and tee times are already for sale — with the course betting that a presidential visit can help boost sales. There are still lingering U.S.-Britain trade issues that need fine-tuning after the previous agreements, including the tariff rates Washington imposes on steel imported from the U.K. Even as some trade details linger and both leaders grapple with increasingly difficult choices in Gaza and Ukraine, however, Starmer's attempts to stay on Trump's good side appears to be working. 'The U.K. is very well-protected. You know why? Because I like them — that's their ultimate protection,' Trump said during the G7. Also likely to improve Trump's mood is the fact that the U.S. ran an $11.4 billion trade surplus with Britain last year, meaning it exported more to the U.K. than it imported. Census Bureau figures this year indicate that the surplus could grow. The president has for months railed against yawning U.S. trade deficits with key allies and sees tariffs as a way to try and close them in hurry. Trump is set to return to Britain in September for an unprecedented second state visit. Trump will be hosted then by King Charles III and Queen Camilla at Windsor Castle.
Globe and Mail
2 days ago
- Globe and Mail
The stock market is booming. Our economies are busting. What's going on?
John Rapley is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. He is an author and academic whose books include Why Empires Fall and Twilight of the Money Gods. Stock markets are probing fresh heights. Among the G7 economies, only Italy's isn't in record territory and even Japan, which looked to have entered terminal decline after its 1990 crash, is now back within touching distance of those long-ago highs. House prices as well are near their all-time highs in most places, slightly off their recent peaks but still far above where they ever were before. And that's nothing compared with crypto and gold – bitcoin is up more than a quarter this year, gold nearly a third. In short, we're getting richer by the day. Which is kind of strange, because our economies are barely moving. Of the major economies, only the United States has shown any significant expansion recently and even that is now slowing rapidly. Reflecting this new deceleration, the corporate-earnings season now under way in the United States is turning out to be a dud, with profit growth coming in well below the rate of share-price increases. In short, the strength of market rallies doesn't reflect what's happening in economies, which are weak and getting weaker. So what's going on? Some of it is rebalancing. Talk of all-time highs in the U.S. stock market cloud the reality – the U.S. is the laggard, it's stock market up a mere 5 per cent since President Donald Trump took office and 8 per cent for the year, a far cry from Germany's 22 per cent or Hong Kong's 28 per cent. Currency effects make the discrepancy even more dramatic, leaving the U.S. market down in euro and peso terms, and pretty much flat in Canadian dollars. Lofty U.S. stock valuations bank on tech-heavy market's earnings strength For years the U.S. stock market sucked the air out of the world's markets. At its peak, it accounted for more than half of the world's publicly traded capital, the Magnificent Seven tech stocks alone having a combined value bigger than any other stock market on the planet. But now, money has begun returning home. That explains the weakening of the dollar. Given how much smaller than the U.S. these markets are, flows of this scale have an outsized impact on prices. As a result, the laggards of the past decade, such as Spain, Hong Kong, South Africa and Britain, have become winners, with a small share of repatriated investment making for big rallies. This rebalancing was always bound to happen at some point, but Mr. Trump's policies are accelerating it. Though presenting the trade 'deals' he's now rolling out as wins, because other countries have to 'pay' higher tariffs than the U.S., it's an odd victory when your consumers must pay more for their goods than foreigners. After Mr. Trump announced his trade deal with Japan this week, Toyota's share price shot up 15 per cent, but Ford's barely budged. That's because the price of a Toyota car will increase by 15 per cent, but Ford's will probably rise more, since the company must pay tariffs on all its inputs. The same is happening in bond markets, where the spread between U.S. government bonds and those of other countries, especially emerging markets, is narrowing. As the U.S. looks less investable, other countries lure capital back away from it. To this reallocation of investment one can add the massive amount of stimulus now entering the global pipeline – the tax cuts in Mr. Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, Germany's big stimulus program, NATO's rearmament, Japan's fiscal loosening: There's a lot of bond issuance coming, which will pump money into the world economy. The monetary tightening that had followed the 2021-22 inflation spike has now given way to an increase in global money supply that's running at an annual rate of more than 7 per cent. Opinion: The triple contradiction of Trumponomics could crash the world economy But what's good for markets isn't necessarily good for the economy. In the U.S., first-time homebuyers are spending a higher share of their income on mortgage payments today than they were before the 2008 crash, leaving less to spend or invest on other things, while squeezing future demand. The same is happening in Canada, and as we know one consequence of the rising cost of living is that voters are demanding a reduction in immigration. If voters don't always favour the harsh measures being taken against immigrants in the U.S., nonetheless virtually all Western countries are starting to clamp down on inflows. That is cutting off one of the few remaining sources of growth in Western economies, namely the rise in labour supply. Sooner or later, in short, markets will realign with the economy. Unless the latter picks up, the former are sure to fall. At the moment, a slowdown looks the more likely scenario. Whatever stimulus effects come from government's fiscal largesse, the impact of tariffs and slow growth in the labour market owing to immigration cutbacks will drag down growth. Investors are still pricing shares as if the good days will keep rolling. But this fall may bring a chill to markets.
