Eleven weeks to go and Stephen Harper’s “no Netflix tax” is an early campaign gimmick.
It is a predictable anti-tax pitch from the PM, but it says a lot about his chaotic public policy in Canada’s multi-billion dollar broadcasting industry. Not even the wealthiest American media company operating in Canada, Netflix still rakes in $400 million a year in Canada, employs no Canadians, and contributes nothing to the Canadian television system or the Canadian economy.
Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz didn’t actually use the ‘r-word’: recession. But his monetary policy report last Wednesday said it all the same, using numbers instead of words. By projecting that Canada’s economy shrank 0.5% in the second quarter of 2015 (following a similar decline in the first quarter), the Bank joins a growing list of others who have concluded that Canada’s economy is now in recession (traditionally defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth).
