I write this week from Britain’s first and oldest colony. If you’re thinking, ‘He’s in Bermuda’ that’s a good guess. Shakespeare knew about the discovery of Bermuda and wrote about it in The Tempest. So a good guess, but wrong. Beating Bermuda by two or three years was the fishing gold mine of Newfoundland, dangling off the most eastern part of North America and the endpoint of the Appalachian Trail. European countries were fishing these lucrative waters by the 1580s. Britain made it a colony in the early-1600s, just before Bermuda.  But it was never safely British till the mid-1700s after Britain’s defeat of France pretty much around the world in a remarkable seven years of military triumphs – including in North America when a very junior naval officer James Cook helped the British sail up the Saint Lawrence seaway (then deemed not to be navigable) so as to come up behind the French forces and win the decisive Battle on the Plains of Abraham outside today’s Quebec City. Those seven years are the reason why you’re speaking English and why it’s the dominant world language.

Anyway, it’s from Newfoundland that I send in this week’s column. My wife and I came for a fortnight’s holiday before she heads to Ontario to spend time with her mom. We thought we’d come see the only Canadian province we’d never visited. And boy is it amazing. Newfoundland island is the size of Ireland. Barely over half a million people live here. We’ve seen countless icebergs (some huge) float by while on sometimes bracing and slightly scary Zodiac boat rides. Puffins by the hundreds of thousands. Lots of whales. The bars in the capital Saint John’s give the Nashville music scene a run for its money. The seafood is out of this world good. But there’s one thing you should know. The place is bracingly cold. Despite it being summer here, our days have almost all topped out at five degrees. Add in the ferocious North Atlantic winds with no Gulf Stream to warm up anything and you generally feel as though it’s minus ten. I spent my first quarter-century in Canada but I’ve never been colder than on a couple of our boat trips into the North Atlantic. That aside, you need to come. The people are as friendly as they come. Oh, and they really like a drink or two here so that fits perfectly with the Allans’ idea of a great holiday.

Other than the cold are there any other drawbacks? Well, maybe one. The Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) that infects near-on all of Toronto and the other populated parts of Canada is just as evident here.  Newfoundlanders (‘Newfies’ for short) think The Don is the source of all of Canada’s current economic woes. And boy are they wrong.

So what woes are they? Well, over the last four years Canada comes first for most quarters of negative GDP per capita. (Guess which country comes second? Think land of the lying PM.)  As of a few weeks ago Canada just went into recession (which is a measure I don’t much like because it shuns caring about how individuals are doing and pretends the economy as a whole matters more, meaning mass inwards immigration and big government spending can prop up this loved-by-lefties measure). Canada’s PM Mark Carney claimed it was only a ‘technical recession’. I’m not sure what that excuse really means given that the definition of a recession is wholly and completely a technical one, so that all recessions are by definition ‘technical recessions’. But, hey, the legacy media love Carney because he fronts a left-wing party so this excuse half-worked.

Then there’s Canada’s woeful productivity growth, the thing that correlates most with economic growth and long-term wealth creation. Canada’s productivity isn’t even a pale shadow of a barely discernible penumbra of the US’s booming productivity numbers. (Query:  Do you think Australia is right near Canada or the US when it comes to productivity growth? Anyone who guesses the latter may be brain-dead.) In fact, Canada’s recent economic performance is the only rich country’s that has been worse than ours in Australia. Phew! If it weren’t for Canada, Albo’s Australia would be dead last across a range of measures. For instance, in Australia we come second (this is a bad thing, to be clear) for having the highest share of the population working in the federal civil service. Canada, dear readers, comes a clear first. Think Mr Albanese is the most left-wing, incompetent prime minister ever, with a glib tongue willing to jettison election promises with gay abandon? Unbelievably, Canada’s PM Mark Carney is worse.  He’s a world-beater. He called carbon taxes irreplaceable, then scrapped Canada’s, sort of, when he became PM. He promised fiscal discipline and sanity but as PM delivered a deficit of over Cdn$78 billion. As I said above, Canada has more quarters of GDP per capita decline of late than even we do.

Canada’s PM Carney also likes to sell himself as something of a banking genius.  But most Brits think he did a woeful job as Governor of the Bank of England trying to run down Brexit. And when he was Governor of the Bank of Canada the brave, reforming calls were all made by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Treasurer. Carney, let’s recall, predicted that Covid would cause deflation. (Seems to have gotten that one wrong.) When he was Governor of the Bank of England Carney printed unbelievable amounts of money so that inflation there went up to 11.1 per cent (compared to 5.2 per cent in France).  A new study from Canada’s biggest bank, out last month, reported that new investment in Canada has completely collapsed – worse even than here in Australia, mirabile dictu! To be fair, that was more his predecessor Trudeau Jr’s fault, but it’s a fact worth reporting.

Carney also promised half a million new homes would be built per year. They’re achieving about 5,200, one per cent of that promise. Carney has flip-flopped on Iran more than even Australia has. Carney is perhaps more climate-obsessed and willing to deliver poverty in the name of the climate Gods than even we are. He certainly is screwing over the oil-producing province of Alberta to such an extent that in October that province will be holding a referendum on whether to hold a referendum to secede.  (Yes, you read that correctly.) Oh, and though Canada sees three-quarters of its exports go south to the US, and though Canada currently has the best US tariff arrangements on earth, Mr Carney – unlike Mexico – has yet to negotiate any sort of revised trade deal with the US. Mr Carney just keeps his poll numbers up by blaming Trump for, well, everything.

Here’s the killer fact. In 2015, when Trudeau Junior was first elected, Canada’s two richest provinces were in the top ten of US states for per capita income. Today, barely a decade later of lefty rule, the richest Canadian province is poorer than the poorest US state (which is Mississippi). But the vast preponderance of Canadians think their tanking economy is all Trump’s fault. My native Canada has the world’s worst case of TDS.

But even so, it’s still well worth visiting Newfoundland. That’s how great the place is!