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Canada’s financial institutions must foster homegrown investments and major infrastructure projects to kick-start the country’s sluggish economy.

HAH. The federal regulators are busy pushing for payment changes specifically to allow foreign businesses greater access to Canadians wallets. They’ve been working to kill small Financial Industry players, namely the provincially regulated Credit Unions, for literally decades – largely stemming from Carney himself, during his time at the Bank of Canada. When they talk about opening up competition in that space, it’s code for letting US tech giants/foreign companies have direct access to Canada’s financial systems / Canadian’s wallets – not about some home grown industry.

If they were serious about trying to fund small businesses more, they’d set up a program to invest a sum of money at many of the smaller Credit Unions around the country – that’d be direct investment in small businesses already. They could set up large deposit vehicles at those Credit Unions with a fixed, below normal interest rate (so they earn less on the deposit), on condition that the capital be used to fund small business loans for the local community at a preferential rate. Let the Credit Unions do all the heavy lifting in terms of vetting the loans. Using geographically contained credit unions also allows govt to target specific regions differently, simplifying a process for responding to a (de)evolving trade environment. If one community is harder hit by trade uncertainty / tariff shenanigans, they could provide additional funding to that regions local CUs to help mitigate it / pump funding into that region. Things like this have been done historically, from what I understand.

It’s unlikely they’d go that way though, because they don’t really want small Canadian businesses in the Financial Markets, they want to eliminate the provincial credit unions. Also, it gives up too much direct authority – and the government is trending authoritarian, whether its left-wing, right-wing or centrist doesn’t really matter on that front.

As long as it’s not like the PPP with the CDPQ and the REM.

The REM itself is fine but the no competition clause from public transit entities is unacceptable. The REM makes it illegal for public transit to compete with it. Everything must feed into the REM to maximize the return on the investment. And the return is coming from public money.

If a suburb doesn’t have adequate transit but is not projected to be a good return on the investment, no transit for the citizens. It now has to be profitable and it’s going to slowly make Montréal/the ARTM dependent on an investment fund to get more transit.

What a shitty way to invest in your own community.