The Canadian Investor - Weak Consumers, Big Deficits, and Ottawa’s New Industrial Policy

Episode Date: July 11, 2026

In this episode of The Canadian Macro Investor, we break down some of the biggest Canadian macro and investing stories from the week. We discuss signs of pressure on Canadian consumers, recent government fiscal trends, and what the latest economic data could mean for interest rates, inflation, and the broader economy. We also look at Ottawa’s push into critical minerals, including the federal government’s potential investment in Teck, and why these types of projects are increasingly being framed through a national security lens. We then touch on broader North American macro themes, including trade, tariffs, consumer spending, and what investors should watch as the second half of the year unfolds. Tickers discussed: TECK-B.TO Watch the full video on Our New Youtube Channel! Check out our portfolio by going to Jointci.com Our Website Canadian Investor Podcast Network Twitter: @cdn_investing Simon’s twitter: @Fiat_Iceberg Braden’s twitter: @BradoCapital Dan’s Twitter: @stocktrades_ca Want to learn more about Real Estate Investing? Check out the Canadian Real Estate Investor Podcast! Apple Podcast - The Canadian Real Estate Investor  Spotify - The Canadian Real Estate Investor  Web player - The Canadian Real Estate Investor Asset Allocation ETFs | BMO Global Asset Management Sign up for Fiscal.ai for free to get easy access to global stock coverage and powerful AI investing tools. Register for EQ Bank, the seamless digital banking experience with better rates and no nonsense.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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If there's uncertainty in the markets, there's going to be some great opportunities for investors. This has to be one of the biggest quarters I've seen from this company in quite some time. If you're listening to this in recording format, there is 20 minutes of me and Simone talking on, you know, recorded on YouTube. X, et cetera. And you can go and listen to it there. Just, you know, caveat that, or just full disclaimer, it might, might hear your ears a little, apparently. So, exactly. Yeah, now we have people commenting saying that it's much better now. So the thing that, that I want to point to based on what you mentioned was that, you know, the, and I've mentioned this a couple of times, but the percentage of the consumption that comes from the top 10%, right? And that's what,

you know, like, I think central banks should be paying attention to this, but if you'll like it's easy for them to still, you know, be fearful of resurrecting inflation or like, you know, letting the economy run too hot and continue to pull more disparate wealth. Like they almost are forced to let it really like burn from the bottom and, and start trying to pull that huge disparity in asset inflation down with it. Like, I think they kind of just have to let this whole thing run its course, unfortunately, which is scary, man. It's kind of like, I don't know. Look at this. Yeah. Yeah, so what's that? Consumers who think inflation will be above 3%? Is that an editor or the U.S.?

Yeah, that's the Canada. So that's the Bank of Canada. So for those watching live, like, the easiest thing to do is green or lower is good. So it's basically Bank of Canada target or lower, even looking at deflation for part of it. But if you're getting red or higher, you're looking at well above the Bank of Canada target. So three to five percent or five percent above. And just looking roughly here, you're looking at. That's about 60% of people that consumers think it's going to be 3% or more, which is definitely concerning. And I don't blame people if you go to the grocery store and obviously even looking at CPI data that comes out month after month, it's consistently above 3%. So if you're middle class or lower income, this is something constantly you see that, you know, you buy $100, $150 worth of stuff at the grocery store. and you just feel like you're getting less and less for the amount that you pay. And I have a feeling that a big chunk of that is coming from grocery prices because that's something you see on a very regular basis, at least once,

maybe twice, three times a week, depending how often you do groceries. Yeah, yeah. 100% man. Like, same thing, oil. Like, oil's not over, man. It's just less topical because there's fewer bombs going off and stuff. But, like, it's less, you know, it's, that's not ever closed over.

And it's not going to get pushed through to the, So the two things that people buy most, and though I mean, even if you go to the three, like, you know, you also have shelter, right? Your shelter inflation. All these new mortgages resetting and all of this stuff. Let me quickly pull up that chart that I mentioned because this is like, I think this is one of the craziest charts, man. Like top 10% versus bottom 80% of the economy.

Again, it excludes the 10% in between those two, but top 10% record and almost half of all consumer spending. Consumer spending, right? So the problem is like at a certain point, this stops scaling. you've seen kind of periods where you can see it start to stop scaling and it corrects quite a bit and then your bottom kind of recorrects. But you go back to like normal economies. They're, they're in tandem, right? And they're both kind of like whatever 40%ish range. The fact that your top 10% is propping up the economy that much, how many more, you know, trips and yachts and

whatever and plane tickets and hotel rooms can they buy to keep the consumer side of the economy stimulated. I'm of the opinion that there's a limit to the upside of this. Oh, yeah. And at a certain point, the bottom 80% does become a metric that can put a downward drag on the economy more than, more than they can put an upward drag on it. But I think that the central banks are being careful to temper how much support via rates they give to the people who hold the assets that, that, you know, because they don't want to pull, pull it up from the top. So anyway, yeah, that's my kind of, that's my thing. I think they're afraid of making things worse if I'm very, being perfectly honest.

They know this is not great, but they know it could be worse, especially in the U.S., right? You have Donald Trump that was essentially saying what we're saying prior to being elected, and now you're seeing the same kind of thing, but it's the greatest economy ever

because he's in the office and he's heading into the midterms and clearly wants the economy to look as good as possible. Now the headline numbers are his friends, where they were these enemies when he was running for for president. So it's just, central banks will be very,

they say they're independent, but they're definitely aware of what's going on on the political side. And the last thing they want is to be too much in the crossfires of politicians. Like I think that's just a reality, whether they want to admit it or not. Yeah, yeah, 100%.

100, man. And I think that this is like, it's fiscal dominance from both the spending side and from the like, you know, like the central bank's no longer independent, right? And that's a, that's a bipartisan argument or nonpartisan argument because it's politicians on both sides of the aisle who are writing open letters to the government saying that they need to cut interest rates, especially in Canada.

It's like there's no respect for the autonomy of central bank anymore. And that's a very bad problem that we need to be taking seriously, in my opinion. Yeah. And just for the podcast, people listening here, what we had talked about before our audio was fixed was just Walmart. lowering prices on thousands of prices across the U.S. because it has access to real-time data. So that is one of the things that we were talking about. And Walmart is probably seeing what we're talking about, that cage-shaped economy where it's just seeing a lot of its consumers that are

spending less. So that's likely the reason. And you also have U.S. Fed data that is showing that more and more the wealthiest consumers are spending more and more and pulling above their weight when it comes to the aggregate numbers, but the middle class and lower income are just spending less. So just try to sum it up so it makes sense for people listening to the audio. We've booked a cottage for early July, and I'm already picturing the kind of trip where the days are pretty simple. Mornings outside with coffee, my daughter running around with our new puppy, afternoons by the lake, and those quiet evenings with my wife watching the sunset with a

glass of wine after everyone else has gone to bed. And while we're away enjoying that time together, the timing also made me think about our own home back in Ottawa. Early July is such a busy time in this city, with Canada Day and Blues Fest bringing so many people in. That got me thinking about how our home could be put to good use while we're out of town as it's just sitting empty. Listing our home on Airbnb could create some extra income to help cover part of the trip, while also letting another family enjoy our neighborhood during one of the best time to visit Ottawa. They could walk over to a local coffee shop, spend the afternoon at a nearby beach, and use our place as a comfortable home base after taking in everything happening downtown.

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Simplify your investing today at BMOetFs.com. Aside from that, did you want to talk a little bit? Did you have a look at the government finance deficit numbers that were released? Yeah, we knew deficit in jobs too, yeah. Yeah, and jobs, that's right. Yeah, so the jobs, why don't we do jobs? Because that came out just earlier today. Did you have a chance to look at that?

I did, yeah. I mean, it's basically part-time jobs, right? So, I mean, we've seen a lot of these prints, right? So the headline says, I'll pull this up here on the screen share, but employment was little change plus 18,000, so like very little. And I will always caveat with this. When this data is bullish, I try and remind people that it's a survey and it's very frequently revised.

And when it's bearish, I say the same thing. And you really have to wait for payrolls, like the actual data. The only problem is it lagged by two months. And like Ben Rabidu has an excellent chart. I'll pull it up when I get a minute when you're chatting. But about the divergence that we're seeing, I think it's the biggest gap between payrolls and the survey. So, I mean, if you think about a survey, who's going to answer the phone?

I've never gotten one of these calls. Have you? Right? So if I did, I didn't answer. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. It probably came in as spam and I just didn't answer it. Yeah.

Yeah. So this is kind of the funny part. So a lot of it is like the things I often pay attention to, it says driven primarily by part-time work here at 1.9%. Although that's youth unemployment, right? I think overall full-time employment actually increase year over year. Yeah, year over year to date. it is up and driven by net increase.

So, sorry. So if we go to the year over year basis, 131,000 on a year over year, not much on a month over month. The employment rate increases. The unemployment rate fell. The one thing I like to look at a lot is your youth unemployment because like to me and my business, that's a lot of your next generation of homeowners. And so their unemployment rate fell pretty significantly.

Last time it did that, it kind of bounced and came back up pretty quickly. so, but I think the dotted line is what people should focus on because the dotted line, I think it's what 2017 to 2019 average. So even though it dropped, it's still well above the pre-pendemic average levels for those three years prior. And I don't know if this is a result of less immigration. I assume that probably has a role to play in when that where, you know, some of that population that was coming into Canada, you have no, pretty much no immigration coming in at this

or population grow at the very least, which is probably allowing some younger workers to find a bit more jobs. That would be my assumption, but I don't know. Maybe you have different. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly my take is you're getting rid of your temporary foreign workers that everybody's been yelling about who taking all the jobs at Tim Hortons and driving Uber's and whatever. You're getting rid of international students and a lot of the entry-level labor force in Canada that would have otherwise consumed entry-level jobs. If they're leaving or if at a very minimum we're not adding more supply to that labor pool, then those jobs are now available for the typical people who would work them,

which is people who are brand new to the workforce that are trying to climb their career ladder. And that's what I was hopeful we were seeing when we first saw the drop there in the youth unemployment. The fact that it rebounded kind of obviously was a bit disheartening. So let's see. Let's see, I mean, again, I don't want to see Canada's economy bird of the ground. I don't want to see the youth not be able to have jobs and start their financial futures and contribute to the economy.

Do I think that this is a sustainable downward trend? Probably not. I'm just not super hopeful. Like, just data would tell me that it would be a silly, silly forecast for me to make and make any assumptions or predictions in my own personal investments based on youth unemployment going up, right? So, yeah. Yeah. Employment levels going up. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we'll see. Like you said, I think the sample is too small. I don't think we can draw any conclusion. I think for me, it just comes back. We're so well about that pre-pendemic average. And I think that's the most concerning part. Hopefully we get back to, you know, around 10, 10, 11%. I think that would be the best thing to see.

But now moving on to the government finances statistic, first quarter of 2026. That was released on June, 26. So I'll just share this. While you're pulling that up, actually, the one other thing I'll say from that LFS report was that the number of public sector jobs decreased and the number of private sector jobs. Yeah, I saw that too.

That was helpful. Yeah. Anyway. That was, you know, maybe Carney is, you know, reducing.

Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's always funny because it's like, I mean, he obviously has the skill set. So he knows how to, how to do the accounting and the investment banker way of things.

So it's like, you know, you're laying off. I think it was 31,000 public sector workers, but then you're spending all this money on CAPEX, you know, government infrastructure spending that gets RFPed and then issued by private sector companies. So there's private sector job creation,

but it's public sector money that's doing it. And so this is where it's like, well, who knows, right? Yeah. Well, Canada is not alone too. You have a lot of people just kind of looking at Canada and say we have way too many public sector workers. I mean, look at the U.S. Yeah.

Like, look at the U.S. There's a lot of private companies. that are dependent on government funding. So it's not just Canada. I think the U.S. has a higher percentage of total workers that are in the public sector than Canada, actually. Let me, I don't pull this up. I have the, I mean, I know there's a lot of large companies in the U.S. that are very dependent on public government or, yeah, public spending in terms of their business. So you have to keep that in mind. Sure, sometimes the numbers might show that there is more public sector workers in one country or another, but how many

jobs are actually created for the private sector that comes from government funding? So I think that's also very important. And I think a lot of people just do not look at that whatsoever. So I think that's even even healthcare like healthcare jobs technically to my understanding are it's public fund. It's a publicly funded program, but it's privately, privately administrated. Like your hospitals are private corporations. And so they're technically private sector jobs, even though they're public funded, right? And that's just one example of the nuance, but same thing happens if I'm the government and I'm building a bunch of subway stations in Toronto, which we're doing right now. And I give that job to a large contractor while they're a private entity and those don't show up when they

hire everybody as public sector jobs. They show up as private sector jobs. Same thing, Verona, where we have a massive new hospital being built close to downtown. So the same kind of thing. But yeah, the government deficits increased as the revenues decline. Of course, there you go. Yeah. So I mean, the, so there's a couple of reasons here. So of course, the government did spend more and the revenue decline in big part was people may have forgotten already, but a carbon tax being removed. Right. So that was a part of the, yeah, the revenues decline. Yeah, the revenues declining. But there's also, there was a one-time thing. So I don't know if you remember last year the government so the i believe it's the p ssa so the public service pension so for federal

government employees they have a pension plan and they had a massive surplus and the government was able to essentially use part of that surplus a little bit of an excess surplus i know a lot of people on eggs that have no idea about how pension plans work we're like oh there you go like the government's like stealing money for the pension fund from that to uh just help like they have no clue how pension plans work. So the government is not stealing money. It is the plan sponsor for that pension plan. I have a lot of experience in that. And they are allowed when there is a surplus over a certain amount. So actuaries will do the calculation to, they have different options. So they could decide for government employees to reduce their contribution rate or they could decide to reduce a little bit, but take out some of the

surplus money. There's different things they can do. But they can also take out the surplus money and then apply it however they see fits. And people might think, oh, well, that's not fair. People contributed to that. The employer contributes a whole lot more than the employees. Just remember that. So I think over time, the employer, it's pretty much every defined benefit pension plan. The employer, in this case, the federal government contributes a lot more.

So yes, they're allowed to do that. And I remember last year was like pissing me off because people were saying like, oh, the government was doing like crooked things by doing that. No, they're not. They're allowed to do that. in the pension legislation. So I just wanted to mention that, but it did have an impact on the deficit because it was a one-time thing that was not present this year. Yeah, I know. I appreciate it. There's a couple of questions from the audience on Instagram

that I didn't catch because they didn't come into the streaming platform. But I think we already entered this one that's on screen. Will the Bank of Canada hike interest or keep it steady? I think keep it steady. My read is like the market's trying to stay that it's more likely that they'll cut than that or hike than cut, but I think that they're more likely to cut than hike. but I think they're going to hold steady and watch what the Fed does. Fed's really the ones running the show. The other one is, what do you think will happen to the condo market in the next five years with all these condos being built?

I mean, we've talked about this a lot, but I mean, supply and demand, right? Like, realtors always said, oh, supply and demand. Like, you know, more people coming into the country than we're building houses. Well, just take that and flip it on its head. And what's the answer to the question? Well, there's way more units being built than there are people to occupy them. And supply isn't just measured in people, right? You don't measure the price of a house in number of temporary foreign.

You measure the house of a price in dollars. So the supply of the money, their buying power, M2 or whatever, however you want to measure it also matters a lot, right? Because we quantify house prices in dollars. So how many dollars that are owned by the individuals that are chasing these units? There's got to be more downside risk in the condo market. Obviously, this is clear based on the fact that the government is amidst a ton of pushback, willing to clearly do something about it right now, which we're seeing play out in real

time. So that would be my answer to that question. I'm really surprised that Carney is not looking at what happened in the U.S. during after the GFC because, yeah, you saw some massive correction. I think Miami, the condo market there amongst other, like I think Las Vegas too. I remember because I, you know, I play poker. I've been like five or six time to Vegas. And there is one hotel. I think it's right next, I think it's a Vedera or right next to the area that was supposed to be a condo building and they actually converted it to a hotel right after the GFC because it was just not viable like they were not able to sell those units as the price so they converted it to a no hotel. I'm just saying a private sector can be quite resilient.

Sure, there'd be some developers that might go bankrupt. But at the end of the day, is that bad for the market? Like it'll be picked up. The prices will crash. Sure, they may be undergoing some, you know, couple of tough years, maybe there's going to be less building. But at some point, the market will recover new builders, new developers will come in and they'll start building condos if the economics actually makes sense, whether it takes two, three, four, five years. But this, this idea that we need to bail out is just, you're just, to me, you're just postponing the problem and you're essentially postponing affordability by doing so. Yeah, you're continuing to, you're perpetuating a model that should, that you should allow to fail, right? Like, we,

as a species, right? Like, you know, you hear about evolution, survival by natural selection. You need the same phenomena to exist in human systems, like the economy, like survival by economic selection or evolution by economic selection, survival of the fittest. By interrupting that process, you allow models that otherwise would not sustain to perpetuate and you just end up dealing with the same problem down the road. So totally agree with you 100%. Does that prevent governments from taking the easy road and trying to prevent pain today. Yeah, of course. Like, they're always going to do that because they don't want to have, they know that they'll never win an election if the country is burning to the ground, right? So the economy is burning to the ground.

And so that's what they're trying to avoid realistically. And it would, honestly, if they let things crash. Like I've said that. I was the one who called this. Dude, everybody absolutely ripped on me in 2022 when I said that there was going to be a bailout for condo developers. and, you know, I did it. I did. I know, but yeah, and here we are, right? And now all of a sudden, but it still remains to be seen. Like, if, I think that market dynamics tell me if there's sufficient, like,

if they're only taking a small portion of the supply and they're buying it actually below market value, then they could actually pull the market down further and faster, to be honest, if you could expedite because you're just introducing another buyer who's proving what the market is capable of clearing at to the market. And now all of the other buyers in the market, I'm like, why would I pay more than 800 bucks a foot if the government just bought off of you for 800 bucks a foot?

I'm going to pay $750. And so the only way they can actually bail out, like actually bail out, I'm not saying whether or not it's appropriate or moral hazard or is there, you know, conflict of interest or whatever. Like those things are all very clear. And I think that people are scrutinizing this hard. And I hope that they run an exceptionally transparent and

honest process around this system. But for them to actually floor prices, they have to buy all of the units above what the market is willing to pay. That's it. That's the only way to actually do it. And they're not going to do that. They just can't. No, the pushback would be way too great for that.

Yeah. To be a market saving mechanism. Yeah. And I think a good way before I wanted to talk about that Meta's new mega data center and now, we've booked a cottage for early July, and I'm already picturing the kind of trip where the days are pretty simple. Mornings outside with coffee, my daughter running around with our new puppy, afternoons by the lake, and those quiet evenings with my wife watching the sunset with a glass of wine after everyone else has gone to bed.

And while we're away enjoying that time together, the timing also made me think about our own home back in Ottawa. Early July is such a busy time in this city, with Canada Day and Blues Fest bringing so many people in. That got me thinking about how our home could be put to good use. while we're out of town as it's just sitting empty. Listing our home on Airbnb could create some extra income to help cover part of the trip while also letting another family enjoy our neighborhood during one of the best time to visit Ottawa. They could walk over to a local coffee shop, spend the afternoon at a nearby beach,

and use our place as a comfortable home base after taking in everything happening downtown. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Smart investing doesn't have to be complicated or time consuming. With BMO all-in-one ETFs, you get a complete diversified portfolio wrapped up in a single ticker. It's easy. Whether you're conservative investor or more aggressive, BMO has an all-in-one solution for you. And now, it's even more cost-effective.

BMO has cut management fees to just 0.15% on select asset allocation ETFs, helping you keep more of what you earn. Simplify your investing today at BMOetifs.com. Just before we move to that, I think it's just good to remember. It's something I've been saying for a few years. I heard from other people, so I didn't come up with that. But everything in investing in life, just saying about your personal life or investing, whatever you want to think about, it's all about tradeoffs.

Yeah. This tradeoffs, it's always, exactly, it's always going to be a trade. off. So in the case of the government stepping in, providing a floor, for example, okay, sure, they're trading off a maybe short to medium correction and prices, but then long term, they're probably trading that off with affordability, where if they actually led the market to its thing, sure, it's more paying short term, but longer term, you're getting more affordability and more of that younger population being able to get into the house and market. That's just an example. But think about your life, there's always a lot of,

going to be trade-offs. I think that's a good segue to data centers actually because I'm always like I published or put a, there's just a news thing about the data center that was happening in Alberta. And I'm generally in support of economic growth. And data centers, I have no issue with them. It's massive. And I've been wondering how long Canadian, or how long it was going to take for this capex spend to come to Canada. Like we have cold climate, we have cheap electricity, you know, we have tons of space. Our constituents seem to whine about the same amount as the, US and NIMBY random projects that are in the middle of nowhere, apparently. But, you know, it's funny to me, like, when you talk about tradeoffs, it's like,

you don't want a data center in your, in your country or wherever, because of water or whatever. And those, you know, those arguments have tons of holes in them. Like, you know, a golf course or like almond farm or whatever uses like insane amounts of more water. And why aren't we demonizing those? But, you know, your average person, like, if we're being not, sorry, if we're, if we're, if we're, if I can step out and not be diplomat.

Your average consumer is an NPC, right? They're a non-player character. They want to go to their work. They want to make their wages. They want to be able to pay all their bills. They want to go home and they want to go to the office and stare at their small screen all day or medium-sized screen all day and come home and stare at their big screen all day while they're also staring at their small screen all day or at the same time, like Doom,

Scroll, Netflix, whatever. All the infrastructure that I just mentioned requires data centers. And so it's like, do you actually want those things, but you're not willing to pay the cost? You want to be able to free to doomscroll for free and to use chat GPT for free or 20 bucks a month, but you don't want a, you know, governments to put $13 billion projects in the middle of nowhere. I just like, it's just blown my mind, right? And I think like that this is, I think that people will just take the opportunity to complain about whatever they possibly can and to distract themselves from the fact that they,

might actually be the problem, right? That they don't want to look in the mirror. So I like large infrastructure and economic growth. I work in the AI space, and I think that it's, that I've seen it change the lives of many people. And I, and I hope that, you know, a lot of the people who consume these things and then also don't support them can take a look in the mirror and see what they're actually arguing about.

Yeah. And at the end of the day, apparently it's going to be creating over 3,000 construction job and about 250, 300 operational job. So it will create some jobs. I mean, it is absolutely massive. I think what I read is the equivalent of powering a city of 800,000 homes. But they are using natural gas and they're going to be building a new natural gas power plant. At the end of the day, natural gas is severely underpriced in Canada and Alberta.

They glare it. Like, for context on how overpriced it is, the way the infrastructure is built is that they, like, if they produce too much, that is being consumed in the pipelines that go to Ontario and heat our homes and all this stuff, they literally set it on fire. They just burn it. Like, so you, like, that's how much, like, we have access is free.

They literally have to spend money to get rid of the excess. Because they don't have the facilities to store it. Well, it's not being consumed, like power on grid. Like, yeah. Yeah, so you can liquefy it and then ship it and which we're starting to build the business around that. Yeah, but liquefying is, it's an intensive business. And they are, I think there's a big facility to NBC.

that they're looking to expand, but it's not, you know, it's, these are massive projects. I mean, we saw it with the war in the Middle East. I think one of the facilities, I think was it Qatar that was hit. I can't remember. But they said it will take multiple years and that was a natural gas facility. But this one essentially, it's the natural gas benchmark in Alberta. So the Alberta Natural Gas Bank Mart or Aco always trades that a significant discount to NRIHUB in. the U.S. the main benchmark, there's a few other ones. It's always 60, 70% discount. So this could be a good thing for the energy sector, natural gas producer, like a company like Tourmaline comes to mine here, where they can, if there's more and more of these data centers, essentially just

tapping into this, this lock natural gas because of the lack of infrastructure, it could actually help push prices of Canadian natural gas a bit higher. So from that perspective, I don't think it's that bad of a thing, especially when you consider that North America as a whole, natural gas is much cheaper than what you'd be paying in Europe or elsewhere in the world. Yeah, 100%. Anything else you wanted to do on this? I mean, maybe quickly the pipeline, I got to jump here, but pipeline from Ontario to BC. We can cover that next week, maybe like, well, because it'll be, you know, we can.

Yeah, I mean, it was just, I guess, quickly, just an announcement. I would be getting past an announcement. Do you? Like, I don't see this actually happening. If the current climate continues, I think there's a chance. I think it will need federal government backing because I don't think any conglomerate or companies would do this project without some kind of guarantee from the federal government. Oh, yeah, for sure.

So maybe that's why they announced it to try and force Carney's hand to basically opine on it, right? Like what are they going to say? Like, what's, now he has to say something. Where is your hat, Doug, for it? I'm kind of disappointed. Didn't have the cowboy hat on. Yeah, isn't the stampede season? Yeah.

Come on. But yeah, I think that's just it. I think it has a best chance not happen. He's not a real conservative. They take every chance they can possibly get to toss a cowboy hat on cosplay. Yeah. I mean, I think it has the best chance to happen than ever right now just because of the geopolitical

and situation in the U.S. I do with that, but I still think it's a super low chance. That's my thing. But I'd love to be wrong. I mean, the longer the war in Iran continues, I think the higher the likely to,

it has happened. If Trump, you know, whatever Trump does in the next couple of years or, you know, you kind of continue having hardliners in the U.S. and regarding Canada, I think more and more people will be supporting that. So I think it's probably a good, good point to end it on. Yeah, you have to go. I do, yeah. All right. Thanks a lot, everybody. For those of you listening to the recording, again, there's a full thing on, on most platforms like YouTube, et cetera, but our audio is really bad for the first half. So we'll save all the people who are listening on the podcast stream, the ear pain. If you really want to hear what we said for the first little bit, you can go find it on YouTube. Anyway, thanks a lot of everybody.

Really appreciate you tuning in, and we'll see you again next week. The Canadian Investor Podcasts should not be construed as investment or financial advice. The host and guests featured may own securities or assets discussed on this podcast. Always do your own due diligence or consult with a financial professional before making any financial or investment decisions.