Harper's Ship is Sinking in Fake Lake

When your entire administration is based on nothing more than photo ops and controlled information, sooner or later it's going to topple, and I think that may finally be happening.

The United States are giving travel warnings telling their citizens to avoid Toronto during the G8/G20 summits.

Criticisms about spending and management around this year’s G20/G8 summits continue to grab headlines in this country and beyond. The US has issued a travel alert for Americans, advising them not to visit Toronto during the G20 summit as protests could quickly turn violent. “Even demonstrations that are meant to be peaceful can become violent and unpredictable,” the advisory reads.

“You should avoid them if at all possible.” Bloomberg News weighed in saying this summit has allowed Canada’s opposition to attack the Prime Minister’s economic credibility, damaging a the message Harper wanted to impress on colleagues and voters: that this country was the last in the G7 to enter the global recession and the first to recover.

It's quite interesting that the message he wanted to send was as fake as his lake. We only appeared to fair better because Jim Flaherty bought up 125 billion dollars worth of sub-prime mortgages. The same sub-prime mortgages that he allowed to infect our once sound banking system with in the first place.

Even Forbes magazine weighed in on the subject:

For all the recent bravado claiming that Canada's supposedly boring yet prudent financial regulations have steered it permanently clear of housing bubble territory, the simple truth is that key causes of the U.S. housing bubble have been sufficiently replicated in Canada.CMHC: Fannie and Freddie's Canadian Cousin - For example, while it is technically true that Canada does not have its own publicly-traded GSEs such as Fannie Mae .. and Freddie Mac .. to artificially inflate its housing market, it has the next best thing. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) is Canada's national housing agency used to provide mortgage insurance, which is fully integrated by the federal government ....

(Uh) Oh, Canada! - Since 2007, when the first effects of the credit crunch began to be felt, the Canadian government postponed the housing bubble's burst by dramatically loosening lending standards, allowing CMHC to insure mortgages with 40-year amortizations and 0% down-payments for the first time in history. This of course flooded the market with new, high-risk borrowers, propping up already historically high prices with unsustainable, artificial demand. From 2007 to early 2009, the total dollar value of CMHC's outstanding MBSs grew from $138 billion to $265 billion, an increase of 92%. During this same time, the total mortgage credit outstanding on the collective books of Canadian banks increased by only 1% to $447 billion.

In other words, all the market demand that has been propping up Canadian house prices can be attributed to Canada's version of subprime loans that the free market was not willing to bear the risk of.

The conservatives are now at their lowest level in the latest EKOS poll: 30.5% and many of Harper's staff, seeing the writing on the wall are planning their exits, even Guy Giorno, the man who's really been running the country for the past two years.

The media have mutinied, the staff are bailing and Harper is up his lake without a paddle. Hope he can swim.