My fellow Canadians...

The next Canadian federal election is in 2019.

Just exactly when solar got less expensive than coal as a means of generating electricity I'll leave to future historians; it might have been 2016.  It might be this year, or 2018.  It really isn't going to be later than that.  The Chinese are investing very large sums -- equivalent to hundreds of billions in USD -- and good for them.  They need to solve their smog problem.  Solar getting cheaper for everybody else in the process is hardly bad, either.

About a quarter of everything, market-value-wise, sits on fossil carbon.  Thereabouts of 70 trillion-with-a-T USD.  Even if you completely ignore climate change[1], anthropogenic climate forcing with atmosphere dumping of (mostly) carbon, all of that 70 trillion is overvalued.  When the market puts a sustained excessive value on something, we call it a bubble.  This one is the Carbon Bubble.

It's going to pop before the next election.  It's, well, there's no reason to suppose it isn't going to make 2008 look like a modest price adjustment.  Trudeau's government will have low odds of re-election, because generally Canadians won't vote for the government if the economy is bad.

(On a scale from "downturn" to "abandon capitalism as a failed experiment", it's going to be much closer to "abandon" than "downturn".  Everybody's political energies for the next few years in most of the developed world[0] are going into trying to hang on to a vaguely tolerable status quo in preference to a neo-con death cult; the will and the ability to do something sensible about the economy isn't going to be there.  So we're going to go off the cliff.)

Are we going to vote for the NDP in 2019?  Well, it depends on the leader.  If the NDP elect another leader who is sober and respectable and runs to the right of Brian Mulroney, very probably not. Voting for the austerity candidate in an economic crisis is a terrible plan.  (Voting for someone out for moral purity of doctrine is a terrible plan, too.)

So it's somewhere between plausible and highly likely we're going to get a Conservative government in 2019,  EVEN IF the Conservative leader is some sort of seriously detached from the consideration of facts.  People will not let go of the expectation Conservatives are good at the economy, no matter how much contrary evidence they get.

March 27th is the last day you can buy (for 15 CAD) a Conservative Party membership[2], enabling you to vote for Conservative Party leader.  There's one choice -- Michael Chong -- who is engaging with facts[3].  The other dozen choices are at least as blessedly free of the taint of factual knowledge as a bunch of new-hatched chickens.  (They are, for example, nigh-all climate deniers.  What they think this will do for Alberta's bitumen economy after the Carbon Bubble[4] has burst I can't imagine.)

If you're Canadian and not particularly politically committed, I urge you to buy a Conservative Party membership and vote for Michael Chong.  We really don't need someone who can't do arithmetic or face facts running the country in a crisis, and that's otherwise what it looks like we'll be getting.

[0] Canada, too.  Both our largest trading partner and some of our federal politicians keep having what amount to excursions from consensus reality.

[1] DO NOT completely ignore climate change.  Food security goes first, and will go before the sea rises and the coastal cities drown because we can't move them uphill if civilization has collapsed due to starvation.

[2] don't use a pre-paid credit card.  There's an ongoing something-or-other with fraud being alleged involving pre-paid cards.

[3] in a worrisome "markets are great!" sort of way.  Markets _can_ be great, if they're properly maintained (which is to say, regulated); they don't get or stay great on their own.  Of course, if you're running for CPC leader, you had better not go saying you think markets require regulation to function, and let people read between the line in your policy papers to make up their own minds about whether or not you're sane.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_bubble  Note that this is talking about "we can't burn it!" more than it's talking about "the markets are going to undergo a correction"; the plummeting price of solar is going to get there and cause the correction long before carbon pricing or other regulation driven by governments shall.