Angela Tozer presents Good economics or just colonialism?: Canada’s public debt and the Carney government’s One Canadian Economy Act.

In the first half of the nineteenth century colonial governments that eventually joined to become Canada borrowed unprecedented amounts of capital at low interest rates. This debt was then bought and sold as securities on the London Stock Exchange, and consolidated at Confederation into the Canadian public debt we know today. The eventual Canadian government borrowed against Indigenous homelands, much of it unceded, unsurrendered, and treaty protected, and spent these borrowed funds on extractivist projects to build Canada. This talk examines colonial systems put in place in the nineteenth century and how they shaped contemporary Canadian economic policy, in particular, the Carney government’s 2025 One Canadian Economy Act.

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