Frank Stronach

Save the family farm

February 14, 2023

When you think about King Charles III, the last thing you probably think about is family farming. But Canada’s new monarch made an impassioned plea over a year ago for small family farmers in the United Kingdom and around the world to come together in a co-operative movement to better ensure their survival. A strong advocate of organic farming, Charles has also created what he calls a “Terra Carta,” a charter that lays out a roadmap for producing environmentally sustainable, healthy food, while ensuring the survival of small family farms. But in the U.K., as in Canada, many small family farms are barely scraping by, and those who grew up on such farms are increasingly fleeing the fields and barns

Canadians need to rise up and fight for their prosperity

August 15, 2023

Canadians know deep in their bones that our country is in trouble and our economy is sick. We also know that we have to fix things because time is quickly running out. The national debt is a case in point. If we don’t tackle this problem now, the buildup of debt and the interest that keeps piling on top of it will drastically affect future generations, who will be stuck with the bill. And that’s not the only economic problem we face. The gap between the wealthy and the workers is growing larger and larger. Many Canadians are living paycheque to paycheque. And it’s become increasingly difficult for young Canadians to find good-paying jobs or afford to buy a home.

Government bureaucracy is the cholesterol clogging up the economy

July 11, 2023

Back in the early 1980s, when commercial computers first came onto the market, they were sold with a big promise: they could do the work of an entire floor of employees in a typical office building and could dramatically decrease the amount of paperwork and paper filing for businesses and organizations. But it never happened. If anything, the piles of paperwork, government forms and compliance reports that needed to be filled out increased enormously — and with it, so too did the size of our bureaucracy. As a result, today you see hundreds and hundreds more office buildings staffed with more people who devote a large chunk of each workday to regulation compliance requests. The facts bear this out: government

Schools have role to play in helping children grow strong and healthy

July 25, 2023

Most parents would surely agree that our nation’s number 1 priority should be the health of our children. But if the old saying that “you are what you eat” is true, then our kids are in a lot of trouble. Many children are eating unhealthy, non-organic foods at home, at school and at fast food restaurants. It’s one of the main reasons why we’ve seen an alarming rise in illnesses such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes in Canadian children. These illnesses drastically reduce the quality of life for a growing number of children and hinder their ability to learn. They also cost our health-care system millions of dollars each year. The universal hope and prayer of Canadian parents is

Whatever happened to balancing the budget?

February 28, 2023

The great British economist Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that countries should be run like any well-managed household: they shouldn’t spend more revenue than they raise. It’s a time-honoured principle. Every family, farmer and small business owner in Canada knows that if you continuously spend more money than you make you’ll eventually go bankrupt. Why, then, does that same principle never seem to apply to governments, which routinely run deficits regardless of which party holds the reins of power?Most Canadians would agree that we have to begin paying down our national debt, but we can only do that if we first start balancing the federal budget. Following decades of budget shortfalls and an international credit rating downgrade,

Canada must slash bureaucracy to reap economic prosperity

June 13, 2023

When I was chairman of Magna International Inc., I could always tell how competitive one of our factories was the moment I set foot in the front door. All I had to do was look at how many people were working upstairs in the administrative and executive offices. When you run a factory, it doesn’t matter how productive the workers on the factory floor are if there are too many people working in administration. If overhead isn’t kept trimmed to the bone, the business will simply not be competitive. This same principle applies to countries as well as companies. One of the great dangers any democratic society faces is the enormous buildup of bureaucracy over time as government grows and