Gerald Butts

speaker

1,669 appearances 11 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 15 Sep

Gerald Butts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.

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The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge · Moore-Butts Conversation Encore Episode -- Is Affordability An Issue That Governments Can Even Solve? · 19 Aug 2026 podcast

But then there are bigger structural things in the Canadian economy.

And here it's gonna sound like to your listeners that James and I

Have changed places because I've always been a big advocate for competition in the economy.

And I think that, which sounds like a conservative point of view, but it shouldn't be, it should be a liberal point of view as well.

And we have an economy that's let's fa let's face it, in big sectors like telecom, like financial services, um, and for all intents and purposes in our big cities like housing, where three or four developers control.

The vast majority of buildable land, which they bank and only build on when the prices go to a certain uh amount.

And it's got nothing to do with how many trees are on their lots, by the way.

It's got everything to do with the value of the lot.

Uh, the government's got to foster more competition in the economy, which ultimately, from a market perspective, is the only way to drive down prices.

And uh, if we've only got two or three providers of all of the major components.

months of your average Canadian family's household bill, then those costs are gonna be higher than they are elsewhere.

I went for

know what I can add to that, Peter.

I I I think that it to g again to use the metaphor of a rorschach test, everybody sees their own ideological predisposition in these crises.

So you have um

uh people on the right saying the solution to all these problems is to cut people's taxes, which, as we all know, uh taken to its extreme, can undermine the things that make life, you mentioned healthcare earlier, James, that make life relatively more affordable in Canada than it does in the United States.

Um and on the uh other extreme on the left, it's always the problem of corporate Canada

And uh the way to deal with it is to call Galen Weston and the Sobey family in front of a parliamentary committee and yell at them for the TV cameras.

And of course, none neither of those things is gonna be in any way effective in lowering the monthly grocery bill of your average Canadian.

The truth, however, as usual, is a mix of less extreme

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