This past week I listened to two podcasts in preparation for Canada's upcoming federal election. I listened to Prime Minister Mark Carney with Scott Galloway and I listened to Pierre Poilievre with Brian Lilley of the Toronto Sun. If any of you have any other recommendations for an interview that I should listen to, please share it in the comment section below.

Here's what I would say. Carney came across as more measured and less direct. But naturally very capable when it comes to understanding the economic implications of our shifting global order. He wasn't forceful when talking about oil and gas pipelines, but I understand that he fully supports them. This is critical to diversifying our trade and frankly gaining more market power.

I'm skeptical of government being able to act as any sort of big developer and/or stimulate a thriving prefab construction industry. The latter is being worked on by a lot of the private sector; what is needed are dramatically lower fees and less barriers to development. I was, however, comforted by the fact that Carney did seem to reduce government's role to an enabler for private enterprise.

Both are promising dramatic cuts to development charges, which is essential. Poilievre is promising to eliminate the federal sales tax on all new homes priced under $1.3 million, whereas Carney wants to do it for homes under $1 million and only for first-time buyers. Carney also focused a lot on increasing construction trade capacity as a way to dramatically increase overall supply.

Broadly, Poilievre was more focused on "axing the tax" and removing the barriers to developing new housing. As we have

Spain is a beautiful country and lots of people want to visit and/or buy property there. But here's what Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez recently had to say about this:

Just to give an idea, in 2023 alone non-European Union residents bought around 27,000 houses and flats in Spain. And they didn't do it to live in them, they didn't do it for their families to have a place to live, they did it to speculate, to make money from them, which we – in the context of shortage that we are in – obviously cannot allow.

And by cannot allow, he means that Spain is preparing to implement a 100% tax on property purchases made by buyers of non-EU countries, such as the UK. It's not quite a foreign buyer ban, but it's certainly a punitive tax that should, in theory, dissuade the majority of buyers.

I am, however, unclear as to how this will interact with Spain's golden visa program. For over 10 years, Spain has been encouraging foreigners to buy real estate in the country (minimum value of €500,000) in exchange for permanent residency.