It's been nearly 20 years since inflation has been this high in Canada

This argument in favour of inflation always baffles me .. yeah, maybe people weigh different reasons for/against buying something like a house now or rather later ... but I'm rather sceptic that regular people who'd buy a house to live in it (who could afford to buy it right now) would have a relevant tendency to wait another 10 years because there's almost no inflation. For entities such as real estate investors the inflation aspect is obviously a lot more relevant, yes. But for regular people, most buying decisions are probably dominated by the aspect of when they need the thing, not by the speculation of whether the thing they could use right now might still cost the same in the future.

Besides that, the notion of spurring people to buy now rather than later is IMO a bit outdated. Buying less now and shifting consumption into the (hopefully less carbon footprinty) future might be one of the most important levers to push, to get humanity out of the climate catastrophe trap. Might just be the argument in favour of deflation ... let's hear it in 10 years from now.

I'm also curious what all these modern monetary advocates will bring up when - contrary to their predictions - inflation doesn't just conveniently level off to an acceptable 2 per cent in the next 18 months.

I'd lightly disagree with this and say that a naturally small but positive interest rate is desirable but not always good or right. That's different than saying a small but positive interest rate is optimal in ever scenario or regardless of what it takes to make it happen.

We've been playing tricks with interest rates to attain a positive interest for a decade and now bond markets are so drastically distorted that we are having to do increasingly drastic measures to try to get our fix.

I would argue the problem is that for much of that time, mild disinflation was priced into the market clearing rate. And instead of taking our medicine then, we have created an incredibly fragile environment that has the potential to be way more painful than the thing we were trying to prevent.

Cpi is 5 but I'm going to argue 7-8 is a more meaningful number to the average American right now. We can't raise rates but 7-8 sustained is also intolerable. I think our low but positive rates at all costs attitude is going to turn out not to look so clever through the lense of history