Livio Di Matteo: Inflation will be stable but higher in 2022

To close out the year, we've asked our contributors and staff to make a prediction about 2022. You would think, at least since the early days of 2020, that we'd have learned our lesson about making predictions, but we couldn't resist. Feel free to save these if you want to embarrass us with them later. Here are five quick predictions for 2022, with some more serious than others: After months of being told that inflation is transitory, the New Year will confirm that the recent inflationary surge was indeed part of a transitory process to a new and higher but stable overall rate of inflation that in the fullness of time will occasionally approach 2 percent.The arrival of new variants of COVID-19 will continue and tax the nomenclature resources of the World Health Organization but the end times of the pandemic will indeed be nigh with the arrival of the Alpha-Omega variant.The issue of persistent supply chain disruptions and shortages of goods in the Canadian economy will be dealt with by creating a federal Royal Commission to study the matter which will recommend that a new federal government Ministry of Supply Chain Issues be established. The new ministry will be designated a pressing national priority and have no shortage of employees.The Ontario Government will balance its budget and pay down its entire provincial debt by selling off all provincial government buildings and property in the GTA and relocating the provincial capital and the entire civil service to Dryden, Ontario. The legislative buildings at Queen’s Park, however, will be retained for ceremonial purposes.The sun will rise, the sun will set, governments will rise, governments will fall, new public health officers will go and come, and the world will wag on.