Over the last day or so I received a few of these: “I watched your interview last night. Your comments about not buying real estate at this time I found very careless for a Politian. Influencing consumers in such a negative way are not helpful for the economy.” (From a Royal LePage agent in BC.)

Plus, a few like this: “How much do you pay the folks at CTV to actually put you on the air to plug your book. Do you actually think you’ll be able to retire on the proceeds from the sale of that piece of crap. I’m sure they can find a good use for it in the back woods of rural Ontario where there’s no indoor plumbing.” (The words of a mortgage broker in Calgary.)

Those comments were in response to this interview, but these days I am routinely peppered with airborne bovine waste from real estate industry people who hate me, hate my recent book, hate my ideas, and are hot to find someone to blame. But it’s not their fault. After all, they’ve been misled, as have legions of recent homebuyers. The big industry spokeguys have been resolute in their message that the Canadian housing market is somehow immune from the real estate disease flying around the world. Our “experts”, in fact, continue. Monday night I watched CREA economist George Klump call the current market “balanced.” And he had a straight face.

For the first time in 10 years, housing prices across Canada are going down, not up. It’s as I predicted some time ago here, and the logical result of a collapse in sales. Nationally, real estate deals are off by almost 20% and in some places, like Vancouver, it’s 40%. There’s more to come, especially in the wake of the mortgage bomb Jim Flaherty lobbed last week. As a result, everybody’s house will decline in value, whether you bought it last week or 40 years ago.

But this is not just about houses. Real estate is but one canary in the bottomless shaft.

As you may know, oil prices took the biggest tumble in 17 years on Monday because traders now think the US economy is in even worse shape than we all imagined. About 90 American banks are expected to fail in the near future, just as Indymac did on Friday. (People started lining up at 4 am on Monday outside Indymac branches, desperate to get cash out.) The Securities and Exchange Commission found it necessary to bring in a new emergency rule yesterday to prevent short selling in mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are on their way towards a bailout by Washington.

GM is laying off 4,000 more people, all of them white-collar managers, and rumours persist the company won’t make it. The Bank of Canada warned the economy is slowing and inflation is rising, with the slowest growth in 17 years, which likely means Ottawa will be going into deficit next year. Oh yeah, and the Toronto stock market lost almost 400 points. Said my pal Sherry Cooper at Nesbitt Burns: “It’s about the financial crisis in the U.S., which has caused contagion worldwide.”

This will get worse. The housing market will dry up, job losses will mount, the stock market will decline, the economy will slip into recession and we’ll be paying handsomely for the real estate, credit and consumer binge that’s been upon us since Nine Eleven and the overblown collapse of interest rates.

It may not be politically sexy to tell you this, and I’m sure Stephane Dion would wish it otherwise, not to mention Stephen Harper. But I’m not going to lie to be popular. I’ve been a personal finance author, analyst and commentator for decades, and when I see a turd, I’ll call it one. Unlike Mr. Klump, I won’t try to polish it.

Canadians have never had this much debt, in mortgages, lines of credit, on credit cards, car loans or consumer loans. At the same time, the after-tax savings rate is zero. Eight-tenths of all the wealth is in housing, and I think you can tell which way that’s headed. Making it worse are the highest energy prices ever, which sap away family cash and will render this winter a tough one indeed.

There’s nobody to blame for this, but us. We watched too many episodes of “Flip this House,” bought too many plasma TVs, added too many granite counter tops, borrowed for too many vacations, let too many married kids buy houses when they had no money, listened to experts who were shameless self-dealers and voted for politicians who promised more, not less.

Finally, as we watch this movie play out (I’ve seen it, and know the ending), I’ll repeat: Ottawa should have cut income taxes, not the GST, to ameliorate this. Jim Flaherty should never have allowed 40-year mortgage terms and nothing-down financing. Federal spending should never have increased at double the inflation rate over the past three budgets. Income trusts should never have been attacked and that wealth decimated. Our government should not have talked the dollar up or blown an historic budget surplus. Most of all, they should have acted in the interests of us all, and not in the constant, obsessive cause of re-election.

I read yesterday that Mr. Harper has committed $3 billion in new spending in the past two weeks. I hear there are many more announcements to come this summer. Even if I were not an MP, not in opposition, non-political, I’d be saying the same thing, word for word.

The American economy’s been hobbled. Must we follow?