Trudeau is so out of touch as to believe Canadians can be convinced their budgets will balance themselves with a two-month GST holiday and $250. Pictured: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Photo Credit: Justin Trudeau/X.
For many Canadian households, this Christmas season may be the toughest – economically speaking – that they have ever had to experience. Yet, one may not guess this from the smiling faces of our federal leaders – whether it is Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault from sunny Baku, Azerbaijan, or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waxing on about his climate fight in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Multiple statements made this past week from the governing Liberals reaffirm they are sorrily out of touch with Canadians’ household reality.
The announcements by Guilbeault at the United Nations (UN) climate summit committed Canadians to pay increased amounts to foreign agendas, over and above the more than $5 billion pledged by the PM at the last UN summit. As it were, these Baku meetings were a choreographed plea for first world countries (minus China, Russia, and India) to pay more than a trillion dollars annually for redistribution to third world countries through UN agencies and programs. Playing his part, Guilbeault took centre stage to announce a new $2 billion public-private Canadian financial platform for the UN. He would later hint that Canada is prepared to launch a new carbon tax on Canadian exports shipped from the country’s ports.
The Trudeau Liberals are prepared to do as much as they can with no regard of the cost to Canadians, of the inefficiency and likely deceit of their national green programs, and the fact that their green initiatives have failed to result in a decrease in emissions in Canada. Guilbeault’s $1 billion green slush fund is a subject of ongoing criticism in Ottawa as the Liberals have misappropriated funds for their own Party members (a government audit showed that of the 226 projects funded in the past six years for a total of $836 million, there were 186 conflicts of interest!). Further to this, Guilbeault himself is accused of taking $254 million to slip to his own company. And this is but the tip of the iceberg, as the Liberals are keeping any details of the government’s $8 billion Net Zero Accelerator Fund from the public.
There are other disturbing news events that signal the Liberals have little regard for just how much money their green initiatives are costing – and the impact they are having on Canadians. Consider the tens of billions of dollars of grant and subsidies handed out to the EV car and battery enterprises. Now we have facilities cutting production and, in the case of the Northvolt factory expected to file for bankruptcy, some tax dollars are ill-fated to be written off. Consider the hikes and hardships of the carbon taxes as well, which are projected to cost the Canadian economy $30.5 billion annually by 2030. This tax regime has failed to in its objective to reduce emissions (and, even worse, the UN reports that Canada has badly slipped in the last few years to 62nd spot of 67 countries).
Guilbeault has also recently announced a cap on the Canadian oil and gas sector, which will limit emissions within the next eight years to 35 per cent below 2019 levels. He crowed as he applied the cap, “Look around the world. No other major oil and gas producer is doing what we’re doing, the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, the Gulf States. We are the only large oil and gas producer in the world to do this.” But throttling Canada’s oil and gas production is delivering a body blow to the country’s economy and future prosperity. It is something that should be rethought, especially since the election of Donald Trump and the Americans’ new priorities on energy security – so says many, including former Liberal finance minister Bill Morneau and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
Morneau stated, “Energy security is going to be critical” and so, “I would question whether putting caps on emissions right now is the right time.” Smith reasoned that “It will jeopardize our relationship with the US… If you put on the table an emissions cap, which we know will cause a cap in production, you’re not going to be able to negotiate (with the U.S.) in a way that’s going to be best for Canada.”
Still, in an Azerbaijan media conference, when asked about the results of the U.S. election Guilbeault stated that it “changes nothing for us.” He said: “We are as determined as we were to continue moving forward with climate action, both domestically and internationally.”
This stance was reiterated by Trudeau a few days later, half-way around the world in Brazil, when he said that if the U.S. steps back from its global commitments on the environment, this will provide “opportunities” for Canada. Trudeau claimed, “If Mr. Trump doesn’t want to take on the opportunities associated with climate change, Canada will continue to.”
Stepping up to do more and pay more for the UN’s climate action agenda, as Trudeau and Guilbeault suggests, comes at a significant financial cost. This is not lost on the Liberals, as they had planned to follow up their promises on the world stage with promises of relief for Canadians back home. On Thursday, Trudeau and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland travelled to Toronto to explain they were giving Canadians a holiday tax reprieve on GST for select products, followed up early in the new year with a $250 cheque in the mail.
There were smiles all around discussing this Christmas gift with no mention of the government’s own fiscal nightmare. In Ottawa, the Parliamentary Budget Office reported that Freeland has overspent her projected annual budget by $7 billion, a figure she set in April. Also reported, the national debt will balloon to somewhere over $1.4 trillion in 2025 with the greatest expenditure being bank charges for interest payments on this debt. So, it appears with their Thursday announcement, Canada’s mathematically challenged prime minister and career-journalist finance minister are ignoring the budget monster under the bed so that they might reassure Canadians with a story of dancing sugar plums for the holidays.
But this is likely to prove too cute for the harsh fiscal realities facing Canadians these days. Statistics don’t lie when the dollars don’t add up. The fact is that nearly half of all Canadians are living paycheque to paycheque and recent data from Habitat for Humanity tells us three in five Canadians (59 per cent) are sacrificing basic needs like food, living essentials, clothing, and education in order to afford their rent or mortgage payments. There is no wiggle room for anyone, and the irony is that Canadians are spending more on taxes than on essential living expenses – as high as 45 cents on every dollar earned.
Here are some more 2024 yuletide stats to contemplate. There are 1.4 million Canadian children living in poverty and more than a quarter of these fell into poverty in the last two years. The prices of food staples have skyrocketed more than 20-50 per cent in the past seven years. More Canadians than ever rely on food banks: a 90 per cent increase in the last five years; one in ten Torontonians rely on food banks, which is a 273 per cent increase in the last five years – 3.49 million client visits in a 12-month period last year. Personal insolvencies of Canadians struggling with the cost of living are up 15.4 per cent year-over-year, and 20.2 per cent year-over-year in Ontario; a total of 34,588 people across Canada filed for bankruptcy from July to September this year.
None of this seems to register with the Liberals. Their “forge ahead” attitude on the government’s green initiatives and the UN climate action agenda is best captured in observations made by PM Trudeau while in Brazil. A relaxed, smiling Trudeau sat down for a one-on-one interview in which he admonished the international community about prioritizing the fight for climate change. To Canadians, he suggested there was nothing more pressing – not feeding your family or paying your rent – than paying for the cost of pollution at home and around the world. Citizens must look beyond their own concerns to pay for the climate actions required in Africa and Asia.
Trudeau said (verbatim), “It’s really, really easy when you’re in a short-term survive, I gotta be able to pay the rent this month, I’ve gotta be able to buy groceries for my kids, to say, OK, let’s put climate change as a slightly lower priority. And that’s something that’s instinctive. When the storm comes, you want to hunker down and just sort of huddle up and wait for it to blow over. We can’t do that around climate change.”
He also made a self-congratulatory comment, saying his government “brought in one of the strongest and most broad-based prices on pollution of any advanced economy in the world. It is no longer free to pollute in Canada and we’ve won three elections on it already and we’re going to be facing a fourth where it’s very much in question.”
This interview is a must watch as it epitomizes the sureness of the Trudeau Liberals in pursuing their green initiatives irrespective of the economic hardships they are causing for Canadians. As he finished his remarks, Trudeau flashed a rather smug grin that betrayed a misplaced confidence of a trust-fund kid living on the exhaust of his grandfather’s gas station empire — a grin of someone so out of touch as to believe Canadians can be convinced their household budgets will balance themselves with a two-month GST holiday and $250.
Chris George is an advocate, government relations advisor, and writer/copy editor. As president of a public relations firm established in 1994, Chris provides discreet counsel, tactical advice and management skills to CEOs/Presidents, Boards of Directors and senior executive teams in executing public and government relations campaigns and managing issues. Prior to this PR/GR career, Chris spent seven years on Parliament Hill on staffs of Cabinet Ministers and MPs. He has served in senior campaign positions for electoral and advocacy campaigns at every level of government. Today, Chris resides in Almonte, Ontario where he and his wife manage www.cgacommunications.com. Contact Chris at chrisg.george@gmail.com.
