Canada has experienced an economic Lost Decade. Pictured: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Photo Credit: Justin Trudeau/X.
Through the last 10 years, the Trudeau government’s mismanagement of the fiscal budgets and national economy has done irreparable damage to the country’s ability to grow and prosper. Justin “the budget will balance itself” Trudeau, finance ministers Bill Morneau and Chrystia Freeland, and industry ministers Navdeep Bains and Francois-Philippe Champagne – and special economic advisor to the prime minister Mark Carney – have all failed Canadians. The Liberal MPs, and the NDP MPs who propped up this government and supported its budgets and economic plans year over year, have placed Canadians in a straitjacket – constrained possibly for generations. This is not hyperbole when one considers the sorry state of the country’s economy after the Liberals’ “Lost Decade.”
The actual numbers – the trillion-plus dollar national debt and the annual deficits of billions of dollars – are unimaginable at this point. What is a billion dollars, or a trillion dollars when one in two working Canadians are struggling to pay for the roof over their heads, and one in three cannot keep food on the table for their family?
So, dispensing with actual figures, consider these facts about how the Trudeau Liberals have mismanaged the country’s economy. This year will mark 10 years of consecutive Liberal deficit budgets, including a few years that mark the largest deficits in the country’s history. Currently the government is factoring annual deficits higher than during the Great Depression, World War I and World War II, and the height of the global financial crisis in 2008-09.
The alarming deficit spending of the Trudeau government has earned it the notorious distinction of accumulating more national debt than all previous federal governments in the history of our country – combined. In fact, the debt has piled up to the point that the government was forced to raise its debt ceiling – twice in 24 months.
Since 2015 the Liberals have more than doubled the national debt and this comes at a tremendous loss. Canadians now must spend more on bank interest charges servicing the national debt than on any other budget line item, including health care and defence. It is expected that these interest payments will rise significantly in the next five years. The bottom line is that servicing the national debt costs Canadians big money (more than a billion dollars a week) that could otherwise go to programs and services.
The Trudeau government has increased the size of the federal bureaucracy by 40 per cent (more than 110,000 bureaucrats hired in nine years) and pay them wages far more than an average Canadian worker might hope for – providing them with perks and privileges like working from home and indexed pensions. Consider that it takes the taxes of more than three working Canadians (at the national average income of $57,000) to pay for one federal bureaucrat salary.
Operational spending (the cost of government) has increased a third, and total government spending has near doubled with the Liberals. To summarize, the federal bureaucracy has never been so big, or so costly.
This week it was exposed that the Trudeau government has spent a record amount outsourcing to consultants – even though they manage the largest workforce in the country. Almost $18 billion was spent on consultants, an increase of 13.5 per cent over last year when the Liberals promised Canadians they would rein in the practice of outsourcing. It is madness that 85 per cent of all professional and special services for our government was outsourced to external parties. (What are the 100,000s of federal bureaucrats doing — managing the consultants?)
This Liberal practice of doling out money to friendly consultancies has resulted in multi-million-dollar boondoggles and scams like the ArriveCan app and millions of unaccounted for dollars; like the sole sourced contracts to McKinsey and Co. that the federal auditor-general reported did not demonstrate value for money; like the ever-increasing amounts going annually to Deloitte and other consulting firms.
Then there is the scandalous spending that has resulted in billions being flushed to who-knows-where: such as former minister Catherine McKenna’s 20,000 missing infrastructure projects that cost the government $187 billion; the untold billions lost during the pandemic with the government’s poorly managed business subsidies and personal relief programs; and, the current green slush fund scandal and the potentially hundreds of millions of dollars given away to Liberal-friendly businesses and individuals – as well as to the environment minister’s business interests.
The Ottawa rumour mill is churning these days with speculation of what might be found should the Trudeau government’s foreign aid contracts and program funding undergo the same scrutiny as is taking place south of the border where American citizens are now learning of the outrageous misappropriation of tax dollars through USAID.
The 2015-2025 decade will be defined not only by the Liberal government’s gross and wasteful spending but also by its ineptitude in fostering economic growth and sustaining the country’s competitive standing. Today, Canada is experiencing its worst economic growth since the depression era of the 1930s. Canadians’ measure of wealth, as factored by the gross domestic product (GDP) per person, has essentially been stagnant since 2016 (and the election of the Trudeau government), according to the Fraser Institute. Statistics Canada figures have recorded a national economy in decline since the pandemic years, actually shrinking on a population-adjusted basis, and now deflated to the size it once was back in 2014. This extraordinary demise of the Canadian economy has to be one of the Trudeau Liberals’ unforgivable legacies.
The Liberal braintrust – from Trudeau to his economic advisor and heir apparent Carney, and everyone in between – appear clueless on how to address the country’s current economic malaise (and those same Liberals refuse to look in the mirror and fess up that, in their decade in Ottawa, they have made matters considerably worse). Under the Liberals’ watch, Canadians have become markedly poorer – now the poorest citizens of the G7 nations and considerably poorer than our American cousins. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that Canada will be the worst-performing advanced economy through the 2020s and for the following three decades. Canada is near the bottom of advanced countries for GDP growth, and the OECD forecasts that growth in living standards in Canada will be the worst of all developed member-countries through 2060.
This sagging economic doldrum the country is mired in is a made-in-Canada phenomenon, not a result of global economic factors. This is a fact demonstrated by comparing countries’ performances over the decade. Canada’s productivity rate has decreased to the point that the country is the weakest of G7 nations and has an economy that lags behind Austria, Ireland, Australia, and Finland. (In other words, Canada is a G7 nation in name only.)
The statistics are stark. Real per capita GDP in Canada from 2016 to the end of 2022 was only 2.8 per cent. Comparatively, the U.S. experienced a real per capita rise in GDP of 11.7 per cent. There is now a near 50 per cent gap in the countries’ measurement of productivity and this expanding gap forecasts Canadians’ standard of living falling further behind. Today, studies show that an Ontarian’s standard of living is equivalent to that of an Alabamian. Alabama has the fourth lowest standard of living of all 50 States, yet it ranks above the majority of Canadian provinces.
Since 2015, Canada’s economy and our capability to respond to economic challenges has been steadily deteriorating. With this Trudeau government, business confidence has dropped like a stone; Canadian businesses are not re-investing in their enterprises and people, and the flow of foreign investment into the country is drying up at a worrisome rate. In a recent editorial comment in the Globe and Mail, Robert Asselin of the Business Council of Canada was remarking on Canada’s capacity to respond to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff and trade threats. Asselin observed:
“This external threat should also force a long-overdue reckoning with Canada’s deeper, self-inflicted economic vulnerabilities. The crisis we face is not just about U.S. tariffs; it is about the fragility of our economic foundations and the urgent need to act decisively to rebuild them.
Shifting political economy alliances and the pressing challenge of demographic pressures are unforgiving realities we must confront. Persistent domestic challenges – low innovation, stagnant productivity and declining competitiveness – have left Canada ill-prepared to navigate this moment.”
Canada’s GDP numbers are ugly, and the forecasts for the country’s future prosperity are anything but promising. Though the country is currently bound in an uncomfortable straitjacket, the impending election and possible changing of the guard provides a hope that Canadians may still break loose from the Liberals’ debilitating “Lost Decade”.
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.
