Canadians are all too familiar now with the reports which forecasts Canada to be the country with the worst performing economy and the weakest growth in living standards through to 2060. Pictured: Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland. Photo Credit: Chrystia Freeland/X.
The Bank of Canada’s announcement this week shaving a quarter per cent off the country’s interest rate was hopeful for Canadians burdened with consumer debt or about to renew their mortgage. Bank Governor Tiff Macklem also hinted that further rate cuts can be expected this fall if inflation rates continue to ease. This news is encouraging for Canadians who are treading water, bobbing about, looking for anything that might suggest they can stay afloat.
As it is, the Trudeau Liberals’ policies of unbridled spending and mass migration have fueled inflationary pressures in the country. The Liberals’ big government, overspending habits have resulted in a sea of red ink that will inevitably lead to higher taxes and future generations paying for the mismanagement of the past nine years.
The Liberal record speaks volumes. This Trudeau government has accumulated more debt than all previous federal governments in the history of our country combined. Today, the national debt is more than $1.2 trillion, double what it was in 2015 – and consider, since Chrystia Freeland has become finance minister in 2020, Canada’s debt has grown more than $400 billion.
This spring the government increased the national borrowing limit to a record $2.1 trillion, likely anticipating even higher interest payments on the national debt. Those interest charges are now the fastest growing line item in the federal budget. Canadians spend more per year on interest payments on this Liberal debt than on the federal health care transfers to the provinces.
In Trudeau’s Ottawa, taxpayers are spending billions of dollars on a bulging bureaucracy that has swelled from 257,000 in 2015 to 367,772 bureaucrats today. This is a 39 per cent increase in the federal bureaucracy, more than three times the rate of growth of Canada’s population.
It’s unsustainable when considering that, last year, taxpayers paid an average of $142,600 for the pay, perks, and CPP of every federal bureaucrat. The Liberals’ record of spending on bureaucracy, and new and expanding government programs, has seen annual spending balloon 75 per cent.
With increased spending comes increased taxes. Today, Canadians pay nearly half (46.1 per cent) of their income to taxes, which is more than is spent on the necessities of housing, food and clothing. Tax bills are the fastest growing expenditure in a household budget. The Fraser Institute reports Canadian families with modest incomes ($30,000-$60,000) have marginal effective tax rates at or above 50 percent. Quebec families pay 67 per cent and Ontario families pay 50 per cent.
It is all we can do but tread water. Canadians are all too familiar now with the reports from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which forecasts Canada to be the country with the worst performing economy and the weakest growth in living standards through to 2060. It has been factored that, in 1984, the Canadian economy was producing 88 per cent of the value generated by the American economy per hour and, in 2022, this productivity rate had fallen to just 71 per cent of that of the U.S. Ontario now has a per-person level of economic output that is like Alabama, and the Maritimes are below Mississippi.
Recent World Bank statistics inform Canadians that over the past 10 years, Canada has had the third lowest per-capita GDP growth, 33 out of 35 of the world’s largest economies – leagues behind the U.S., Britain, Germany, Australia, Poland, even Mexico, and just ahead of Austria and Luxembourg.
All of this ill-fortune can be attributed to disastrous fiscal policies and economic mismanagement in Ottawa. Certainly, one may argue that there have been global crises and unprecedented pressures on governments, but international factors cannot explain away Canada’s comparative economic disadvantages with countries that were once our economic equals.
Diane Francis has opined that Trudeau’s gross fiscal mismanagement has created an uncompetitive business climate: “If the Government of Canada were a publicly traded company, it would have no shareholders or investors.” Joe OIiver, a former finance minister with Stephen Harper, assesses that in the last nine years the Trudeau government has crumbled the country’s five pillars of prosperity: spending restraint, low taxes, minimal regulation, sound money, and free trade.
This week a new report by the Fraser Institute confirms the Liberals negative impact on the country’s prosperity. The Institute concludes: “Canada’s economy is trailing behind its international trading partners and is projected to be the worst in per-person gross domestic product among OECD countries by 2060.” It cites GDP per capita figures: “Canadian GDP per capita in 2014 was $44,710, 81 per cent of the U.S.’s $55,605. In 2022, Canada’s per person GDP was $46,035, while America’s GDP was $63,685, growing the gap from $10,895 to $17,649.”
More distressing, especially for younger working-age Canadians, is the fact that the country’s economic prospects have declined sharply between 2014 and 2022 and is now one of the worst performing advanced economies in the world. Canada has noticeably slipped and lost ground to its key allies and trading partners such as the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. The report states, “Canada has been experiencing a collapse in investment, low productivity growth, and a large and growing government sector, all of which contribute to reduced growth in living standards compared to our peer countries in the OECD.”
The underlining conclusion of this week’s report: “We’re getting poorer.”
Still, like an anvil around Canadians’ neck, the Trudeau Liberals continue to sink the country fortunes, seemingly with every national headline. The Liberals’ gross incompetency is costing billions – a bill that future generations will be required to pay.
Earlier this spring, after a dozen years, the Trans Mountain pipeline was completed at a cost of $34 billion – almost triple its estimated cost. In 2018, the Trudeau government bought it at a cost of $4.5 billion and spent nearly $30 billion to make this pipeline the most expensive infrastructure project in Canadian history.
The Liberals have promised an estimated $46.1 billion in EV subsidies in the last two years, and yet a parliament budget report states they have grossly underestimated the cost of their subsidies by more than $6.3 billion. As it is, today the Liberals are spending more money on capital expenses for the 13 EV projects than the automotive companies are spending.
The government’s $8 billion slush fund to help manufacturing industries reduce their emissions has been labeled “a failure” by the federal commissioner of environment and sustainable development. This green program is in shambles, unable to co-op Canadian businesses with its generous subsidies (only two have signed on!).
The billion-dollar agency created to dole out subsidies for green ventures was collapsed this year after it was revealed the chair and known Liberal-donor Annettee Verschuren gave her own company a $217,000 grant. The auditor general also discovered the agency paid out $856 million in subsidies, violating conflict of interest guidelines 90 times to shuffle tens of millions of dollars to companies with ties to its own directors and managers.
The federal auditor general reports the federal ventilator program wasted millions. Half of all ventilators purchased under a $700 million COVID-19 federal program immediately went to warehouses as surplus, including being sold for scrap.
The federal Phoenix Pay System failure has now cost $3.7 billion and counting, as cited by the department of public works, reports Blacklock’s Reporter this week. Recall, Phoenix was hatched in 2016 with the promise to save taxpayers $70 million by centralizing 46 separate federal payroll departments into a single office.
When does this deluge of misspent tax dollars end?! But, more to the point, what else should Canadians have expected from a Prime Minister who is a self-described financial illiterate and a journalist finance minister who is a trustee of the WEF’s global plans for wealth redistribution? Canadians are now being told by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to expect a white knight, namely Mark Carney, to appear on the horizon.
Mark Carney?! Mark Carney: the same point man for both the WEF’s Klaus Schwab and the UN’s Antonio Guterres, responsible for turning the screw on corporate boardrooms worldwide; the great champion of ESG and DEI and the cashless society; the staunch advocate for increasing carbon taxes?! Imagine, just as Canadians are gulping in their first mouthfuls of water, we see Carney peering over the side of the SS Liberals, carrying two water buckets to pour overboard.
Yet another headline this week reports that half of Canadians (46 per cent) are $200 or less away from financial insolvency. In other words, they are both figuratively and literally bobbing about, and one can expect they no longer are looking to Ottawa for any buoy.
There are conflicting accounts on what exactly it feels like to drown: slow and peaceful, or frantic and shocking. One person who survived an incident confided what he was thinking, and he put it this way: “The clock is running down now; half-conscious and enfeebled by oxygen depletion, the person is in no position to fight his way back up to the surface. The very process of drowning makes it harder and harder not to drown, an exponential disaster curve similar to that of a sinking boat.”
It is a rather disturbing thought to contemplate – given we know the nation is adrift on a sea of red ink.
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.
