Michael Higgins: Trudeau isn't the solution, he's the problem - "The issue of temporary foreign workers was an issue Trudeau was aware of even before he became prime minister. In 2014, Trudeau, then Liberal leader, blasted the Conservatives for allowing too many temporary foreign workers (TFWs) into the country. What’s happened since he became prime minister? “In 2015, 248,590 TFWs came to Canada compared to 597,075 in 2022, representing an increase of 240 per cent,” says a government of Canada briefing document . But a truer picture emerges when looking at non-permanent residents (NPRs) which include foreign workers, international students and asylum seekers. According to Statistics Canada, there were 1.3 million NPRs in the third quarter of 2021. That figure has now doubled to 2.6 million... The latest RBC Housing Affordability report shows that in Oct. 2015, the share of income needed by a household to cover ownership costs stood at 39.3 per cent in Canada. That is now 63.5 per cent, a figure RBC described as “staggering.”... Canada is also “struggling” and “under performing”, according to another report co-authored by no less an éminence grise than Kevin Lynch, whose list of past titles include clerk of the privy council, secretary to the cabinet, deputy minister of finance, deputy minister of industry, as well as executive director for Canada at the International Monetary Fund. We are suffering a “national malaise,” says the report whose other co-author, Jim Mitchell, spent 17 years as a public servant primarily in the Privy Council Office and the Treasury Board Secretariat. Experts on government don’t get much more expert than these two. The signs of that national malaise? “The cost of living is high but growth in per capita income is negative. Government spending is soaring, but delivery of essential government services is sputtering, and procurement is a quagmire. Debt servicing costs are skyrocketing but spending, deficits and debt are still rising. Monetary policy is painfully reining in inflation but without help from fiscal policy. “Immigration is soaring, but the country has a housing crisis. We commit publicly and frequently to NATO’s two per cent defence spending target, but in practice we appear to have no intention of meeting it. Ambitious climate change goals are proclaimed, but climate change policy itself is unclear to Canadians.” Lynch and Mitchell say key areas to address are: “Political short-termism” — too much attention on press releases and not enough focus on priorities; “Excessive centralization of decision-making in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO)” — ministers and public servants with valuable advice are sidelined; “Provision of core services to Canadians” — inefficient and inconsistent services despite bloated public service and “Government procurement” — “a mess.” A fifth area to be addressed is “government policy,” say Lynch and Mitchell, who argue that the government relies too heavily on external consultants... Of all the obstacles facing Canada, the two men never mention the biggest problem of all: Trudeau."
Trudeau should really resign as PM and run to be premier of Quebec - "Over the past several years, Trudeau has introduced childcare programs, pharmacare, dental care, and now he’s talking about a renter’s bill of rights. To accomplish this goal, like all the other programs, Trudeau will need to negotiate with the provinces and territories. Anything to do with real property, contracts, landlord and tenant issues all fall clearly under provincial jurisdiction in the Constitution... he can’t accomplish anything here without the express and full cooperation of the provinces, some of whom won’t like the PM meddling in provincial jurisdiction... If Trudeau really wants to run all kinds of social programs across the country, then he should run at the provincial level. This is clearly where his heart is at, it’s what he spends his time, and our money, obsessing over. Meanwhile, he lets areas of federal responsibility wilt and whither from neglect. Our military, already a shadow of its former self, is facing budget cuts in two weeks’ time. In addition to recruitment and retention problems, the military recently announced that we would no longer train our own Air Force pilots but instead send them to Texas, Italy or Finland. It’s just one of many major embarrassments over the past several years. Our allies no longer see us as a reliable partner on many fronts, as evidenced by Canada being excluded from intelligence sharing operations with the Americans, Australians and Brits. We were similarly cut out of a defence agreement with these same countries. In the wake of the horrific attacks Hamas carried out against Israel on Oct. 7, U.S. President Joe Biden convened a call with major allies including Britain, France, Germany and Italy. The country the American president did not call was Canada, a G7 and NATO ally and the country with the fourth-largest Jewish population in the world. And who would want to hear from Canada under Trudeau in a serious moment like that. As Trudeau was leaving the G20 conference in India a month earlier, a reporter asked him what Canada had contributed to the meeting. “Gendered language,” was Trudeau’s immediate and unprompted answer. While Trudeau claimed that Canada left the world stage under Stephen Harper and that he would bring us back, the opposite is true. Under Harper, three Canadians chaired G20 committees during the 2008-09 financial crisis — Harper himself, the late Jim Flaherty and then Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney. That would never happen today. Instead of focusing on the things the federal government is responsible for, Trudeau focuses on provincial issues and in so doing hurts national unity, another key responsibility of any federal government. Let’s face it, Trudeau doesn’t like the job he has, so maybe it’s time he looked for a new one."
When you believe in big government, you want everything
Jack Mintz: Provincial deficits are out of control. The feds are up next - "Defining every new expenditure program as a “right” gives Ottawa an excuse to spend more. How could it deny Canadians their “rights”? This past week, the prime minister, taking a leaf from COVID days with daily spending announcements, publicized $1 billion in new spending on child-care spaces, $6 billion on housing, $15 billion in rental loans and $1 billion on school lunches. This is on top of a new pharmacare program, dental care, sky-is-the-limit climate and business subsidies and a host of other new programs. Not surprisingly, polling shows that deficits and debt are low priorities for Canadian voters, who seem happy just passing the bill onto someone else. This attitude changes only when the costs of deficit financing become apparent to voters, as they did in both 1984 and 1993 when Canadians turfed the governments of, respectively, Liberal John Turner and Conservative Kim Campbell after a surge in out-of-control deficit spending during recessions. Larger deficits add to inflationary pressures, which makes life harder for the Bank of Canada by moving the economy along at a faster pace than would allow the bank to cut interest rates. To make room for looser monetary policy, the government should tighten fiscal policy. Public deficits also crowd out private investment. Governments issuing more bonds pushes up interest rates as investors come to see the debt as less and less sustainable. The cost of capital for businesses rises, weakening already anemic investment even further. And higher interest rates mean less homebuilding, despite sharp rises in housing demand because of immigration. Burgeoning public deficits also create uncertainty for private investors, who expect governments will eventually have to raise taxes to finance their debt costs. Knowing it’s always tempting for governments to levy wealth and capital taxes, investors respond to growing deficits by deciding not to invest. Deficit spending also causes a misallocation of resources. When child care was introduced at $10 per day, what would any competent planner expect? That even parents with alternative arrangements like neighbours, au pairs or grandparent supervision would rush to fill cheap child-care spaces. And that suppliers of child-care services, now heavily regulated, would close or cut back on spaces. The prime minister blames the provinces for the undersupply of child-care spaces but the root of problem is no mystery. When something is free, shortage happens. Margaret Thatcher liked to say “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” That quote should be displayed on every MP’s desk when the finance minister gets up to present the 2024 federal budget."
Justin Trudeau's legacy could be a poorer Canada - "He has done plenty of popular redistribution — subsidizing child care, child benefits, dental care and a skeletal pharmacare program, all paid for by rising corporate and marginal personal tax rates and higher debt. He can also claim credit for recovery from the COVID recession, though he did it with over-the-top, inflationary deficits. He imposed social justice and carbon policy criteria throughout the government, whether in trade agreements and academic research grants or approvals for resource projects. Even federal budgets now contain a (rarely read) gender analysis, concocted no doubt by glassy-eyed civil servants holed up in windowless rooms. Despite these achievements, the prime minister doesn’t seem ready to leave. Saying “I couldn’t be the man that I am and abandon the fight at this moment,” he has made clear he still has work to do pushing for women’s and LGBTQ rights and fighting climate change. He’s certainly right there is more work to be done — but not the kind he’s thinking of. Canada is falling behind economically and it’s getting worse. Eighth among OECD countries in per capita GDP in 1974, we are 14th today. From 2015, when the Liberals were elected, to 2022 our GDP per capita fell from 78.6 per cent of U.S. levels to 72.8 per cent. Relative to the G7 average (the favourite comparison for a finance minister), it fell from 92 per cent in 2015 to 88 per cent in 2022. As Trevor Tombe of the University of Calgary has shown, almost all of Canada is now poor by U.S. standards. British Columbia (average per capita income of US$57,000), Ontario (US$55,000) and Quebec (US$51,000) are at roughly the same level as West Virginia (US$54,000), South Carolina (US$56,000) and Alabama (US$55,000). Only Alberta (US$80,000) lies closer to the top — though it ranks only 14th among the 60 states and provinces. Saskatchewan (US$71,000) is second in Canada but 25th in North America. If he does stay on, Justin Trudeau’s eventual legacy may be to have made us poorer than the poorest U.S. state — Mississippi at US$47,000. Continuing with the same anti-growth framework of the past nine years will eventually achieve that. Expand the federal civil service by another 40 per cent so they can dream up even more inefficient programs while working from the comfort of home. Keep hiring by woke criteria rather than merit. Impose even more regulations and taxes to discourage entrepreneurship, investment and growth. Encourage more emigration of our talented and well-educated workers to countries offering now much higher after-tax incomes. Some of our decline is the result of ideologically driven emissions reduction. An energy transition that shifts resources from our highest value-added sector — oilsands, where VA is almost $1,000 per production hour — to manufacturing and other sectors where it is less than a tenth is obviously going to be very costly. But we don’t have to deliberately make it even worse than it has to be, as we did by failing to provide European allies with multibillion-dollar liquefied natural gas exports to replace Russian gas. After we bailed on Germany, she went to the U.S. and Qatar (not her long-time ally)... The prime minister is also pouring money into EV and renewables projects that will certainly enrich both foreign and domestic investors in these projects — so much for our concern about inequality — but are far from certain to result in viable production. At the same time, he is piling higher energy costs onto consumers and businesses with new clean fuel regulations, emissions caps and mandates for clean electricity and EV sales. These non-price interventions are contrary to his recently declared preference for the “cleaner … market-based solution” that is the carbon tax. That tax is now in intensive care after he exempted heating oil to gain more political support in the Atlantic provinces. The Trudeau government’s lack of focus on economic growth will hurt Canada. Bloated, inflationary federal spending on a featherbedded civil service, combined with poorly designed subsidy programs, leave little money for critical federal responsibilities. We have downgraded our military, which hardly has a working tugboat or jet to its name. We haven’t yet been kicked out of NATO for failing to live up to our commitments but we are no longer on speed dial with our U.S., U.K. and Australian allies, who are building next-generation nuclear submarines together. Immigration has become our de facto growth policy. Yet we don’t have adequate housing or public services to support the large numbers coming here. And our health care is ailing, with long wait times, not enough doctors and nurses and emergency triage that needs to be fixed. Whoever is prime minister in the next few years does have their work cut out for them, but not on more climate and woke rights policies. The challenge will be to reverse an economic slide that is seeing us lose investment and our best and brightest to the rest of the world."
Rapid public-sector growth means flat living standards for us - "so weak has business investment been in Canada since 2015 that in addition to declining capital investment, the capital stock itself, adjusted for the number of workers, is falling. If business investment is down so significantly, which categories of real GDP per capita have increased to make up the total 0.8 per cent change over eight years? Household consumption is 2.1 per cent higher, but the big growth is in government. General government consumption grew at 6.8 per cent — three times the rate of household consumption — while general government gross fixed capital formation is up 6.3 per cent. The remaining changes were: non-profit consumption up 10.9 per cent; exports down 2.3 per cent; and imports up 2.4 per cent... Where GDP comes from is important. Household spending is a good measure of standards of living, because people only buy things that they expect will improve their material lives. Business investment is a helpful measure, too: businesses survive by making productivity-increasing investments to produce the goods and services people want. Government spending is very different. Politicians buy things they think people ought to want, not necessarily the things they actually do want, and usually at outrageous prices — witness the ongoing ArriveCan debacle. Even greater cause for alarm: if government consumption and investment are excluded, real per capita GDP is actually down 1.1 per cent over the last eight years. The growth of government and the decline of the private sector are related. In order to spend, the government must take from the private sector, but by discouraging and distorting private activity with taxes, raising an extra $1 of government revenue costs the private sector $2 to $3. That’s the “marginal cost of public funds,” as economists call it. Moreover, as Milton Friedman once mused, “It costs government about twice as much to accomplish any given task as that same task would cost if done by private entities operating in a competitive environment.” So $1 of government spending costs the private sector $2 to $3 but generates only $0.50 of economic benefit. As discouraging as the recent and medium-term past have been, the outlook is no better. “A further deterioration in Canada’s weak productivity performance since the pandemic,” RBC economist Nathan Janzen wrote last week, “is threatening the sustainability of wage growth, which has already been relatively modest when measured against surging inflation.” While worker productivity in the United States is about 6.1 per cent higher than in 2019, it has actually fallen slightly in Canada. Wage growth in Canada is “broadly expected to be slow,” Janzen cautions, and there is “little reason to think that productivity growth will substantially accelerate in the near term. Capital investment has remained relatively weak.” That productivity improvements, the main driver of rising standards of living, are expected to continue to be weak cannot be a surprise. The government sector, which continues to expand rapidly under the Liberals, is not known for its efficiency and productivity."
EDITORIAL: Trudeau ‘rescues’ parents from the mess he created - "Trudeau announced this week that his government will provide $1 billion over five years to set up a national school food program. In 2019, he claimed his government had raised 900,000 Canadians out of poverty since he was elected in 2016. Now, soaring housing costs and the skyrocketing cost of food have depleted so many families that he has to ride to rescue them — from the dire situation he created. Had he managed the economy better, he’d have left more money in the hands of parents so they’d have the dignity to feed their children themselves. Instead, he hiked the carbon tax, fuelled inflation with his irresponsible spending and racked up a massive debt that will haunt our children and grandchildren. In the third quarter of 2023, the government spent $24.7 billion on interest, up 20.7% compared with the same quarter of 2022."
Chris Selley: School meals is another phoney Liberal 'national' program. Don't fall for it - "Point out a basic fact like “school lunches are not federal jurisdiction,” online or off, and you will immediately be set upon by people who understand very well how federalism works, but think it’s downright ghoulish for you to bring it up in the matter of hungry children. (It’s all they can do not to literally channel Helen Lovejoy’s immortal, agonized cry from The Simpsons : “Oh won’t someone please think of the children!”) You can assemble an impressive roster of such people quite quickly by sticking your neck out slightly on social media: journalists , criminal defence lawyers , a candidate for the Alberta NDP , even a former premier: “Let’s skip the long debate about jurisdiction,” Kathleen Wynne advised , without explaining how exactly we would go about that."
Mackenzie Gray on X (Apr 2 2024) - "PM Trudeau says immigration to Canada has "grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb," adding that "temporary immigration has caused so much pressure in our communities," in relation to housing #cdnpoli"
Shazi on X (Dec 2023) - "When asked about reducing immigration numbers to soften demand on housing, 🇨🇦 PM Justin Trudeau claims his government has always been doing immigration responsibly and at a pace that our cities can absorb. 👇🏽"
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon on X - "Justin Trudeau est un pompier pyromane. Il a volontairement créé une situation intenable sur le plan du logement, du français et des services et il veut aujourd’hui nous faire croire qu’il est la solution. Il y a un prix à ne pas contrôler ni nos frontières, ni nos aéroports, ni notre planification de l'immigration. Et l’arrivée potentielle de Pierre Poilièvre, qui est resté silencieux sur cette question alors que Justin Trudeau mettait en place sa lubie idéologique, n’apporte rien de rassurant. Il faut rapidement sortir de ce bordel." ("Trudeau is a firefighter obsessed with setting things on fire. He created an imbalance in housing through migration and then here comes acting like a savoir")
PM Trudeau says immigration to Canada has "grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb," adding that "temporary immigration has caused so much pressure in our communities," in relation to housing : CanadaHousing2 - "Justin Trudeau has been permanent banned from /r/ CanadaHousing"
FIRST READING: Trudeau's weird habit of denouncing his own government - "this is far from the first time that Trudeau has emerged as a public critic of policies for which he is technically responsible... While Trudeau’s Dartmouth statements were among his most poignant criticisms of sky-high rates of temporary immigration, he’s been decrying the phenomenon ever since Christmas... After a September incident in which the combined Canadian parliament gave a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka — a 99-year-old former member of a Waffen-SS unit in Ukraine — Trudeau’s initial stance was to blame the gaffe entirely on the neglect of House Speaker Anthony Rota. Rota had invited Hunka, and Trudeau said in the House of Commons that if he made it a point of vetting the guest list of every parliamentarian, it would be a “grievous attack” on the independence of MPs. But months later, it would emerge that Trudeau’s office had been just as derelict as Rota in vetting its invitees. While Rota had invited Hunka to Parliament, it was the prime minister’s office that had invited the nonagenerian ex-Nazi to a reception later that day... From the beginning, whenever opponents criticized the carbon tax as a cash grab, the consistent answer from the Trudeau government was that any affordability concerns with the tax had been addressed via rebates... But last year, this whole argument was detonated when the Trudeau government made a public concession to the claim that carbon taxes actually were hammering the ability of Canadians to pay the bills. In October, a coalition of dissident Liberal MPs in Atlantic Canada began claiming that the carbon tax was making it difficult for constituents to afford groceries or heat their homes. Trudeau didn’t respond by saying that the constituents would be fine once they received their rebates. Rather, he acceded to the dissidents claims on affordability by approving a carbon tax exemption on home heating oil... “I’ll be blunt … housing is not a primary federal responsibility”... But by denying federal responsibility for housing, Trudeau was contradicting nearly nine years of his party asserting that housing was indeed an issue over which they had jurisdiction. On the eve of Trudeau’s election as prime minister, one of the key pledges of the Liberal campaign platform was that they had “a plan to make housing more affordable for those who need it most — seniors, persons with disabilities, lower-income families, and Canadians working hard to join the middle class.” He said procurement (particularly in regards to ArriveCAN) is a scandalous mess"
LILLEY: Trudeau makes life more expensive for you as MPs get pay hike - "taxes already make up about 50% of the cost of alcohol in Canada and the federal government just adds more every single April 1. This is on top of the increase to payroll taxes that saw smaller paycheques coming home after Jan. 1. It comes before the 33% increase to the airport security charge that will come into play on May 1. And somehow, despite the carbon tax hike, the alcohol tax hike, three payroll tax hikes, and an airport tax hike, the Trudeau government will claim they aren’t contributing to inflation. About the only people who can afford this and not notice the price increases will be Canada’s MPs, who got a significant pay increase of 4.4%"
Trudeau in Shock As Young Canadians Threaten Rebellion - "Canada ranks 8th worldwide for happiness among those aged 60 and up, but a dismal 58th for people under 30. This puts Canadian youth on par with developing countries like Ecuador and Honduras when it comes to life satisfaction and overall well being... For decades, liberal politicians headed by Trudeau have ignored problems like housing affordability, prioritising “woke” globalist visions over common sense domestic priorities. This has allowed home prices to skyrocket beyond the means of most young people. Instead of addressing issues like supply and urban density, liberals virtue signal on climate change – while shoving unnecessary and costly taxes down our throats – and expanding the provably harmful and countless immigration policies, making life harder and harder for younger Canadians looking to set their foot and carve their place in their own country. At the same time, Trudeau has allowed alarming debt levels across both the public and the private spheres, leading to younger generations bearing the harsh burden of paying all of this back, limiting their own prosperity and success. And how could we forget about all the “woke” ideological experiments in schools and workplaces that have left younger Canadians feeling disconnected from their own country’s history and values. Is it really surprising they feel unhappy and alienated from their homeland?"
David Rosenberg: Canada was once productive and competitive, but not today - “If not for the tight trading ties with the United States and the good fortune of a rich endowment of resources, the Canadian economy would be in perennial recession. There has been no capital deepening or productivity growth in Canada in eons because the massive spending at the government level has continued to crowd out private-sector investment. All the spending that was used to combat the pandemic has become a permanent feature of the budgetary landscape. The level of program spending in Ottawa today is 35 per cent higher than it was pre-COVID-19. Meanwhile, volume spending on aggregate business investment is lower today than it was in 2012. How can the citizenry be OK with that? On a per-capita basis, government program spending is 27 per cent higher than it was in 2019 and almost double the average of the past 40 years. Inflation has only accounted for 40 per cent of that gap in per-person spending now compared to four years ago. The fiscal spending is out of control, and a clear sign is that when it comes to the government sector, what is always billed as a temporary spending measure to fight a crisis inevitably finds a way to remain on the books. Either Canadians don’t know about what is going on with this fiscal profligacy or, as is typical in this country, totally apathetic to what is going on. The government incursion into the economy in this country is so acute that the public sector now comprises 27 per cent of GDP. Business capital spending? Try a mere eight per cent share and flirting with two-decade lows. The capital spending share of the U.S. economy is practically double that, which is why productivity growth stateside is running at a 2.6 per cent year-over-rate pace versus minus 0.6 per cent (yes, negative) north of the border. When you blend labour and capital together, total factor productivity in Canada, under this current government in Ottawa, is now back to where it was a quarter-century ago. And productivity is the mother’s milk of future standard-of-living enhancement and no amount of pro-immigration policies to provide the illusion of economic prosperity can act as a true antidote… the country’s productive capital stock has stopped growing over the past two decades, and, indeed, has actually decayed 1.5 per cent over the past year… Because of this dismal productivity performance, unit labour costs of five per cent at an annual rate are running double the U.S. trend. That means we are increasingly uncompetitive and that is showing through in a Canadian dollar that instead of reaping the benefits of this year’s commodity price run-up, has headed south and, by most measures, is undervalued by at least five per cent. It is why, under this current government’s watch, Mexico has replaced Canada as the top exporter to the U.S. — this happened two years ago. Historically, Canada exported around 20 per cent more to the U.S. than Mexico did; today, Mexico sells 10 per cent more to the U.S. than we do. That says everything we need to know about how current and past policies have failed us. Too much emphasis on government intervention and less on promoting pro-productivity business investment and export competitiveness. All so sad. Brian Mulroney (R.I.P.) certainly did leave a legacy — too bad this current government has had nearly a decade to tear it apart. The world not only lost one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th century, but Canada lost its most effective prime minister of the 20th century. What he accomplished in his near-decade in office from 1984 to 1993 was most impressive: taking Canada out of the dark ages of economic sclerosis after years of inept government rule under the Liberals (talk about being back to the future given what is happening today in Ottawa) using Ronald Reagan-style deregulation, tax reform, breaking the back of inflation and embarking on the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement… The controversial, but powerfully positive policies Mulroney embarked on that cost his Conservative Party the 1993 federal election ended up being nurtured by the ensuing Liberal government, even though it had pledged to abandon all those pro-growth, supply-side policies”
Left wingers claim government spending is the way to economic growth, so clearly it needs to be increased even more. Either that or they want de-growth, or that economics is astrology for men so we must ignore it
No wonder left wingers hated Mulroney
Meme - Justin Trudeau's Ego @Trudeaus_Ego: "My Government is increasing our military funding to meet NATO targets, and spending the money on what our troops need most. Tampons. Moving forward, every military workspace where men operate will have extra tampons including tanks, submarines, and fighter jets."
GUNTER: Trudeau tanks Canadian economy as Americans prosper - "rampant immigration and the economic cluelessness of the Trudeau government... the housing affordability crisis is unlikely to get better anytime soon, because the Trudeau government is neither encouraging home building fast enough nor willing to cut back immigration levels until the housing market catches up. Also, the Liberals’ record-high spending and massive expansion of the federal civil service have led to the inflation that has caused the Bank of Canada to jack up interest rates to the highest levels in more than 20 years. That not only makes it more expensive to buy a home, but according to Marc Desormeaux, principal economist at Desjardins, high interest rates led to a decline in residential housing investment of more than 12% last year... It’s not just Liberal governments that have failed to increase productivity and core growth in our economy. The few Conservative administrations we have had in that period have done little more than slow the decline. The Trudeau government, though, has put our decline on steroids with their emphasis on woke social objectives over economic progress, especially their obsession with climate alarmism. The OECD estimates that with our current, Liberal-dictated industrial and economic policies (which are “green” maniacal, anti-business, debt-ridden and tax-heavy), Canada will remain at the bottom of the developed world in growth for the next quarter century. By 2050, we will no longer qualify for the G7 and could find our standard of living in the range of Spain and Greece, rather than the U.K. and France. At present, despite being battered by endless Liberal environmental mandates, Alberta is the only province near the midway point of the 60 states and provinces, economically, and it is in real danger of sinking below the surface, too, if the Trudeau government remains in power."