Matthew Lau: Pretty much everything the Liberals do makes us poorer - "Compared to 0.7 per cent growth in Canada from 2015-Q3 to 2024-Q1, real GDP per capita is up 15.7 per cent in the U.S. in the same time period. Where the 0.7 per cent comes from matters, too. In real per capita terms, some components of GDP — mainly government — expanded while others contracted. Alarmingly, business investment, which drives productivity and standards of living, is down 13.9 per cent. This includes real per capita reductions of 15.2 per cent in residential structures, 18.4 per cent in machinery and equipment, and 19.3 per cent in non-residential structures, with an increase in intellectual property investment not nearly enough to offset the reductions in other categories. To understand why business investment and economic performance in Canada are so poor under the Trudeau government, let us consider the following representative example of its economic strategy. The government believes many families struggle with the cost of caring for young children, which is a legitimate concern. A reasonable solution, which the Harper government implemented in 2006, is to send money to families with young children and let parents buy for their children what they need. After the Liberals expanded that program, they could have left it at that, but what have they done instead? The government initiated a national takeover of child care, effectively expropriating child care entrepreneurs’ businesses by flooding their sector with public money and then controlling private companies’ revenues and operations. The result is child care entrepreneurs’ investments have been wiped out or severely reduced, control of their business operations have been wrestled away by government, and they are unable to properly serve their customers (the families), as evidenced by the drastic reduction in parental options and widespread shortages. When the federal government behaves in so unaccountable a fashion towards business owners, it is no wonder people are reluctant to invest in Canada. Personal income tax hikes, capital gains tax hikes, payroll tax hikes, annual carbon tax hikes, special taxation of financial institutions, threats of special taxation of grocery stores, and significant uncertainty about what future tax hikes might take place given the explosion of public debt, all exacerbate the problem. As the private sector struggles, from October 2015 to April 2024, public sector employment grew 24.7 per cent. That is more than double the 11.5 per cent cumulative private sector and self-employment growth. An area of particularly large government expansion, reflecting Trudeau’s enthusiasm for raising taxes, is the 47.3 per cent increase in staff at the Canada Revenue Agency from 2015 to 2023. It is a very rapid rate of growth, although outpaced by the 408.7 per cent headcount increase at the federal department of Women and Gender Equality over the same period. These statistics are not encouraging."
Opinion: Fed up with economic issues, many young voters are moving to the right - The Globe and Mail - "Ginny Roth, a public relations consultant and devout Conservative, reckons that more than 75 of the 117 Tory MPs in the House of Commons are the same age as leader Pierre Poilievre – who is 44 – or younger. Many young voters, especially young men, are moving to the right. They are now far more likely to support the Conservative Party than the Liberal Party. This confounds some older voters, who mistakenly assumed that each generation would be more progressive than the one that came before. The reason for the disconnect is simple. As Ms. Roth put it when she moderated a panel of young Conservative politicians last week that was hosted by the Canadian Club of Toronto: “Politics is dominated by homeowners.” That is, the political discourse in the media, the academy, the public service, the cultural industries and the like is largely controlled by older, well-off citizens who own their homes, who profit from rising housing prices and who aren’t affected by high interest rates because they’ve paid off the mortgage... As Simcoe North MP Adam Chambers, one of the panelists, explained: “A bunch of young people were just told for two years that they had to put their life on pause for a virus that wasn’t really going to affect them, but they had to do it for the good of the community.” And they did. They locked down, obeyed the rules, got their vaccines. “Then they re-emerged to find houses completely unaffordable, the economy’s completely different, and by the way, we just doubled the national debt and they’re responsible for paying for it,” Mr. Chambers said. “So of course they’re frustrated.”... Frustration over housing affordability, interest rates, inflation and declining real wages have powered a massive swing toward the Conservatives among younger Canadians. On the day of the 2021 election, according to an Ipsos poll, 38 per cent of voters 34 and younger supported the Liberals, while only 24 per cent supported the Conservatives. In contrast, the two parties were tied at 32 per cent among voters who were 35-54. (Older voters heavily favoured the Conservatives, as they traditionally do.) Compare those numbers with an Abacus poll released this week. Among voters 29 and younger, the Tories are ahead of the Liberals 36 per cent to 21 per cent. Among those 30 to 44, the gap is 41 per cent to 21 per cent. (The online survey of 2,125 adults Feb. 15-21 had a comparable margin of error of plus-or-minus 2.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.) Round it out, and it’s safe to say that support for the Liberals among younger voters has fallen by more than half since the last election. Liberal strategists say they have to do a better job of communicating their policies. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accuses Mr. Poilievre of stoking fear and anger. But that’s not the root of it. Younger voters were facing affordability changes before the pandemic. The aftershocks of the lockdowns made things much worse for them. They blame, in part, the Liberals and Mr. Trudeau... Mr. Poilievre latched onto the inflation issue long before Liberals or even the Bank of Canada acknowledged the danger. He threatens to compel municipalities to allow more housing construction or be punished. He vows to “Axe the tax. Build the homes. Fix the budget. Stop the crime.” Simplistic, yes. But as was said at the Canada Club event: Simple isn’t easy."
The Trudeau Liberals have eroded all five pillars of prosperity - "What explains Canada’s dreadful performance? As set out by Arthur Laffer, of Laffer Curve fame, prosperity has five pillars: restrained government spending, low taxes, minimal regulation, sound money and free trade. The Liberal government has rejected, undermined or neglected each of the five. Our weak record and disheartening prospects have not been caused by external forces but by dysfunctional government policies. Canada is blessed by enviable geology and geography — immense natural resources and a friendly superpower next door — which Canadians too frequently take for granted. Because our border is safe and our population well off by world and historical standards, progressive politicians feel free to obsess about issues irrelevant or actually harmful to economic growth, jobs, affordability, a sound currency, security and national unity. Let’s review the litany of debilitating missteps, starting with the size and role of government... Out of 61 US jurisdictions and Canadian provinces, the top three personal marginal income tax rates are imposed by Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Ontario. Nine Canadian provinces rank in the top 10, all are in the top 15, and Canada ranks fifth out of 38 OECD countries. Corporate income tax rates are also higher here than in the U.S., the U.K. and the OECD on average. High taxes damage affordability, reduce competitiveness, discourage innovation and entrepreneurship, accelerate capital flight and weaken productivity. The proposed increase in the capital gains inclusion rate for both individuals and companies and the phase-out of accelerated capital depreciation will seriously exacerbate those negatives. Since 2015, intrusive regulations have proliferated across the economy, imposing burdensome compliance costs that are particularly harmful to small and medium- sized enterprises. The resource industry, which accounts for 19.2 per cent of GDP and 58 per cent of merchandise exports, has been targeted by draconian regulation deliberately designed to block energy projects. The result is an opportunity loss in the hundreds of billions of dollars and mounting. A stable money supply is critical for economic stability. To cope with out-of- control government spending, the Bank of Canada expanded the money supply dramatically, pushing it to $3.6 trillion, 83 per cent more than when the Liberals took office... Free trade had been a cornerstone of Canada’s economic policy for decades, promoting growth and prosperity. But last year Canada lost bragging rights as America’s biggest trade partner to Mexico. Instead of pursuing our comparative advantage in natural resources, Liberal policies purposely stymie the development and export of oil and gas. In a memorably inane comment, the prime minister claimed there was never a strong business case for liquified natural gas. The government should leave the assessment of business cases to business. Barriers to interprovincial trade, a related problem, have continued to elude meaningful progress despite repeated promises. The Montreal Economic Institute estimates that removing those barriers would yield an average increase in Canadians’ incomes by 5.5 per cent, or $1,800. According to the IMF, it could boost GDP by $80 billion. The government’s score for supporting the mainstays of prosperity is zero for five. Rather than correcting course, Justin Trudeau seems increasingly disconnected from reality and fixated on maintaining a perfect losing streak. Doubling down on big government, high taxes and hostility to resource development will do the trick."
Opinion: Internet bills should itemize Justin Trudeau’s new streaming tax - "Whatever the official name for it ends up being this is a tax. It will cost Canadians money. And everyone knows it, including the prime minister. Maybe not the prime minister of 2024 but certainly the prime minister of 2018, who, in response to NDP pressure to tax streaming services, sensibly refused, saying : “The NDP is claiming that Netflix and other web giants are the ones who will pay these new taxes. The reality is that taxpayers will be the ones to pay those taxes.” Well, that was then and this is now. Justin Trudeau’s 2018 logic has been thrown out the window... Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre recently told corporations not to rely on lobbying behind the scenes to influence policy. If businesses want policies to change, they need to convince voters so voters will in turn convince politicians."
Liberals playing with inclusion rates is divisive politics at its worst - "the government ignored almost every single recommendation made about the proposals by very qualified people and great organizations. The Joint Committee on Taxation of the Canadian Bar Association and CPA Canada made some excellent technical recommendations . They were mostly disregarded. Some organizations, such as the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), were very vocal about how damaging the proposals would be to their members. They were ignored. In response to criticisms from the CMA, Freeland suggested doctors should simply ask for more money from their applicable province since it would share in the extra tax revenue increases. Wow. In other words, politics, as always, trumps good policy. The second thing that will be remembered is the offensive and misleading messaging. This included the long-debunked taxpayer application rate of 0.13 per cent, the inaccurate tax comparison of an investor’s gains to a nurse/plumber’s salary and the aggressive messaging about how the capital gains increase was necessary for “intergenerational fairness.” Upon release of the material, Freeland went one step further and basically asserted in a bizarre “speech” that the capital gains proposal was necessary to help hungry kids and pregnant teens in what was an obvious shot at potential political opposition to certain of the government’s Robin Hood income-redistribution programs. The most offensive quote in her speech: “Do you want to live in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury, but must do so in gated communities behind ever higher fences, using private health care and airplanes because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their less privileged compatriots burns so hot?” The class warfare message here is dangerous and offensive. There is no straight line between the capital gains inclusion rate proposal and “higher fences.” There is no good tax policy at play here. Instead, this is politics at its worst and, unfortunately, it will contribute to continued divisiveness... Those who have been successful will continue to look for greener pastures outside Canada. The foreign investment dollars the country so desperately needs (and I don’t mean handing out subsidies to foreign corporations) will continue to dry up. Entrepreneurs and startups will look elsewhere. I’m seeing it in droves. It’s sad. All in the name of ugly politics and at a time when Canada has a significant productivity problem . “The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state,” the esteemed American economist Thomas Sowell is quoted as saying. “The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever-rising tax rates to cover ever-rising spending.”"
The Trudeau government using wedge issues as usual
Trust the experts - when it helps the left wing agenda
EDITORIAL: Trudeau’s record of deficits keeps growing - "Defenders of Liberal budgeting argue government deficits starting in 2020 are explained by the pandemic and its lingering effects on the economy. But the Trudeau government was never close to recording a balanced budget prior to the pandemic, despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pledge to do so. In the 2015 election that brought him to power, Trudeau said that, under his leadership, Canada would have a balanced budget with a $1-billion surplus in 2019 — the year before the pandemic hit... the federal deficit in 2019, far from Trudeau’s prediction of a $1-billion surplus, turned out to be a $39.4-billion deficit. In fact, the Trudeau government blew Trudeau’s predictions of what the deficit would be every year during his first term in office."
Meme - Pierre Poilievre: "What happened 9 years ago..."
"Real GDP per capita 1995 = 100
*US and Canada rising in unison from 1995 to 2015*
Trudeau took office November 4, 2015
*Divergence, with Canada doing the same as in 2015 with the US doing much better*
Meme - Jay Vas @jayvas: "Dear Canada: this is a really sad graph.
The widening gap between public, private and self-employment
The largest growing government departments are: Canada Revenue Agency: grew by 34% since 2019. Employment and Social Development Canada: grew by 56% since 2019. Does anyone see the irony in Employment and Social Development Canada being one of the largest employers in Canada? It employs 45,000 people. To put that in context, that's almost 2x the amount of people Rogers Communications employs. Why does the ESDC need 45,000 people? They are a top 20 employer in Canada, and their mandate is to... help Canadians with employment (I guess in a sense they are achieving that mandate, lol). All these gov employees and we don't even have a dedicated federal department for small business and entrepreneurship. The US Small Business Administration has 4,000 employees and they effectively administer critical programs to support small businesses and entrepreneurs."
Left wingers hate the private sector, so they see the debt-fuelled growth of the public sector as good
If economy had stayed at 2015 trends, we'd all have an extra $4,200 - "If the economy had stayed where it was heading in 2015, Canadians would all be earning an extra $4,200 per year, according to an illuminating new report by Statistics Canada. This roughly means that if the Canadian economy had merely spent the last nine years sticking to its usual rate of growth, Canadians would have experienced a natural increase in their paycheques larger than any number of Trudeau government benefits, including the $500 one-time top-up to the Canada Housing Benefit offered in 2022, or the $650 per child currently offered to eligible families as part of the Canada Dental Benefit. The Statistics Canada report — authored by researchers Carter McCormack and Weimin Wang — adds to a growing body of literature showing that Canadian productivity is dropping fast, resulting in noticeable decreases to income and living standards that are set to continue dropping for the foreseeable future. Everyone from the Bank of Canada to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce to the OECD have now issued increasingly dire warnings about Canada’s “productivity problem.” Earlier this year, the Bank of Canada’s senior deputy governor Carolyn Rogers warned that lagging productivity was now a national emergency. “You’ve seen those signs that say, ‘In emergency, break glass.’ Well, it’s time to break the glass,” she said at a March speech in Halifax... Historically, Canada’s high rate of capital investments has been most important towards increasing its per-worker productivity. As an example, a Canadian worker with a $100,000 bulldozer is going to produce much more for the economy than a Canadian worker with a shovel. But McCormack and Wang highlight 2016 as the year when Canadian businesses dramatically cut back on how much capital they were investing in each worker... while GDP per capita was already on the decline, the report also cites the “shock of the COVID-19 pandemic” at pushing it into overdrive. In a 2022 analysis on the COVID-19 lockdown, Wang concluded that while Canadian GDP was quickly able to return to pre-pandemic levels, GDP per capita was never the same. Which isn’t to say that federal policy hasn’t contributed to Canada’s ever-shrinking productivity rates. For one, the researchers point to “near-record population increases.”... Perhaps most damning for Canada is that the U.S. — a country that has similarly been hammered by COVID and low 2014 energy prices — has not experienced anything close to the falling productivity seen by Canadians."
Clearly, if you opposed covid lockdowns, you were a heartless monster who just wanted grandma to die
Premiers warn against Ottawa encroaching on provincial jurisdiction - The Globe and Mail - "It adds that the federal government should pledge to hand over fair shares of funding to provinces and territories that don’t want to comply with Ottawa’s demands... Peter Graefe, an associate professor of political science at McMaster University in Hamilton, said in an interview that Mr. Trudeau’s approach to federalism is more interventionist and involves less consultation with provinces than the approaches of any of his predecessors going back to at least the 1990s. The result, in Friday’s letter, has been some pushback from the provinces, he said. “If you have a very strict understanding of the Constitution, they’re overreaching,” Dr. Graefe said. “They’re reaching into areas where the Constitution doesn’t say they have the power to do it.”"
For the first time in 12 years, government debt costs will surpass GST revenue - "Still, the Liberal government’s budget and its proponents have rightly emphasized that although public debt charges have risen significantly in absolute terms, they remain low in relative terms. For instance, at about 1.8 percent of GDP today, they’re far lower than they were in the 1980s and 1990s when they hit as high as 6.5 percent."
Good luck if interest rates rise again. Also the last time the debt was so high, it was another Trudeau's fault
For the first time in 12 years, government debt costs will surpass GST revenue : r/canada - "Services are already lacking and our federal government employees grew by more than 40%. Imagine that. The sad thing is there are many people who want the government to take over more things like grocery stores, housing etc. when they can’t even do their jobs now "
"This. If your public sector explodes like this, you had bettter be getting more or better service. Full stop."
"There is a case that the public service needed to grow - both with the ballooning population but also because we were near historical lows prior. We still aren’t at historical highs for the public service compared to population… But the ballooning isn’t even necessarily in the people delivering results for the public. The exponential growth of the public sector is primarily in admin staff. There are departments in which the admin staff outnumber the actual boots on the ground with deliverables for the public. More and more of these department’s staffing budgets and running costs go to admin when they need to actually be expanding other positions to meet deliverables… But it’s admin who decides what each department needs, and of course they are going to prioritize more admin because they don’t necessarily have any understanding of the demands placed on frontline staff. You see this provincially in hospitals as well. And it’s not just a public sector problem: the bloating of administration in both public and private sectors is a massive reason why Canada’s productivity lags…"
"The public sector model is partially flawed in Canada right now. We as an economy have become very unproductive, but have somehow justified a growth in our public service. In the private sector companies are incentivized to identify areas of improvement and efficiency gains. The public sector based on how budget is allocated are incentivized to do the exact opposite, they use all their budget so they get more next year. What actually happens is an easy lever is to just hire more people to consume that remaining budget, what this leads to no new services or improvements for the public. :/"
"there’s actively people who want the government to set up a crown corporation to run grocery stores. Which is hilarious because they think it would be cheaper than a Loblaw. Clearly they haven’t shopped at the LCBO lately to see how cost effective the government is when running retail"
"The government should just stay in there lane and focus on doing their job well instead of trying to over regulate and do their jobs plus everyone else’s jobs poorly. Things like using common sense with population growth numbers, making Canada an attractive place to do business, etc. We desperately need more companies investing in Canada and we desperately need more landlords (private capital) investing in our housing market. That is literally the only way out of this mess. On one hand the government says we need these things but on the other they do everything they can to discourage them."
"Unfortunately, the mismanagement of spending over the last eight years has been at levels we’ve never seen in this country. We’re not talking about spending on services. The complete inefficiencies and cost of scandals is just astonishing. This Trudeau government has by all means, played the unemployment rate more than any other prior government. They hire significant numbers of public sector workers just to help bring that unemployment rate down. But that only creates giant, massive bloat."
For the first time in 12 years, government debt costs will surpass GST revenue : r/canada - "Bingo. You are absolutely correct. We have a 100,000 new government workers since Trudeau took power. Almost double!! The Alberta government posted that 90% of new private sector jobs in the country were created in one province: Alberta. I'm now blocked from the Alberta Reddit page for stating this information, and my post was deleted as it was deemed non factual. The info came from the globe and mail and the Alberta Minister himself. Go figure. That page is nothing but NDP socialists with a serious hate for Smith. What they don't realize is Smith is standing up for Alberta's oil and gas economy that also will include hydrogen moving forward. Meanwhile the liberal government is doing everything possible to shut it down."
Canada Proud on X - "Remember when we had a prime minister who actually liked our country, its people and history?"
"Harper's Canada Day VS Trudeau's Canada Day"
Wonder why you’re broke? - YouTube - "Take a listen to the guy who’s been running things for 8 years."
Rebel News on X - "Justin Trudeau says his infamous comments about "anti-vaxxers" being "racist and misogynist" was "taken out of context." The PM then says polarization during the pandemic was "amplified deliberately with misinformation and disinformation.""
Ironic.
Canada cannot afford another lost economic decade - "It’s fair to say that the government’s economic policy agenda has done little to abate the twenty-first century trends of slow and sluggish growth and has arguably exacerbated them. The Trudeau government has advanced an economic strategy of what Lakehead University economist Livio Di Matteo calls extensive growth—that is, a set of policies (such as high immigration and deficit-financed increases to cash transfers) that have grown the total size of the economy but contributed to stagnant and even declining living standards. Immigration policy is a good (or bad) example. It’s not just that the government has increased overall immigration. It’s also shifted the composition towards lower-skilled newcomers which can distort business investment decisions and depress productivity. There’s a long-run risk here that if business investment doesn’t rise and immigration levels remain high, the Canadian economy will transition to a more labour-intensive one that has lower productivity and living standards relative to our peers. Government policy, in other words, has contributed to an economic imbalance: it’s shifting the economy from a capital-intensive model to a labour-intensive one. At the same time, high population growth is causing demand to outstrip supply in key areas such as housing, health care, and childcare. So, too, are the Trudeau government’s well-intentioned yet ultimately flawed policies like the $10-a-day childcare subsidies that have increased demand in a sector over which the federal government has little regulatory authority to similarly boost supply. One of us can attest to how bad the situation has gotten after recently being quoted waitlists of one to two years for childcare in downtown Toronto. Similar challenges have been reported across the country. It’s increasingly clear that Canada needs to shift from state-centric economic development under the Trudeau government that has relied on government consumption and population growth to eke out marginal growth to a bold supply-side agenda that pulls investment into the economy to boost supply in key areas and ultimately increase productivity and living standards. We must move our overall growth model from one of extensive growth (driven primarily by government consumption and high levels of immigration) to one of intensive growth (which is dependent on capital investment and rising productivity). One might think of the difference as stimulative versus sustainable growth. We’ll be back in the future with some policy ideas that ought to form the basis of such an agenda. But the first order of business is to understand the magnitude of the challenge and the risks of not confronting it. Canadian living standards are now what they were in 2014. That amounts to a lost decade. The overwhelming imperative of our politics and policy must be that it doesn’t extend to a second decade. We cannot afford to learn of the consequences."
The left hate private enterprise and economic growth, so
Procurement awards reviewed after ArriveCan team named 'unsung heroes' - "The award was meant for 'innovative and effective' procurement during the pandemic, but the ArriveCan team’s work has been severely criticized by the auditor-general"