WATCH: MLA asks why does Eby dump on Trump, but let Xi go free - "Brodie referred to China’s interference in Canadian elections, hostage diplomacy and 100% tariffs on Canola oil and seafood and Eby’s refusal to sell U.S. wine and spirits in B.C. government liquor stores. “But instead of retaliating and railing against China, like he does with Trump, the Premier rewarded our economic enemies in China with a multi-billion dollar B.C. Ferries contract.”"
Trump not to blame for province's financial woes, Eby is | Vancouver Sun - "Finance Minister Brenda Bailey released a budget update Thursday confirming that Premier David Eby has thrown away the good financial position he inherited from his NDP predecessor, John Horgan... The $17 billion turnaround in just three years ranks as the most dramatic reversal in the B.C. government bottom line in the more than 40 years I have been covering provincial finances. Note, too, that Bailey only managed to cap off the deficit at $11 billion by bringing forward almost $2 billion in future payments from the settlement with Big Tobacco. The province won’t get some of that money for another 18 years. The province’s independent auditor general has challenged what Bailey characterized as a “standard accounting treatment.” She went ahead and counted the money as if it were cash on hand... New Democrats would have one believe that Eby’s debt loading was mostly undertaken to pay for schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, transit lines and other capital projects. In fact, the budgetary fine print shows that about half of the increase ($32 billion out of $65 billion) was to cover successive operating debts from program spending, not capital projects. Eby is outspending revenues at a record pace, making for record deficits. Interest payments are also rising. When Horgan left office, debt servicing cost $2.7 billion a year. Today, it has hit $5.1 billion with no end in sight. Interest on the debt is now the second largest program in government, exceeded only by the budget for the Health Ministry. Yet, in many ways, the most remarkable thing about the Eby government’s performance is that it has comparatively little to show for all this debt. Hospital ERs are still closing. Public safety is at risk in many communities. Ambitious NDP programs like child care have fallen behind, according to advocates. Bailey says the government is making progress on getting the budget under control. But you’d be hard pressed to find the evidence in the 75-page financial update released yesterday... The financial update showed that the minister had also presided over a reduction of 700 positions in the public service, mostly by attrition. That, too, is less than one per cent of the positions in a public service that the New Democrats have increased by almost 50 per cent since taking office... Finance Minister Selina Robinson, who served as Horgan’s finance minister after James retired, may have been poised to continue his record. But a few days after she delivered the above fiscal update, Eby demoted her to the ministry of post-secondary education. She became the first finance minister in modern times to be fired after delivering a surplus. Her replacement, Katrine Conroy, showed not the slightest interest in getting a handle on spending, deficits and debt. The only time I asked about a plan to balance the budget, she just laughed... she tried to put the first helping of blame on “unjust and unpredictable trade policies,” originating from Donald Trump’s America. But a comparison of this year’s books with the results from three years ago shows that the main perpetrator of B.C.’s fiscal fiasco is a fellow named David Eby."
The BC NDP Government is Allergic to Prosperity : r/VancouverLandlords - "Wealthy resource rich countries are currently busy building and growing entire cities out of desserts and forests, yet here we are, endowed with immense wealth, struggling to create roads, homes, schools and hospitals. BC's predicament is entirely the fault of the ideologically extreme BC NDP government that is allergic to any and all forms of prosperity. They are communists who get anaphylaxis the moment anyone dares to propose any sort of profit-making enterprise in this province. Whenever some enterprise or development does happen, Eby begins salivating at the idea of taxing it into the ground or giving it away in a secretive land claims deal. Cross the border into Washington State and see the vast wealth their government has created by nurturing industry, capital and investment. Do you think that the BC NDP has any plan to deliver that sort of prosperity to British Columbia? Our largest home-grown corporation is like what, Lululemon? And no surprise, the BC NDP and their supporters treat it and its founder as if it's some sort of terrorist enterprise. Do you think we have any chance of fostering a home-grown Boeing, Amazon, or Microsoft under the leadership of the BC NDP regime? Not a chance! It's been 8 years, what the heck is their plan? What is their vision? Eby has none. He's motivated by nothing more than ideological hatred for those who work hard, make investments, buy property. It seems to me that all the BC NDP wants is to create a class of drug addicts that depend on government handouts so they can foster a reliable voter base that they can use to stay in power."
What exactly is David Eby and the BC NDP's plan for British Columbia's economy? They have an ideological opposition to almost every single industry. What is their plan? : r/VancouverLandlords - "What exactly is David Eby and the BC NDP's plan for British Columbia's economy? There isn't a single industry (aside from the junkie-industrial complex) that they don't have some sort of ideological opposition to. Over the past eight years, the BC NDP has devoted considerable time and political capital to waging war on the real estate sector, which has also discouraged the very investment the construction industry relies on. They’ve driven away capital from the natural resource sector, maintained an ideological hostility toward the energy industry, and are now working overtime to squander the potential benefits of hosting the World Cup for the tourism industry. Meanwhile, manufacturing has sharply declined under their watch, and they’ve made little effort to attract global tech investment. And whatever remains, such as the film and gaming development industry, is now at risk of being decimated by American competition and tariffs. And the cherry on top is the record deficit. The province’s finances have fallen off a cliff. If the government is intent on opposing nearly every industry that generates tax revenue, where exactly do they expect the money to pay down this debt to come from? So, what is the plan? David Eby is an ideologue who doesn't have a clue as to what he is doing."
Donald Trump not to blame for B.C's financial woes, David Eby is : r/ilovebc - "They’re “saving” the lives of drug addicts while killing tax payers with poor hospital services and by spreading drugs to kids in suburbs."
Eby sees approval rating fall to new low, finds latest poll
Meme - Michael A. Arouet: "What happened in Canada will be studied by many historians and economists as the prime example of self-destruction of an otherwise prosperous nation after blindly following left ideology."
"Canada's living standards growth is even worse than Britain's. Change in GDP per person, adjusted for inflation"
Elbows up! Canada needs to spite Trump by destroying its economy!
Jamil Jivani on X - "The federal government wants to be your daddy and buy your kids' lunch. The federal government should instead be building an economy where you can afford to buy your own kids' lunch. Tell me what you think:"
Kristin Raworth 🇨🇦 on X - "What am I missing here? Isn’t it actually good to give children free lunch?"
Lee Humphrey on X - "The difference between a liberal’s (Kristin) way of thinking & a conservative’s way of thinking is pretty clear. Both want children to have full bellies, the Liberal thinks that it’s the gov’s responsibility to do that directly. The conservative thinks it’s the gov’s responsibility to minimize the taxes & regulations on businesses so the parents can make a good living so they can feed their children. Kristin wants socialism, the rest of us want free market solutions!"
Meme - Mark Marissen: "Amazing to see all the right-wingers on this app who think the world has ended or want to leave Canada because of a national school lunch program"
Anti-Taxxer @mapleblooded: "This isn't something to celebrate. Canada went from having the most prosperous middle class in the world to subsidizing school lunch programs in only 1 decade."
Rational Posts: "I think it's amazing every Liberal that says a school program is critically important for the kids, yet not one started a GoFundMe for a food program in their local school, volunteered their time to help it happen, and did not conduct one food drive for it."
Anti-Taxxer: "Liberals outsource their charity to taxpayers."
Taleeb Noormohamed 🇨🇦 on X - "On National Child Day, we’re reminded that every child deserves to be safe, healthy, and happy. That’s why we made the national school food program permanent to provide up to 400,000 kids with healthy, nutritious meals. No child should start the day hungry."
Jasmin Laine 🇨🇦 on X - "No parent should be taxed so high that the government strips away their dignity and wants a pat on the back for giving their child a granola bar."
The three villains of the Canadian economy - The Globe and Mail - "In the story of Canada’s sagging productivity growth in recent decades, there is a rotating cast of villains. Sometimes, high taxation is singled out for blame, with a outsized burden on personal and corporate income – choosing to tax success rather than consumption. Others point to the grip of a growing morass of regulatory red tape, with new layers added year after year. And still others see this country’s protectionist bent as culpable: restrictions on foreign investment that leave Canada badly out of step with other modern economies. The damage is plain to see. Canada’s productivity growth has lagged for years. Real gross domestic product per capita has flatlined over the last four years, with the second quarter of this year marginally higher than in the same period of 2021. Longer term, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has warned that Canada is projected to lag its peers in per capita growth in coming decades. Of course, each of those three bad policy choices, decades in the making, play a role in Canada’s deep-seated economic malaise. Each would be bad on its own. But together, they act to prop up each other – leaning on each other for support. Protectionist policies reduce competition, tempting governments to remedy the resulting market failures through regulation. The ever-growing number of regulations inflates the cost of doing business, but also shields incumbents from upstarts unable to afford lobbyists, law firms and regulatory compliance departments. That insulation from competition protects profit margins and makes the burden of excessive taxation a little easier to bear. And to bring it full circle, as the burden of regulations and taxation erodes competitiveness and dulls innovation, it increases the clamour for protection against foreign competition. The result is corporate complacency, a willingness to settle for the lukewarm results of not-bad profit margins. Economist and former federal finance official Don Drummond points out that successive federal governments have tried to deal with each of those issues, with at best mixed results. Mr. Drummond says something beyond numbers may be at work: a business culture that lacks ambition. Tinkering around the edges won’t deliver enough of a jolt to shock Canadian businesses out of their complacency. Incrementalism is doomed to fail because of the mutually supporting nature of the three villains. But a bold move against one could succeed in defeating the trio. Those defending the status quo like to say that Canada’s tax burden is not particularly high. And, superficially, they are correct. As the chart below shows, Canada sits precisely in the middle of the OECD, as measured by taxes as a percentage of GDP, as of 2023, the most recent ranking. And this country’s tax burden, at 34.8 per cent of GDP, is just above the OECD average of 33.9 per cent. But take a look at the components of that tax burden, and the problem is readily apparent... Taxes on personal income in Canada are much higher than the OECD average - half again as high. The gap is less pronounced on corporate taxation but still substantial. More telling is what is decidedly absent: any tax advantage for Canada in a world in which the fight for global capital is intensifying. There is an area in which Canadians have an edge over other OECD countries: consumption taxes. Canada’s value-added taxes are just three-fifths of the OECD average. That might sound like a good thing, except for this: consumption taxes are far less damaging to investment and productivity growth than taxes on income. Or to put it another way: Canada has chosen to heavily tax success, in the form of higher incomes and corporate profits... Taxes have one virtue – their cost is obvious. Not so with the second big problem gumming up the works of Canada’s economy: overregulation. A Statistics Canada analysis from earlier this year laid the problem out in stark terms, namely a federal regulatory burden that rose 37 per cent between 2006 and 2021, as the chart below shows. Just at the federal level, there was a net increase 86,700 regulations over that period. Add on top of that provincial and municipal red tape and you start to get the idea of the magnitude of the problem. The costs estimated by StatCan are staggering: a reduction in GDP by 1.7 per cent (about half the economic damage of the financial crisis); a 1.3-per-cent reduction in employment growth; and a 9-per-cent hit to business investment... For a trade-dependent economy, Canada is surprisingly hostile to foreign investment. Whole sectors are effectively off limits for companies wanting a controlling stake, ranging from the somewhat plausible (airlines) to the downright odd (fishery licences). Vincent Geloso, senior economist at the Montreal Economic Institute, estimates that nearly a third of the Canadian economy is protected from foreign competition, once health care and education are excluded. Even more jaw-dropping is this country’s international ranking on protectionist measures... Canada ranks 73rd out of 104 jurisdictions, and is the most protectionist economy in the G7 when it comes to foreign investment. The Scandinavian countries that Canada so often aspires to emulate have far more open economies. The politics of tearing down those protectionist barriers are daunting, to say the least. Target any one sector and businesses within it would argue, with some justification, that they will feel a full measure of pain without being able to enjoy the benefits of heightened competition elsewhere in the economy. The solution, then, is to abandon the failed incrementalist approach, and tear them all down at the same time. Without those protectionist barriers, Canadian businesses would face much more intense competition and would have to innovate and ramp up investment – or go bust. Without those barriers, Canadian businesses would not be so accepting of a lopsided tax burden. Or so willing to endure a morass of regulations. Every gang has a ringleader. And for the three villains of Canada’s economy, it is protectionism that keeps the gang together."
Moody: Liberals have made our tax system complex and inefficient - "In Canada, compulsory taxes have exploded in both quantity and complexity under the current Liberal government. In addition, the number of officials at the Canada Revenue Agency has grown to 59,155 in 2024 from 40,059 in 2015 — a staggering 47.7 per cent... For me, respect starts with controlled government spending. It then extends to a tax system that is approachable and understandable, is efficient in its administration, encourages and rewards hard work and risk-taking, and is competitive with other countries. A poor tax system is just the opposite: complex beyond comprehension, bloated with too many officials and it punishes hard workers and risk-takers. Canada’s tax system fits that description. Canada’s taxation system has also become a giant income and wealth redistribution scheme that is designed to achieve political goals (get voters addicted to cheques) rather than achieve good public policy."
City of Toronto imposes hiring freeze on non-essential workers : r/toronto - "Everything is going to shit because the government refuses to tax people. It’s becoming infuriating... People are idiots. You can’t run a city without the funds. It’s not just Toronto going through this. It’s all the municipalities, the provincial AND federal government. They should be directing taxes towards the wealthy and toward corporations. People will vote conservative against their own interests because they’re idiots."
Left wing economics - keep increasing spending and taxes (but not on me). Because higher taxes will be paid by "the rich" and "corporations"
City of Toronto imposes hiring freeze on non-essential workers : r/toronto - "Everything is going to shit because the government refuses to tax people. It’s becoming infuriating."
"Toronto has had well above inflation property tax hikes for three consecutive years: a 7% increase in 2023, a 9.5% increase in 2024, and a 6.9% increase approved for 2025"
"These tax increases should have been implemented long before but it’s been a bigger jump since Tory kept kicking the can down the line. Everyone will blame Chow or whoever else stepped in as the Mayor who had to eventually do it since the City is running out of money and property tax has not kept pace. Toronto still has one of the lowest tax rates in Ontario and has been able to get by due to economy of scale. Other smaller and neighbouring municipalities have higher tax rates than Toronto"
"Peak r Toronto comment, must be from someone that lives in a basement and pays no tax. Hey, did you know Toronto has a double land transfer tax, new condos have $160k development charge, property taxes have increased ~20% in the past three year and they have a massive commercial tax base?... Density should be driving huge tax revenue and economies of scale, not to mention the other items mentioned above. I didn’t even mention the fewer services condos get, garbage pickup not covered by the city, private snow clearing, etc.. This city has a massive spending problem."
Left wing logic - claim cities are more efficient then look at tax rates on home value, not tax dollars paid and then claim taxes are still too low
City of Toronto imposes hiring freeze on non-essential workers : r/toronto - "It’s estimated it cost up to $850,000 to rename sankofa square. It’s also estimated to cost 12.5M to fullly rename Dundas street. Are they spending our money wisely?"
"If you're not first willing to address the $1.2B we spend annually on police, then you're not actually serious about the "wisdom" behind our city budget."
"Regardless of the massive cost difference between the two, you can make arguments about the usefulness of police in a city. It's very difficult to argue the benefits of renaming a street."
"But it allows performative activists to pat themselves on the back without actually improving the means of anyone in the city"
"All I ever see on this site is "cops bad", "cars bad". These "Torontonians" want no cops and no roads. What they really want is to live in a field with nobody else around except ubers to take them out to socialize."
These are the same people who rage against CEO pay and claim that workers could be paid better if CEOs were paid less, when even if CEOs worked for free, workers would get a few cents more
Alberta tops in Canada for 'social mobility', Quebec dead last: study - "Alberta notably had fewer legal and regulatory barriers to mobility than other provinces, making it easier for residents to pursue quality education and training, enter occupations and find adequate housing close to where they work. Despite coming out on top, Alberta still had much room for improvement, earning just 57 of a possible 100 points. It fared especially poorly with respect to occupational licensing and regulatory takings... “The fact no Canadian province gets a grade of 60 per cent or above is an indictment of the web of regulations that have cemented society in place and prevented so many from bettering their situation,” said Renaud. “Canadians rightly expect to see their hard work pay-off, and government policy should not stand in the way of that.”... The index incorporates both policy-driven barriers to mobility and “natural barriers” like childhood poverty and family instability. Quebec finished 10th out of the 10 provinces in both categories, hindered by both low social capital and high government-imposed barriers to mobility. Brossard noted that Quebec has compulsory certification rules in place for 25 trades across the construction industry, more than twice as many as any other province. Workers who want to enter these trades must undergo months of training and apply for a government-issued license... Quebec also fared poorly on indicators of social connectedness like family intactness and hours spent volunteering. The western provinces generally ranked higher on the index than Quebec and Atlantic Canada, with Ontario falling right in the middle at number five."
Proof that Capitalism needs to be regulated. Quebec needs even more regulation to improve social mobility
Public grocery stores unlikely to bring down food prices, say experts - "NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis is promising to lower grocery bills across the country by bringing in a national “public option” to compete with corporate supermarket chains, but economists say this could be a hard row to hoe for a meagre yield. “I think it would be profoundly expensive, and very difficult to make succeed, for a relatively marginal benefit for Canadians,” said Mike von Massow, a professor of food, agriculture and resource economics at the University of Guelph. “If you wanted to provide food support for low-income or underserved Canadians, (there are) much more cost-effective ways of doing that,” said von Massow. Lewis said in a recent interview that the federal government has the capacity to buy food directly from distributors and then sell it to Canadians at cost via non-profit grocery stores. “People cannot get by when they’re paying 300 bucks for a cart of groceries … when the market fails any industry, the government has to step in and actually provide an alternative that is not in the market mindset, where everything has to make a big profit,” said Lewis. Lewis called his plan for public grocery stores a “fantastically popular policy that I think (the NDP) can win with.” Five large chains, three domestic and two foreign, control roughly three-quarters of the Canadian market for groceries. The idea of a public option for food and groceries has recently caught fire in democratic socialist circles south of the border... Von Massow said that, even if government-owned grocery stores integrated seamlessly into the market, they’d still offer a relatively small savings for the average customer, given already thin profit margins for grocers. “So even if you bought just as well as Loblaws or Sobeys do, you would only be able to reduce the cost at checkout by somewhere around five per cent. And that’s not insignificant, but that’s assuming that they do it as efficiently as the big guys, and there’s no evidence that they can,” said von Massow. Profit margins average between 3 and 4 percent among Canada’s major grocery chains, according to the Retail Council of Canada. Von Massow noted that the federal government already has programs in place to help the food insecure, such as the national school lunch program and Nutrition North. Sylvain Charlebois, a professor of agri-foods distribution and policy at Dalhousie University, says he’s worried about how Lewis’s proposal will impact the already thinned out agri-food labour force. “Essentially, what Mr. Lewis is trying to do is make sure that food is sold at cost. But it’s incredibly dangerous to do that, because you basically undermine the value of the work that’s being done across the supply chain, from farm gate, to store, to restaurant,” said Charlebois. “You’re basically saying to Canadians, well, if you’re in the food business, you’re not allowed to make money … and that’s an incredibly dangerous message when we’re already struggling to recruit young Canadians to work in different areas of food distribution,” he added. Charlebois noted that the food industry has become increasingly dependent on temporary foreign workers (TFWs) in recent years, and more government involvement in food distribution would only further this trend... Kent Fellows, an economist at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy, says that it’s Canada’s geography, rather than large chains themselves, that’s led to the concentration of ownership in Canada’s retail grocery sector. “The firms themselves aren’t doing anything to keep new entrants out of the market … I think it is because of the economies of scale, particularly in the large urban centres that tend to be served by the big chains,” said Fellows. Fellows said that agglomeration allows the major chains to combine retail groceries with higher-profit-margin entities like pharmacies. He added that there’s a stronger argument to be made for small-scale public grocers in underserved areas than a national public option. “I think that argument really needs to be predicated on the notion that we now consider this part of the social safety net,” said Fellows... A spokesperson for rival NDP leadership candidate Heather McPherson said that she would soon be putting forward a plan focused on giving Canadians an “immediate change in the price of their groceries.” McPherson called in a video posted to social media last month for an emergency price freeze on staples and a windfall tax on the big grocery chains to fund the removal of the federal sales tax on prepared foods and snacks."
