Canada is in trouble. This is the ninth budget in a row that depends heavily on excessive borrowed money managed by an obesely bloated federal bureaucracy that is now 40% larger and 68% more costly than when the Liberals took power in 2015.
Unwilling to live within the tax revenues produced by the national economy, this government has borrowed more money in 8 years than all other Canadian governments combined since the nation was founded in 1867. This recklessness has doubled the national debt and created interest payments that are breaking all records – last year over $46 billion dollars and this coming year over $54 billion dollars. That is more than the federal government spends on the military, or healthcare. All of it taken from taxpayers to pay bondholders instead of being spent on public services.
Now, the centrepiece of their new budget is a capital gains tax targeting the few Canadian individuals and firms who invest in Canadian ventures or assets. This investment is what creates the new businesses and jobs and productivity the nation so badly needs.
It is bizarre to watch a morbidly obese and fiscally incompetent government propose - in the name of ‘fairness’ - to justify taking productive capital away from Canada’s small but critical investor class and hand it to the same bureaucracy that has for almost a decade shown they will only waste it. The track record is anything but ‘fair’: inflationary reckless borrowing, uncompetitive taxes, an obesely expanded bureaucracy and debt, underperforming public services, runaway interest payments and a regulatory state that kills industrial expansion and economic momentum.
The world is noticing. The OECD now measures Canada dead last of the world’s 38 advanced economies for per capita GDP productivity modeled to 2030 - and 2060. Since that 2021 analysis, the nation has lost ground on GDP productivity for another 6 of the last 8 quarters. On a purchasing power basis, Canadian GDP per capita is down to 76% of the USA. That’s with outlier Alberta raising the national GDP numbers significantly. On a provincial basis, 46 of the 50 US states are now wealthier than Ontario, and if Quebec was a US state it would be the 49th poorest, only marginally ahead of Mississippi.
The government needs to ask itself how fair it is to add another $39.8 billion in debt this coming year as they lose over $54 billion dollars in interest payments to bondholders instead of spending it on public services?
The real social injustice in this budget is the borrowed money that is killing the opportunity society Canada is supposed to be - and that the next generation deserves. By avoiding hard decisions - and taxing investors instead of cutting their own reckless spending - this govt is creating a future of forced austerity for our kids. You can call that a lot of things, but it isn’t ‘fairness’.
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