Trudeau doesn’t know what saving money means
By Lethbridge Herald on April 12, 2023.
GUEST OPINION
Franco Terrazzano
CANADIAN TAXPAYERS FEDERATION
You know you’ve been in Ottawa too long when you forget what saving money means.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland claims she is “exercising fiscal restraint” and “reducing government spending by more than $15 billion.”
Here are the numbers in Budget 2023.
In 2022, spending was $470 billion. In 2023, it will be $491 billion.
Spending will climb to $509 billion in 2024, $523 billion in 2025, $538 billion in 2026 and $556 billion in 2027.
Does that look like saving money to you?
For politicians reading this in Ottawa, here’s a clue to answer that question: if you increase spending by $85 billion, you’re saving money wrong.
Freeland pinky promises to save money on consultants and travel, and across department budgets and in Crown corporations.
But 97 per cent of those savings won’t begin until 2024. If you promise to start your diet next year, are you taking that diet seriously?
The government doesn’t need to wait until next year to stop serving bureaucrats beef Wellington or stuffed pork tenderloin on flights. Freeland doesn’t need to wait until next year to stop hiring luxury chauffeurs when she books a hotel in the wrong city. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should stop billing taxpayers for $6,000 per night hotel rooms right now.
Bureaucrats don’t need to wait another year to stop giving themselves $200 million in bonuses when they barely meet half of their own performance targets. Crown corporations – like the Bank of Canada, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the CBC – should cut the bonus party today, not next year.
Cutting back on consultants and travel and finding savings in departments and Crown corporations is needed. But the government is promising to use a scalpel to slice a gram of fat tomorrow when it should be pulling out the STIHL today.
Budget 2023 is like a bad episode of the Oprah Show. Instead of a prize for everyone in the audience, there’s special taxpayer treatment for every business with green in its name.
“The government is offering major tax credits to companies promising lower-carbon technologies,” the Post reported. “A senior government official estimated the value of the credits at roughly $80 billion over the next decade.”
The government is also putting taxpayers on the hook for $15 billion through a corporate slush fund dubbed the Canada Growth Fund. The government still won’t tell taxpayers how many billions of dollars it’s giving Volkswagen.
Any flicker of hope the Trudeau government will ever balance the budget has vanished.
The deficit will be $40 billion in 2023. That’s almost $10 billion larger than the deficit Freeland forecasted five months ago. The best this government can do is promise to bring the deficit down to $14 billion by 2027.
But even that may be wishful thinking for a government that hasn’t met a budget target it couldn’t miss.
The debt will total $1.2 trillion by the end of the year. That’s about double the $616-billion debt Prime Minister Justin Trudeau started with.
More debt means more money wasted on interest charges. Interest charges on the federal government credit card will cost each Canadian an average of about $1,000 this year. Annual interest charges will hit $50 billion in 2027.
Budget 2023 contains $11.6 billion in new taxes over the next five years. For context, Freeland outspent her own budget by $18 billion last year. The government could win the lottery every day and still run massive deficits if it doesn’t stop overspending.
The biggest sting will come through higher gas, heating and grocery bills as the government increases the carbon tax in April. The carbon tax will cost the average family up to $710 this year, even after the rebates.
Budget 2023 is proof this government doesn’t care about fiscal restraint or helping taxpayers.
Franco Terrazzano is the Federal Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
27
-26
There is a lot of factual information there! This PM has bankrupt the country, with nothing to show for it! He has fractured the country, coast to coast, province to province, people to people with his ‘brilliant’ social manipulation and created a country full of addicts and people using drugs with his policies of legalizing marijuana (for the taxes collected) and enabling and encouraging drug use with his Supervised Consumption Sites where people die from overdoses right outside their doors after leaving the site as well as giving people free drugs in BC.
He has destroyed a once great country in just a few years!
As we face another world war, our military is in a sad state for equipment, even though we have dedicated men and women, ready and willing, they are understaffed and underequipped for the job. Similar to 2002 when he committed troops to go into a war in Afghanistan, with junk: no air support and no armoured vehicles- iltis jeeps ( no armour ), LAV’s, light armoured and even green camo that should have been desert camo.
It is disgraceful for a country as vast and populated as Canada is with 34 million, to have such a small defense force – 68,000 reg force and 30,000 reserves.
Finland, NATO’s newest member, only has a 5,565,000 people yet it has 24,000 regular force active personnel with 900,000 reservists ready to march and equipped with modern equipment that some of our military would love to have.
The PM is constantly flying around the world, trying to be a world leader ( with many laughing at him), costing us tens of millions in travel costs, while our country tears itself apart!
He cannot keep the country together, even after bribing so many groups with Canadian taxpayer money, so how is he going to lead the world?
He wants that a on the useless UNSC, that is a joke and it now has Russian President Putin sitting as President of the ‘United Nations’ Security Council, while he disrespects the very mandates the UN was formed on.
The United Nations went the way of the League of Nations decades ago and now cannot enforce it mandates due to China and Russia sitting on the UNSC!
This PM will be the worst PM in Canadian history!
But Franco please remember what Trudope said “And the budget will balance itself.”
…
trudeau, like every other govt name we have elected, “saves” us masses from having too much money.