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400,000 more Canadians live in poverty now compared to 2020: gov’t report

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

A report by the federal government has found that ‘9.9 percent of Canadians, some four million people, live in poverty compared to 6.4 percent in 2020, the equivalent of approximately 400,000 more Canadians.’

Decades of progress in lowering the poverty rate in Canada has been wiped out in the last few years under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, one of his own federal departments has reported.

According to Blacklock’s Reporter, a recently released report dated December 11, 2023 by the Department of Social Development “estimates” that “9.9 percent of Canadians, some four million people, live in poverty compared to 6.4 percent in 2020, the equivalent of ‘approximately 400,000 more Canadians,’” and that “[f]uture increases in the rate of poverty could stall progress towards reaching the 2030 poverty reduction target of a 50 percent reduction in poverty versus 2015 levels.” 

The report observed that high inflation in Canada combined with “lagging household incomes” has led to “affordability pressures among many households.” 

While the uptick in the poverty rate is certainly concerning for many Canadians, it may come as little surprise as this is not the first time one of Trudeau’s own departments has warned of such a trend.

In January, the National Advisory Council on Poverty (NACP) observed to Parliament that fast-rising food costs have led to many people feeling a sense of “hopelessness and desperation.”

“Persons with lived expertise of poverty and service providers alike told us things seem worse now than they were before and during the first years of the pandemic,” read the NACP report.  

“We heard that people are worried about the rising cost of living and inflation,” it continued, adding, “More people are in crisis and these crises are more visible in our communities.” 

The damning figures comes as critics, including the nation’s leading taxpayer watchdog, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, have warned that the Trudeau government’s deficit spending and oft-increasing tax regime has been putting undue strain on the pocketbooks of its citizens.

Previously speaking to LifeSiteNews, CTF federal director Franco Terrazzano urged the Trudeau government to cut spending, balance the budget and “completely scrap” the “carbon tax.”

“More debt means more money wasted on interest charges and less room to cut taxes,” Terrazzano stated, warning that “[i]n a handful of years, every penny collected from the GST (Goods and Service Tax) will go toward paying interest on the debt.”

Under Trudeau, Canadians have seen their overall tax rate go up thanks to the punitive carbon tax that affects all goods and services in the nation. 

Even the Bank of Canada, the nation’s central bank, has taken issue with Trudeau government policy, acknowledging last year that some of its federal “climate change” programs, which have been deemed “extreme” by provincial leaders, are helping to fuel inflation. 

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Canadians should expect even more spending in federal fall economic statement

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From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

The Trudeau government will soon release its fall economic statement. Though technically intended to be an update on the fiscal plan in this year’s budget, in recent years the fall economic statement has more closely resembled a “mini-budget” that unveils new (and often significant) spending commitments and initiatives.

Let’s look at the data.

The chart below includes projections of annual federal program spending from a series of federal budgets and updates, beginning with the 2022 budget and ending with the latest 2024 budget. Program spending equals total spending minus debt interest costs, and represents discretionary spending by the federal government.

Clearly, there’s a trend that with every consecutive budget and fiscal update the Trudeau government revises spending estimates upwards. Take the last two fiscal years, 2023/24 and 2024/25, for example. Budget 2022 projected annual program spending of $436.5 billion for the 2023/24 fiscal year. Yet the fall economic statement released just months later revised that spending estimate up to $449.8 billion, and later releases showed even higher spending.

The issue is even more stark when examining spending projections for the current fiscal year. Budget 2022 projected annual spending of $441.6 billion in 2024/25. Since then, every subsequent fiscal release has revised that estimate higher and higher, to the point that Budget 2024 estimates program spending of $483.6 billion for this year—representing a $42.0 billion increase from the projections only two years ago.

Meanwhile, as spending estimates are revised upwards, plans to reduce the federal deficit are consistently pushed off into later years.

For example, the 2022 fall economic statement projected a deficit of $25.4 billion for the 2024/25 fiscal year, and declining deficits in the years to come, before reaching an eventual surplus of $4.5 billion in 2027/28. However, subsequent budgets and fiscal updates again revised those estimates. The latest budget projects a deficit of $39.8 billion in 2024/25 that will decline to a $26.8 billion deficit by 2027/28. In other words, though budgets and fiscal updates have consistently projected declining deficits between 2024/25 and 2027/28, each subsequent document has produced larger deficits throughout the fiscal outlook and pushed the timeline for balanced budgets further into the future.

These data illustrate the Trudeau government’s lack of accountability to its own fiscal plans. Though the unpredictable nature of forecasting means the government is unlikely to exactly meet future projections, it’s still reasonable to expect it will roughly follow its own fiscal plans. However, time and time again Canadians have been sold a certain plan, only to have it change dramatically mere months later due to the government’s unwillingness to restrain spending. We shouldn’t expect the upcoming fall economic statement to be any different.

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Daily Caller

Climate Change Fanaticism Was The Big Election Loser

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Stephen Moore

A few days before last week’s election, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a dire warning to voters. If Trump won, “the struggle against climate change will be over.”

He had that right.

Climate change fanaticism was effectively on the ballot last week. That green energy agenda was decisively defeated.

It turns out the tens of millions of middle-class Americans who voted for Trump weren’t much interested in the temperature of the planet 50 years from now. They were too busy trying to pay the bills.

The result shouldn’t be too surprising. Polls have shown climate change ranks near the bottom of voters’ concerns. Jobs, inflation and illegal immigration register much higher on the scale of concerns.

But if you asked the elite of America in the top one percent of income, climate change is seen as an immediate and existential threat to the planet. Our poll at Unleash Prosperity earlier this year found that the cultural elites were so hyper-obsessed with climate issues, they were in favor of banning air conditioning, nonessential air travel and many modern home appliances to stop global warming. Our study showed that not many of the other 99 percent agree.

Wake up, Bernie and Al Gore.

Climate change has become the ultimate luxury good: the richer you are, the more you fret about it.

Among the elite, obsessing about climate change has become a favorite form of virtue-signaling at the country club and in the faculty lounges. There is almost no cross that the green elites — the people who donate six figures or more to groups like the Sierra Club — aren’t willing to make lower income Americans bear to stop global warming.

Herein lies the political curse of the climate issue. A millionaire doesn’t care much if the price of gas rises by $1 a gallon or if they have to pay another $100 a month in utility bills. But the middle class hates paying more.

It wasn’t just economic concerns that turned the voters against climate crusaders like President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Workers weren’t too thrilled with the heavy fist of government commanding them to buy an electric vehicle — whether they wanted one or not.

It hasn’t helped the greens’ cause that the same progressives who are out to save the planet with grandiose transformations and global government, seem to have no problem with the garbage polluting the streets of our major cities or the graffiti or the feces and urine smell on the street corners of San Francisco and New York. That’s real pollution. And it’s affecting us here and now.

The good news is this year’s voter revolts against the radical green agenda are not a vote for dirtier air or water. The air that we breathe and the water we drink is cleaner than ever — a point that President Donald Trump correctly made. We will continue to make progress against pollution.

To try to sell middle America on the climate-change agenda of abolishing fossil fuels, the greens peddled bogus arguments that climate change would hurt poor communities most. In reality the financial costs of the climate policies and the paychecks lost were felt by the non-elite.

Democrats forgot to visit the steel-mill construction sites or the auto plants or the oil patch and ask those workers what they thought.

Well, now we know the reality. Americans think their shrinking paychecks and the higher price of gas they pay at the pump is the real clear-and-present danger. If Democrats don’t start to get that, they too will go to bed worrying about their jobs.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity.  His latest book is titled: “The Trump Economic Miracle.”

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