Business
Feds spend $4.3 million printing out budget
From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Author: Ryan Thorpe
The average cost for each copy of the budget is $110.
Federal documents, including the budget, are routinely made available for free on government websites.
Here’s how the federal government could have saved money printing the budget:
It could have bought 1,000 top of the line, all-in-one printers at retail price.
Then it could have bought 10,000 multi-packs of colour ink.
Along with 106,000 reams of paper.
And then it could have assigned one of the 108,000 new bureaucrats hired under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to print out copies of the budget.
Or it could have bought more than 333,000 USB flash drives and handed out digital copies to anyone who wanted to read it.
And even after this epic office supply shopping spree, Ottawa would have saved a million dollars.
Instead, Ottawa blew $4.3 million on printing the federal budget since 2015.
In fact, the government continues to spend half-a-million dollars a year printing paper copies of the budget, more than a decade after authorizing the transition to digital-only publications, according to documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
“It’s 2024, presumably the government isn’t still using carrier pigeons, so it probably doesn’t need to spend half-a-million dollars printing paper copies of its budget every year,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Not only are taxpayers getting soaked by what’s in the budget, we’re also getting a six-figure tab just to print it out.”
On average, the federal government spends $482,000 annually printing out thousands of copies of its budget, despite the fact the government has been trumpeting its embrace of the digital economy for years.
The costliest year on record was 2023, when the Trudeau government spent $753,160 printing 4,200 copies of the federal budget, according to the records.
That was $443,370 more than the Conservatives spent in 2015, the last year in which the government of former prime minister Stephen Harper tabled a budget.
The least expensive year on record was 2021, when the government spent $215,434 printing copies of its budget.
Cost of printing the federal budget, 2015 to 2024, access-to-information records
|
Year |
Number of copies |
Cost |
|
2015 |
5,911 |
$309,790 |
|
2016 |
5,876 |
$490,334 |
|
2017 |
5,937 |
$553,804 |
|
2018 |
5,561 |
$655,645 |
|
2019 |
4,874 |
$457,793 |
|
2020 |
N/A |
N/A |
|
2021 |
1,599 |
$215,434 |
|
2022 |
3,035 |
$632,273 |
|
2023 |
4,200 |
$753,160 |
|
2024 |
2,225 |
$270,418 |
|
Total |
39,218 |
$4,338,651 |
Given the number of copies the government prints each year, the federal budget would constitute a best seller in the Canadian publishing industry, according to BookNet Canada.
The average cost for each copy of the budget is $110.
In 2012, the Harper government authorized federal departments to transition to online-only publications, estimating the move would save taxpayers $178 million annually.
Federal documents, including the budget, are routinely made available for free on government websites.
“The government proved in 2021 that it could bring printing costs down, so taxpayers expect that to happen every year moving forward,” Terrazzano said. “Printing some physical copies is understandable, but an average tab of half-a-million-dollars is silly.”
Since 2015, the federal government printed 39,218 physical copies of the budget.
According to online calculations, roughly 1,460 standard pine trees would have been cut down to produce that volume of paper.
The Trudeau government is more than 1.8 billion trees short of its promise to plant two billion trees by 2030.
Fr0m LifeSiteNews
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has been providing massive funds in the name of COVID despite the fact that Joe Biden admitted the ‘pandemic’ was over by 2022.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is withdrawing $11.4 billion in COVID funding to state and local health departments, non-government groups, and international recipients about two years after the U.S. government declared the COVID-19 “national emergency” over.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” HHS director of communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement, NBC News reported.
“HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.“
Despite the fact that former President Joe Biden admitted in 2022 that the COVID “pandemic” was over, Health and Human Services (HHS) has been continuing to allocate funds for COVID testing, “vaccines,” and “global COVID projects,” according to CDC talking points.
The funding cut comes as millions of dollars for other initiatives, including vaccine hesitancy research and HIV prevention, are slashed under new HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
HHS has made the greatest funding cutbacks government-wide, according to the Department of Government Efficiency’s website.
Dr. Robert Malone argued in 2023 that the only reason the Biden administration decided to end the national COVID “emergency” when it did is because of the congressional legislation seeking that end.
“The bottom line is that the imperial U.S. administrative state will never give up these unconstitutional powers until forced to do so,” Malone wrote.
For years, major corporations bragged about their wonderful Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. They’re good for business and morally correct, they said. So why are they now cutting those programs?
Robby Starbuck says these programs once got a lot of buy-in, because people wanted to be nice! But DEI came to mean much more than just being nice.
Starbuck says what it looked like in practice was “crazy trainings” and “overtly racist hiring practices.” Now lots of people agree with him.
Companies actually take notice when Starbuck tells his many followers about their DEI programs. Often the programs get dropped.
That’s the power of free speech.
After 40+ years of reporting, I now understand the importance of limited government and personal freedom.
——————————————
Libertarian journalist John Stossel created Stossel TV to explain liberty and free markets to young people.
Prior to Stossel TV he hosted a show on Fox Business and co-anchored ABC’s primetime newsmagazine show, 20/20. Stossel’s economic programs have been adapted into teaching kits by a non-profit organization, “Stossel in the Classroom.” High school teachers in American public schools now use the videos to help educate their students on economics and economic freedom. They are seen by more than 12 million students every year.
Stossel has received 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. Other honors include the George Polk Award for Outstanding Local Reporting and the George Foster Peabody Award.
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