Trudeau has more than doubled Canada’s debt while Canadians get poorer

46 percent of Canadians are a few hundred dollars away from not being able to meet their financial obligations… 400,000 more Canadians live in poverty now compared to 2020.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has more than doubled Canada’s national debt, but Canadian’s quality of life has only decreased.

According to calculations from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), Canada’s national debt has more than doubled since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took power in 2015, reaching a total of $1.239 trillion.

“Canadians can’t afford another decade-and-a-half debt binge,” Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director, said in a . “Trudeau needs to stop wasting so much money and balance the books, because it’s wrong to waste billions on debt interest payments.”

When Trudeau took office in November 2015, Canada’s federal debt was just $616 billion.

Despite this doubling of the national debt, the Trudeau government does not plan to balance the budget until 2040, according to supplementary data from the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO). 

Currently, every Canadian owes $31,000 of the debt, however, interest charges between now and the time the budget is balanced in 2040 will mean that the number is much higher. By 2040, interest charges on the federal debt will have cost taxpayers a whopping $847 billion, meaning each Canadian will owe an additional $18,000. 

“Waiting until 2040 to balance the budget is outrageous and the government won’t even hit that target if the economy has a hiccup or politicians can’t say no to new spending,” Terrazzano said. “This government has given taxpayers every reason to believe it will never balance the budget.”

While the national debt has skyrocketed, and the government continues to spend money hand-over-fist, the quality of living for Canadians is plummeting. Instead of addressing this, Trudeau continues to send tax dollars to Ukraine and subsidizing a variety of ideologically motivated causes that provide no material benefit to Canadians.

In July, a survey found that a massive 46 percent of Canadians are a few hundred dollars away from not being able to meet their financial obligations.

LifeSiteNews reported that fast-rising food costs in Canada have led to many people feeling a sense of “hopelessness and desperation” with nowhere to turn for help, according to the Canadian government’s own National Advisory Council on Poverty.

At the same time Canadians are being driven into poverty, housing prices have skyrocketed, with a recent analysis estimating that a Canadian household now has to spend an unprecedented 63.5% of its income to afford a mortgage.

At the same time, criminal incidents under the Trudeau government have increased 20 percent, with critics placing the blame on Trudeau’s “catch and release” policy, which allows dangerous criminals to walk free on bail.

Indeed, this policy has put many Canadians in danger, as was the case last month when a Brampton man charged with sexually assaulting a 3-year-old was reportedly out on bail for an October 2022 incident in which he was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon and possession of a dangerous weapon. 

As LifeSiteNews previously reported, a well-known Ottawa think tank warned that Canada’s justice system is unable to keep up with out-of-control crime that has risen sharply in the last few decades to the point where the national murder rate is at its highest in 30 years.

Up Next

BC NDP, Conservatives’ drug policies converge in close election

Don't Miss

The Explosive Cost of Canada’s Civil Service Hiring Binge

Todayville

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Hamas, Palestinians paraded dead babies coffins through streets before handover to Israel

Health / 7 hours ago

RFK Jr: There’s no medical justification for vaccinating one-day-old babies for Hepatitis B

National / 8 hours ago

Andrew Scheer exposes the Mark Carney Canadians should know

Business

Worst kept secret—red tape strangling Canada’s economy

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

In the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S.

According to a new Statistics Canada report, government regulation has grown over the years and it’s hurting Canada’s economy. The report, which uses a regulatory burden measure devised by KPMG and Transport Canada, shows government regulatory requirements increased 2.1 per cent annually from 2006 to 2021, with the effect of reducing the business sector’s GDP, employment, labour productivity and investment.

Specifically, the growth in regulation over these years cut business-sector investment by an estimated nine per cent and “reduced business start-ups and business dynamism,” cut GDP in the business sector by 1.7 percentage points, cut employment growth by 1.3 percentage points, and labour productivity by 0.4 percentage points.

While the report only covered regulatory growth through 2021, in the past four years an avalanche of new regulations has made the already existing problem of overregulation worse.

The Trudeau government in particular has intensified its regulatory assault on the extraction sector with a greenhouse gas emissions cap, new fuel regulations and new methane emissions regulations. In the last few years, federal diktats and expansions of bureaucratic control have swept the auto industry, child care, supermarkets and many other sectors.

Again, the negative results are evident. Over the past nine years, Canada’s cumulative real growth in per-person GDP (an indicator of incomes and living standards) has been a paltry 1.7 per cent and trending downward, compared to 18.6 per cent and trending upward in the United States. Put differently, if the Canadian economy had tracked with the U.S. economy over the past nine years, average incomes in Canada would be much higher today.

Also in the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S., and only about two-thirds as much new capital (on average) as workers in other developed countries.

Consequently, Canada is mired in an economic growth crisis—a fact that even the Trudeau government does not deny. “We have more work to do,” said Anita Anand, then-president of the Treasury Board, last August, “to examine the causes of low productivity levels.” The Statistics Canada report, if nothing else, confirms what economists and the business community already knew—the regulatory burden is much of the problem.

Of course, regulation is not the only factor hurting Canada’s economy. Higher federal carbon taxes, higher payroll taxes and higher top marginal income tax rates are also weakening Canada’s productivity, GDP, business investment and entrepreneurship.

Finally, while the Statistics Canada report shows significant economic costs of regulation, the authors note that their estimate of the effect of regulatory accumulation on GDP is “much smaller” than the effect estimated in an American study published several years ago in the Review of Economic Dynamics. In other words, the negative effects of regulation in Canada may be even higher than StatsCan suggests.

Whether Statistics Canada has underestimated the economic costs of regulation or not, one thing is clear: reducing regulation and reversing the policy course of recent years would help get Canada out of its current economic rut. The country is effectively in a recession even if, as a result of rapid population growth fuelled by record levels of immigration, the GDP statistics do not meet the technical definition of a recession.

With dismal GDP and business investment numbers, a turnaround—both in policy and outcomes—can’t come quickly enough for Canadians.

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute

Business

‘Out and out fraud’: DOGE questions $2 billion Biden grant to left-wing ‘green energy’ nonprofit`

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The EPA under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a ‘green energy’ group that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a “green energy” nonprofit that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists such as former Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

Founded in 2023 as a coalition of nonprofits, corporations, unions, municipalities, and other groups, Power Forward Communities (PFC) bills itself as “the first national program to finance home energy efficiency upgrades at scale, saving Americans thousands of dollars on their utility bills every year.” It says it “will help homeowners, developers, and renters swap outdated, inefficient appliances with more efficient and modernized options, saving money for years ahead and ensuring our kids can grow up with cleaner, pollutant-free air.”

The organization’s website boasts more than 300 member organizations across 46 states but does not detail actual activities. It does have job postings for three open positions and a form for people to sign up for more information.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, along with new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, are raising questions about the $2 billion grant PFC received from the Biden EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), ostensibly for the “affordable decarbonization of homes and apartments throughout the country, with a particular focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities.”

PFC’s announcement of the grant is the organization’s only press release to date and is alarming given that the organization had somehow reported only $100 in revenue at the end of 2023.

“I made a commitment to members of Congress and to the American people to be a good steward of tax dollars and I’ve wasted no time in keeping my word,” Zeldin said. “When we learned about the Biden administration’s scheme to quickly park $20 billion outside the agency, we suspected that some organizations were created out of thin air just to take advantage of this.” Zeldin previously announced the Biden EPA had deposited the $20 billion in a Citibank account, apparently to make it harder for the next administration to retrieve and review it.

“As we continue to learn more about where some of this money went, it is even more apparent how far-reaching and widely accepted this waste and abuse has been,” he added. “It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”

Daniel Turner, executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, told the Beacon that in his opinion “for an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant — it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud.”

Prominent among PFC’s insiders is Abrams, the former Georgia House minority leader best known for persistent false claims about having the state’s gubernatorial election stolen from her in 2018. Abrams founded two of PFC’s partner organizations (Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count) and serves as lead counsel for a third group (Rewiring America) in the coalition. A longtime advocate of left-wing environmental policies, Abrams is also a member of the national advisory board for advocacy group Climate Power.