From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

By Franco Terrazzano 

Average compensation for a federal bureaucrat is $125,300. Cutting back the bureaucracy to population growth would save taxpayers $9 billion every year

Dumb government spending doesn’t stop at the 49^th parallel.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency, with a mandate to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”

Those marching orders sure would sound good in a prime minister’s mandate letter to a finance minister. And here’s the blueprint they should follow.

Begin with crazy research Canadian taxpayers are forced to subsidize.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council spends $1 billion a year supporting “research and research training in the social sciences and humanities.”

Here’s a little taste of the reports it funds with your tax dollars:

• Gender Politics in Peruvian Rock Music ($20,000)
• Cart-ography: tracking the birth, life and death of an urban grocery cart, from work product to work tool ($105,000)
• My Paw in Yours: Dead Pets and Transcendence of Species Divides in Experimental Art-Making Practice ($17,500)
• Playing for Pleasure: The Affective Experience of Sexual and Erotic Video Games ($50,000)

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Parks Canada put Mr. Magoo in charge of its hunting operations. It spent four years and $10,000 capturing a single bullfrog and dropped $800,000 hunting 84 deer on a B.C. Island. How can a simple hunt cost $10,000 per deer?

Well, hunting gets more expensive when instead of your grandpa’s old rifle, you use prohibited semi-automatic weapons, instead of a box of shells, you get a crate of ammo, and instead of your buddy’s old pickup, you rent a helicopter for $67,000.

Or how about the $8-million barn at Rideau Hall. Or $12,500 live senior citizen sex story shows. Or the $8,800 sex toy show in Germany. Or the millions wasted producing government podcasts no one listens to.

Then there’s government officials living high on the hog.

Governor General Mary Simon spent $71,000 on limo services in Iceland. Bureaucrats spend $76,000 a month renting art. Global Affairs Canada spends $51,000 on booze a month.

Now, the big stuff.

The size and cost of the government is out of control. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hired 108,000 new bureaucrats. That’s a 42 per cent increase in less than a decade.

Had the bureaucracy only increased with population growth, there would be 72,491 fewer bureaucrats today.

Average compensation for a federal bureaucrat is $125,300. Cutting back the bureaucracy to population growth would save taxpayers $9 billion every year.

It’s time to stop rewarding failure with bonuses.

The feds dished out $1.5 billion in bonuses since 2015.

And the bonuses flow despite federal departments only managing to hit half of their performance targets once in the past five years.

Government executives overseeing ArriveSCAM took $340,000 in bonuses.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation rubberstamped $102 million in bonuses amid the worst housing crisis in Canadian history.

The Bank of Canada printed $20 million in bonus cheques in 2022, as inflation reached a 40-year high.

The CBC dished out $132 million in bonuses since 2015.

The next thing on the chopping block? Corporate welfare.

Trudeau put taxpayers on the hook for $30 billion in subsidies to multinational corporations like Honda,Volkswagen, Stellantis and Northvolt.

Federal corporate subsidies totalled $11.2 billion in 2022 alone.

Shutting down the federal government’s seven regional development agencies would save taxpayers an estimated $1.5 billion annually.

True efficiency would also mean eliminating failing government operations altogether. The feds should sell any Crown corporation that can, or should, be left to the private sector.

Here are a few examples.

The CBC, which takes more than $1 billion from taxpayers annually.

Canada Post, which lost $1.2 billion in the last two years and forecasts “larger, unsustainable losses in future years.”

VIA Rail, took $1.8 billion in taxpayer cash during the past five years just to cover operating losses.

The bad news for taxpayers is we pay too much tax because the government wastes too money. The list of wasteful spending in this article is far from exhaustive.

Other examples include the multi-billion dollar gun confiscation that police officers say won’t work, the $25-billion equalization scheme and taxpayer-funded media bailouts, among others.

The good news is a champion of taxpayers could make massive cuts and barely anyone outside the Ottawa bubble would notice.

This is the blueprint to slash Ottawa’s wasteful, bloated bureaucracy. All we need now is a prime minister with the guts to pick up the scissors.

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

If the value of local radio stations, as measured by how much revenue they generate, is higher than the costs of running those stations, no subsidies are needed to keep them going. Conversely, if the costs are higher than the benefits, it doesn’t make sense to keep those radio stations on the air.

The governmentalization of the news media in Canada continues apace. According to a recent announcement by the Trudeau government, the “CRTC determined that a new temporary fund for commercial radio stations in smaller markets should be created.” Now, radio stations outside of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa-Gatineau will be eligible for taxpayer subsidies.

Clearly a bad idea. Firstly, there’s no obvious market failure the government will solve. If the value of local radio stations, as measured by how much revenue they generate, is higher than the costs of running those stations, no subsidies are needed to keep them going. Conversely, if the costs are higher than the benefits, it doesn’t make sense to keep those radio stations on the air.

The government said the new funding is “temporary” but as economists Milton and Rose Friedman famously observed, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” Taxpayers may can reasonably expect that subsidies to local radio news stations will become an ongoing expense instead of a onetime hit to their wallets.

Indeed, the Trudeau government has a history of making temporary or “short-term” costs permanent. Before coming to power in 2015, the Liberals proposed “a modest short-term deficit” of less than $10 billion annually for three years; instead this fiscal year the Trudeau government is running its 10th consecutive budget deficit with the cumulative total of more than $600 billion.

Secondly, the governmentalization of media will likely corrupt it. Here again an observation from Milton Friedman: “Any institution will tend to express its own values and its own ideas… A socialist institution will teach socialist values, not the principles of private enterprise.” Friedman was talking about the public education system, but the observation applies equally to other sectors that the government increasingly exercises control over.

A media outlet that receives significant government funding is less likely to apply healthy skepticism to politicians’ claims of the supposed widespread benefits of their large spending initiatives and disbursements of taxpayer money. The media outlet’s internal culture will naturally lean more heavily towards government control than free enterprise.

Moreover, conflict of interest becomes a serious issue. To the extent that a media outlet gets its revenue from government instead of advertisers and listeners, its customer is the government—and the natural inclination is always to produce content that will appeal to the customer. Radio stations receiving significant government funding will have a harder time covering government in an unbiased way.

Finally, as a general rule, government support for an industry tends to discourage innovation, and radio and other media are no exception. When new companies and new business models enter a sector, the government should not through subsidies try to keep the incumbents afloat.

“The media, like any other business, continually evolves,” noted Lydia Miljan, professor of political science at the University of Windsor and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, in a recent essay. “As each innovation enters the market, it displaces audiences for the legacy players. But does that innovation mean we should prop up services that fewer people consume? No. We allow other industries to adapt to new market conditions. Sometimes that means certain industries and companies close. But they are replaced with something else.”

To summarize—there are three major problems with the Trudeau government’s new fund for radio stations. First, it will impose costs on taxpayers that, despite the government’s label, may not be “temporary” and the compensating benefits will be lower than the costs. Second, increased government funding will damage the ability of those radio stations to cover the government with neutrality and healthy skepticism. And third, the new fund will discourage innovation and improvement in the media sector as a whole.

Author:

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute