Bank of Canada showers executives with $3.5 million in bonuses in 2022

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

The Bank of Canada lavished millions of dollars in bonuses on its executives last year amid seven interest rate hikes and the worst inflation crisis in four decades, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

All but two of the central bank’s 82 executives (97.5 per cent) received an “at-risk pay” bonus. Twenty-five received a “performance pay” bonus.

The average bonus among Bank of Canada executives last year was $43,700, for a total cost of more than $3.5 million.

“Executives at the Bank of Canada shouldn’t be showering themselves with big bonuses when Canadians can’t afford gas, groceries or mortgages,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Most organizations don’t give 98 per cent of their executives bonuses when they have their worst year in four decades.”

Executive bonuses at the Bank of Canada total nearly $21 million since 2015. Since then, the size of the executive class at the Bank of Canada spiked by 18 per cent.

Table: Executive bonuses at Bank of Canada, 2015-2022

Year	Number of executives	Bonuses
2015	69	$683,794
2016	70	$550,064
2017	71	$2,572,915
2018	73	$2,923,613
2019	78	$3,261,123
2020	79	$3,594,681
2021	79	$3,785,902
2022	82	$3,588,324
Total		$20,960,416

The records provided by the Bank of Canada indicate its executives did not receive “at-risk” bonus pay in 2015 or 2016.

It was a bumpy year for the Bank of Canada in 2022.

The Bank of Canada’s mandate is to keep “an inflation target of two per cent inside a control range of one to three per cent.”

But inflation was 6.8 per cent in 2022, representing “a 40-year high, the largest increase since 1982,” according to Statistics Canada. The Bank of Canada also failed to meet its inflation target in 2021.

After Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem told Canadians in 2020 that interest rates would remain low for a “long time,” the central bank turned around and hiked interest rates seven times in 2022.

In 2022, Macklem admitted “we got some things wrong” and the deputy governor acknowledged “we haven’t managed to keep inflation at our target,” adding that Canada’s central bankers “should be held accountable.”

“Handing out big bonus cheques is an odd way to hold your organization accountable,” Terrazzano said. “Canadians have every right to be furious when they find out executives at their central bank were taking bonuses as inflation and interest rates soared.”

Speaking at an event organized by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in July 2022, Macklem told companies not to adjust wages for inflation, sparking outrage among labour leaders.

All told, bonuses at the Bank of Canada total about $55 million since 2020, according to separate access-to-information records obtained by the CTF.

Related Topics:#BankOfCanadaBonuses #BankOfCanadaExecutives #CanadianTaxpayersFederation #FrancoTerrazzano #Inflation #InterestRateHikes

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Worst kept secret—red tape strangling Canada’s economy

Published on February 22, 2025

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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

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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.