Canadians should expect even more spending in federal fall economic statement

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.

Authors:

Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

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Taxpayer watchdog says Canadian gov’t needs to use Trump ‘blueprint’ and create efficiency agency

Published on December 2, 2024

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canadian Taxpayers Federation director Franco Terrazzano cited the ‘crazy research’ citizens are forced to subsidize under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government as justification for a department to ‘slash Ottawa’s wasteful, bloated bureaucracy.’

One of Canada’s most respected taxpayer watchdogs said the government needs an agency similar to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to “slash Ottawa’s wasteful, bloated bureaucracy” that under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has funded numerous woke projects.

“This (DOGE) is the blueprint. … All we need now is a prime minister with the guts to pick up the scissors,” Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) federal director Franco Terrazzano wrote in a recent blog.

Terrazzano highlighted what he called the “crazy research Canadian taxpayers are forced to subsidize” thanks to Trudeau’s Liberal government.

Examples of such “crazy” government spending include the government granting a university student $20,000 to study “Gender Politics in Peruvian Rock Music.”

Canadian taxpayers were also on the hook for $105,000 for “Cart-ography: tracking the birth, life and death of an urban grocery cart, from work product to work tool,” as well as $17,500 for “My Paw in Yours: Dead Pets and Transcendence of Species Divides in Experimental Art-Making Practice.”

Incredibly, the Trudeau government also doled out $50,000 in a scholarship award to a student to study “Playing for Pleasure: The Affective Experience of Sexual and Erotic Video Games.”

DOGE will be headed by Elon Musk and businessman and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal agencies — Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement,” Trump announced on Truth Social.

Terrazzano noted how a Canadian version of DOGE would be welcome in Canada, and “Those marching orders sure would sound good in a prime minister’s mandate letter to a finance minister.”

He also noted how the government has wasted billions a “multibillion dollar gun confiscation that police officers say won’t work, the $25 billion equalization scheme and taxpayer-funded media bailouts, among others.”

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

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

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Canada Scrambles To Secure Border After Trump Threatens Massive Tariff

Published on December 2, 2024

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The Canadian government made clear its beefing up its border security apparatus after President-elect Donald Trump threatened to impose sweeping tariffs against Canada and Mexico if the flow of illegal immigration and drugs are not reined in.

Trump in November announced on social media that he would impose a 25% tariff on all products from Canada and Mexico unless both countries do more to limit the level of illicit drugs and illegal immigration entering into the United States. In response, Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with the president-elect at his residence in Mar-a-Largo and his government has detailed what more it’s doing to bolster immigration enforcement.

“We got, I think, a mutual understanding of what they’re concerned about in terms of border security,” Minister of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc, who accompanied Trudeau at Mar-a-Largo, said of the meeting in an interview with Canadian media. “All of their concerns are shared by Canadians and by the government of Canada.”

“We talked about the security posture currently at the border that we believe to be effective, and we also discussed additional measures and visible measures that we’re going to put in place over the coming weeks,” LeBlanc continued. “And we also established, Rosemary, a personal series of rapport that I think will continue to allow us to make that case.”

Trudeau’s Liberal Party-led government has pivoted on border enforcement since its first days in power.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) — the country’s law enforcement arm that patrols the border — is preparing to beef up its immigration enforcement capabilities by hiring more staff, adding more vehicles and creating more processing facilities, in the chance that there is an immigration surge sparked by Trump’s presidential election victory. The moves are a change in direction from Trudeau’s public declaration in January 2017 that Canada was a “welcoming” country and that “diversity is our strength” just days after Trump was sworn into office the first time.

While encounters along the U.S.-Canada border remain a fraction of what’s experienced at the southern border, activity has risen in recent months. Border Patrol agents made nearly 24,000 apprehensions along the northern border in fiscal year 2024 — marking a roughly 140% rise in apprehensions made the previous fiscal year, according to the latest data from Customs and Border Protection.

“While a change to U.S. border policy could result in an increase in migrants traveling north toward the Canada-U.S. border and between ports of entry, the RCMP now has valuable tools and insights to address this movement that were not previously in place,” read an RCMP statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “New mechanisms have been established which enable the RCMP to effectively manage apprehensions of irregular migrants between the ports.”

Trudeau’s pivot on illegal immigration enforcement follows the Canadian population growing more hawkish on the issue, public opinion surveys have indicated. Other polls also indicate Trudeau’s Liberal Party will face a beating at the voting booth in October 2025 against the Conservative Party, led by Member of Parliament Pierre Poilievre.

Trudeau’s recent overtures largely differ from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has indicated she is not willing to bend the knee to Trump’s tariff threats. The Mexican leader in November said “there will be a response in kind” to any tariff levied on Mexican goods going into the U.S., and she appeared to deny the president-elect’s claims that she agreed to do more to beef up border security in a recent phone call.

Trump, who has vowed to embark on an incredibly hawkish immigration agenda once he re-enters office, has tapped a number of hardliners to lead his efforts. The president-elect announced South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan to serve as border czar and longtime aide Stephen Miller to serve as deputy chief of staff for policy.