Business
The Problem With Trudeau’s Fiscal Responsibility Message
From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
By Franco Terrazzano
This year’s interest charges will cost taxpayers more than $46 billion. That’s almost $4 billion every month that’s not going to improve services or lower taxes. It’s also a cost of more than $1,000 for every Canadian.
There’s only one problem with the federal government’s messaging about saving money: the feds aren’t actually saving money.
“The foundation of our Fall Economic Statement is our responsible fiscal plan,” said Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.
The mid-year budget update shows the government increasing spending by $15 billion this year. A far cry from Freeland’s March promise to find “savings of $15.4 billion over the next five years.”
Next year, the government will increase spending by $30 billion. And that comes on top of an already ballooned baseline.
The feds spent all-time highs before the pandemic. That means Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was spending more before the pandemic than the feds did during any single year during World War II, even after accounting for inflation and population growth.
Freeland is trying to put Canadians’ minds at ease by claiming her deficits are “modest.” Canadians have heard this before.
When running for prime minister in 2015, Trudeau promised to run a few “modest” deficits of less than $10 billion before balancing the budget in 2019. Trudeau blew that balanced budget promise by a “modest” $20 billion.
This year’s deficit is projected to hit $40 billion. Deficits in 2024 and 2025 are both projected to be $38 billion.
Is this the new modest? Four times larger than the “modest” deficits Trudeau first promised?
The mid-year budget update proves this government has no idea how to balance a budget.
In fact, the only mention of a balanced budget in Ottawa comes from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who forecasts the next balanced budget will happen in 2035. But that relies on the economy growing every year, relatively low interest rates and no new spending.
A government too incompetent to balance the budget means Canadians are paying dearly just to service the debt.
This year’s interest charges will cost taxpayers more than $46 billion. That’s almost $4 billion every month that’s not going to improve services or lower taxes. It’s also a cost of more than $1,000 for every Canadian.
Next year, debt interest charges will surpass federal health transfers to the provinces. Soon, every penny collected from the GST will go toward servicing the debt.
As bad as the budget is, the government could keep the ship from sinking with modest spending restraint.
The government could balance the budget next year by using its own projected program spending from two budget updates ago. Instead of running a $38-billion deficit next year, taxpayers would have a $1-billion surplus if Freeland just stuck to the spending plan she created in 2021.
This highlights the root of Trudeau’s spending problem – the ratchet effect. Almost every budget document released by this government drastically increases spending.
The mid-year budget update in 2019 first projected spending in 2024 to be $421 billion. This year’s budget update shows the government will spend $519 billion in 2024.
This government’s muscle for fiscal responsibility has atrophied.
MPs from all political parties can’t help themselves from taking a pay raise every year – regardless of the struggles their constituents endure. The prime minister can’t help but spend $61,000 on Manhattan hotel rooms during a two-day anti-poverty summit.
No one in government is willing to end the hundreds of millions in bureaucratic bonuses, despite departments consistently meeting less than half of their own performance targets.
The Liberals are also unwilling to take the air out of the ballooning bureaucracy, which increased by 98,000 employees since they took power. That’s almost 40 per cent more federal employees. The bureaucracy currently consumes half of every tax dollar used in day-to-day spending.
No party in the House of Commons is willing to oppose the more than $43 billion taxpayers are being forced to give multinational corporations to build battery plants.
This government hasn’t shown one iota of fiscal restraint. In fact, the government appears to be trying its best to run up the red ink. Fortunately for taxpayers, it would only take modest spending restraint for a serious government to bring the books back into black.
Franco Terrazzano is the Federal Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Business
‘Context Of Chemsex’: Biden-Harris Admin Dumps Millions Into Developing Drug-Fueled Gay Sex App
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Owen Klinsky
The Biden-Harris administration is spending millions funding a project to advise homosexual men on how to more safely engage in drug-fueled intercourse.
The University of Connecticut (UCONN) in July announced a five-year, $3.4 million grant from the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) for Assistant Professor Roman Shrestha to develop his app JomCare — “a smartphone-based just-in-time adaptive intervention aimed at improving access to HIV- and substance use-related harm reduction services for Malaysian GBMSM [gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men] engaged in chemsex,” university news website UCONN Today reported. “Chemsex,” according to Northern Irish LGBTQ+ nonprofit the Rainbow Project, is the involvement of drug use in one’s sex life, and typically involves Methamphetamine (crystal meth), Mephedrone (meth), and GHB and GBL (G).
Examples of the app’s use-cases include providing a user who has reported injecting drugs with prompts about ordering an at-home HIV test kit and employing safe drug injection practices, UCONN Today reported. The app is also slated to provide same-day delivery of HIV prevention drug PrEP, HIV self-testing kits and even a mood tracker.
“In Malaysia, our research has indicated that harm reduction needs of GBMSM [gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men] engaged in chemsex are not being adequately met,” Shrestha told UCONN Today. “Utilizing smartphone apps and other mHealth tools presents a promising and cost-effective approach to expand access to these services.”
Homosexuality is illegal in Malaysia and is punishable by imprisonment, according to digital LGBTQ+ rights publication Equaldex. Drug use, including of cannabis, is illegal in Malaysia, and drug trafficking can be a capital offense.
The Old Border Czar VS The New Border Czar pic.twitter.com/9Ie8JRsroR
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 12, 2024
The NIH disbursed $773,845 to Shrestha in July to conduct a 90-day trial testing the efficacy of JomCare among 482 chemsex-involved Malaysian gays. It also provided Shrestha with $191,417 in 2022 to “facilitate access to gender-affirming health care” for transgender women in the country.
“Gender-affirming care” is a euphemism used to describe a wide range of procedures, including sometimes irreversible hormone treatments that can lead to infertility as well as irreversible surgeries like mastectomies, phalloplasties and vaginoplasties.
Shrestha has a track record of researching mobile health (mHealth) initiatives for foreign homosexuals, co-authoring a 2024 study entitled, “Preferences for mHealth Intervention to Address Mental Health Challenges Among Men Who Have Sex With Men in Nepal.”
The proliferation of LGBT rights has been a “foreign policy priority” under the Biden-Harris administration, a State Department spokesperson previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation, with President Joe Biden instructing federal government department heads to “to advance the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons.”
“Around the globe, including here at home, brave lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) activists are fighting for equal protection under the law, freedom from violence, and recognition of their fundamental human rights,” a 2021 White House memorandum states. “The United States belongs at the forefront of this struggle — speaking out and standing strong for our most dearly held values.”
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Nov. 12 that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would collaborate to establish a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with Musk claiming the agency would feature a leaderboard for the “most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars.” Some DOGE cuts could come from LGBTQ+ programs, such as a grant from the United States Agency for International Development to perform sex changes in Guatemala and State Department funding for the showing of a play in North Macedonia entitled, “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.”
“The woke mind virus consists of creating very, very divisive identity politics…[that] amplifies racism; amplifies, frankly, sexism; and all of the -isms while claiming to do the opposite,” Musk said at an event in Italy in December 2023, according to The Wall Street Journal. “It actually divides people and makes them hate each other and hate themselves.”
Shrestha and the NIH did not respond to requests for comment. When reached for comment, a UCONN spokeswoman told the Daily Caller News Foundation that, “specific questions about the grant and the decision to award it to our faculty member should be directed to the NIH, since that’s the funding agency.”
From the Fraser Institute
By Alex Whalen and Tegan Hill
Back in the summer at a meeting in Halifax, several provincial premiers discussed a lawsuit meant to force the federal government to make changes to Canada’s equalization program. The suit—filed by Newfoundland and Labrador and backed by British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Alberta—effectively argues that the current formula isn’t fair. But while the question of “fairness” can be subjective, its clear the equalization program is broken.
In theory, the program equalizes the ability of provinces to deliver reasonably comparable services at a reasonably comparable level of taxation. Any province’s ability to pay is based on its “fiscal capacity”—that is, its ability to raise revenue.
This year, equalization payments will total a projected $25.3 billion with all provinces except B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan to receive some money. Whether due to higher incomes, higher employment or other factors, these three provinces have a greater ability to collect government revenue so they will not receive equalization.
However, contrary to the intent of the program, as recently as 2021, equalization program costs increased despite a decline in the fiscal capacity of oil-producing provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador. In other words, the fiscal capacity gap among provinces was shrinking, yet recipient provinces still received a larger equalization payment.
Why? Because a “fixed-growth rule,” introduced by the Harper government in 2009, ensures that payments grow roughly in line with the economy—even if the gap between richer and poorer provinces shrinks. The result? Total equalization payments (before adjusting for inflation) increased by 19 per cent between 2015/16 and 2020/21 despite the gap in fiscal capacities between provinces shrinking during this time.
Moreover, the structure of the equalization program is also causing problems, even for recipient provinces, because it generates strong disincentives to natural resource development and the resulting economic growth because the program “claws back” equalization dollars when provinces raise revenue from natural resource development. Despite some changes to reduce this problem, one study estimated that a recipient province wishing to increase its natural resource revenues by a modest 10 per cent could face up to a 97 per cent claw back in equalization payments.
Put simply, provinces that generally do not receive equalization such as Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan have been punished for developing their resources, whereas recipient provinces such as Quebec and in the Maritimes have been rewarded for not developing theirs.
Finally, the current program design also encourages recipient provinces to maintain high personal and business income tax rates. While higher tax rates can reduce the incentive to work, invest and be productive, they also raise the national standard average tax rate, which is used in the equalization allocation formula. Therefore, provinces are incentivized to maintain high and economically damaging tax rates to maximize equalization payments.
Unless premiers push for reforms that will improve economic incentives and contain program costs, all provinces—recipient and non-recipient—will suffer the consequences.
Authors:
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