Juno News - Carney budget ignores the big problems

00:00:00.000 Hi, Juneau News, Alexander Brown here back for another episode of Not Sorry. I'm the

00:00:07.320 director of the National Citizens Coalition. I'm a host here. I'm a communicator, campaigner,

00:00:11.840 columnist. Thrilled to have you here. And while you are here, junonews.com slash not sorry.

00:00:18.140 For 20% off, we're grateful for your support. Budget 2025, the fallout continues, the questions

00:00:24.800 continue. And Canadians, anything but ordinary and expert alike, they have questions. Pierre

00:00:30.980 Polyev has concerns about the numbers as, as you know, it's both his job and opposition to have

00:00:35.560 those concerns. But because that's an unprecedented non-pandemic amount of deficit. Take a look.

00:00:41.400 The cost of this liberal budget will drive up the cost of food, housing, and everything else that 0.82

00:00:47.760 Canadians buy. And the prime minister has broken every single promise he made just seven short

00:00:53.700 months ago. He promised a $62 billion deficit. He delivered nearly an $80 billion deficit,

00:01:00.940 $16 billion bigger than he promised, and twice the size that his predecessor left behind. He promised

00:01:06.640 to lower the debt-to-GDP ratio. He raised it, and inflation along with it. He promised to spend less.

00:01:14.800 He's spending $90 billion more, costing $5,400 per family in Canada. And that $90 billion to the

00:01:25.460 prime minister's heckles is above and beyond the promised $16 billion that he says he will one day

00:01:31.800 find. And if he doesn't find them, it will be over $100 billion in brand new spending to respond to the

00:01:37.880 prime minister's heckles, Mr. Speaker. He also promised that he would invest more. His own budget

00:01:44.540 document lays out a graph showing that every quarter of this year we'll see private sector

00:01:50.420 business investment collapse. This costly budget forces Canadians to spend more on debt interest

00:01:57.360 than on health care transfers. More than the government collects in GST. That means every dollar

00:02:03.840 the Canadians pay in GST will go to bankers and bondholders instead of to doctors and nurses.

00:02:11.240 All while he raises the industrial carbon tax on farm equipment and fertilizer and therefore food,

00:02:17.940 on steel, concrete, and other industrial projects needed to build homes, a big tax increases on homes and

00:02:25.920 food. Now, it's not just the conservatives who are worried about what's been presented here.

00:02:30.340 Generationally, again, those sacrifices the liberals want you to make, they only seem to fall on young

00:02:36.620 and working Canadians, on Canada's missing to non-existent middle class. Liberal housing expert

00:02:43.120 and advisor Mike Moffitt called this budget a disaster for housing. It doesn't address sky-high

00:02:48.200 development costs or red tape, and only seeks to unlock these kinds of carny Khrushchevkas, 0.57

00:02:53.980 these public housing units and forever rentals, that are a band-aid for this liberal-inflicted

00:02:58.900 housing crisis that they continue to exacerbate with record high immigration levels that are only 0.76

00:03:04.500 getting slightly better for now. And we're already seeing today the Century Initiative, our not-so-beloved

00:03:11.080 mass immigration lobby with large corporate interests and ties to media. They're back in the papers today,

00:03:17.000 back in the globe, arguing for more infinite replacement, wage-suppressing cogs in our economy that are

00:03:25.160 often treated abhorrently and preyed upon that then lead to record youth unemployment for your kids

00:03:31.240 and grandkids. These limousine liberal priorities still don't appear to have changed. They promised a

00:03:37.380 transformative budget, and this appears to be everything but. There are some positive signs,

00:03:42.800 such as an allusion to creating more grounds for economic growth, but the government remains the

00:03:47.760 central planner, which is a big concern. Military. Encouraging. Believe it when we see it.

00:03:52.800 But after saddling Canada's kids and grandkids with a historic millstone, with cosmetic changes familiar to

00:03:59.800 these Trudeau failures, they even reveled in that success at a party hosted by a consulting firm and a media

00:04:06.060 company. Take a look at these images. That media organization, of course, has received Canadian government

00:04:11.560 funding in the past. It's a big club and you ain't in it. It's a big budget that appears to exacerbate so many

00:04:18.140 of the problems of the last few years. Professor Ian Lee joins us. He's an associate professor at

00:04:23.900 Carleton University. Terrific economist. Has done amazing work. You can read many of his missives

00:04:30.120 in the Financial Post or at the Hub. He helps us unpack this. He provides a great perspective here.

00:04:35.880 Join us. Ian Lee joins us. Associate professor at Sprott School of Business at Carleton. Ian, thank you.

00:04:41.640 My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

00:04:43.320 Now, we're coming out of the budget. The government's spinning it one way, even

00:04:48.520 celebrating it, the federal liberals. But in the past, you've described Canada's economic problems

00:04:55.040 as structural, not cyclical. Does this liberal budget do anything to address that structural issue?

00:05:02.900 A bit. And let me explain that. Okay.

00:05:05.020 If we use as our benchmark, our comparator, to use elegant academic language, to this Kearney budget,

00:05:13.620 and we say, okay, let's compare it to the 10-Trudeau budget. I think there were 10 budgets under Trudeau.

00:05:17.980 Well, this is definitely a break from the Trudeau years, and that's a very good thing.

00:05:23.020 Trudeau focused in 10 years, and I'm giving a solid empirical justification.

00:05:28.020 He was focused overwhelmingly on redistributing the pie. He was focused on consumption, to use the

00:05:38.880 economic sense of consumption, that is to say, pharma care and daycare and various social programs,

00:05:44.240 and then redistributing. It was not about growing the pie, making the pie bigger so that the standard

00:05:49.820 of living would increase and people would have more money, would make more money.

00:05:53.100 So, in that sense, I gave Mr. Carney for the budget kudos for reversing the disastrous decisions of the past 10 years

00:06:03.160 that caused so much damage to the economy and the standard of living measured by, for example,

00:06:08.400 the productivity declining precipitously in Canada and other key metrics that were going down.

00:06:15.320 Okay. So, he's changed direction, and this is much more an investment budget.

00:06:19.680 I can't remember how many times the word was mentioned in the budget.

00:06:23.700 Hundreds, hundreds of times.

00:06:24.320 Hundreds, hundreds, hundreds.

00:06:25.420 And so, he's going in the right direction. But before, that's faint praise, because I don't

00:06:32.420 think he went far enough. And in some instances, he went too far. My criticism of the liberal years

00:06:40.800 has been very much that they put government at the center of, it's a top-down philosophy,

00:06:49.180 and it's very similar to Europe, too, by the way. It's the same criticism I have of Europe,

00:06:52.780 that they believe that government should be the driving force and the planner that sets out the

00:07:01.380 grand plans for the economy.

00:07:02.800 And I have studied, ever since I did my PhD back in the 80s, I've studied economies, not every last

00:07:11.040 one. I certainly studied the big ones, you know. I certainly studied Argentina as sort of the example

00:07:15.220 of the opposite situation. And I just don't, I don't believe if one really does look at the economic

00:07:21.660 record, that one can put forward an argument that top-down government decision-making produces

00:07:27.360 prosperity. Very quickly, I said before the Finance Committee last fall, I said, you know,

00:07:33.540 for 60-odd years, the Laurentian elites have believed that this, broadly speaking, tax, subsidize,

00:07:39.340 and protect is the overarching vision to produce prosperity. And we now know it didn't. It produced

00:07:47.420 the opposite of prosperity. It produced economic decline. And so, that's where I fault Mr. Carney in

00:07:54.280 that budget. He's putting government at the center of decision-making instead of saying, look, I'm

00:07:58.500 going to remove the barriers to growth that Mr. Trudeau put there, and barriers that were there

00:08:02.160 before him. I'm going to open up the economy, and that will catalyze the private sector. But he

00:08:08.560 decided to instead keep the government at the center of the, shall we say, the decision-making. And I just

00:08:14.840 think that's a serious mistake.

00:08:16.780 Yeah, it seems that way. And if you've read his book, all signs were there that the central planning,

00:08:21.520 the beatings would continue until morale improves. Expanding on that Argentina point, I think of

00:08:27.680 Miele's success of late. I'm no economist. I have a poli-sci degree. And so, I'm thankful to have

00:08:32.680 your expertise. In what way is that proving to be a success? And how is that sort of differentiating

00:08:39.680 itself from this centrally planned model, where it doesn't seem like economies actually grow?

00:08:44.300 So, let me just back up for a moment, because I've been using Argentina for literally 30-odd years in

00:08:48.460 my classes and in media interviews. In 1918, and this is empirical information on the record.

00:08:54.480 Anybody can look it up. It's not secret. Argentina had a higher per capita income than Canada.

00:09:00.540 And that's widely used by UN and StatsCan and OECD and IMF, average income per person.

00:09:07.000 It's an overarching metric that because the average income is, you know, that's what we eat. That's what

00:09:13.660 we consume. That's what we pay our groceries with. And what happened with Argentina was an incredibly

00:09:20.120 wealthy, very resource-based economy. And then starting with Isabel and Juan Peron, they adopted

00:09:26.120 policies that are, we should be quite familiar, we're very experienced with, you know, policies that

00:09:30.840 said, we're going to restrict foreign direct investment. We're going to create sectors of the

00:09:34.680 economy that foreigners can't go there, where they put high confiscatory taxes, high capital gains 0.98

00:09:40.060 taxes, huge government deficits, government intervention in sector after sector after sector.

00:09:48.880 And it takes a long time to run down an economy. It's not, it doesn't happen overnight, but they

00:09:52.980 managed to, in the next 20, 30 years, they drove it down. And just to, as my evidence for that

00:09:58.660 statement, that they really did drive it down before Miele arrived, the average income per capita

00:10:03.940 today, or two years ago, was, is $14,000 US per person. I mean, I just find that mind-boggling.

00:10:11.940 The US, by the way, for a reference point is 89,000. And so they went from one of the wealthiest

00:10:16.620 countries in the world to dropping down to deep down in third world status. I know academics don't

00:10:21.720 like to use the word third world. They think it's pejorative. Well, it probably is. That's because 1.00

00:10:26.180 there's a lot of countries in the developing world that I have visited, unlike my critics, because I've

00:10:32.080 taught over 80 times, actually over a hundred times in developing countries around the world,

00:10:36.200 including Cuba. I've been teaching in China since 1997. I've taught in just about every East European

00:10:41.140 country immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, including Russia, including Ukraine.

00:10:46.400 And I saw the, up close and personal, the destructive, the incredibly destructive impact on the

00:10:54.800 society, on people, on the economy, on the environment of top-down central planning. I mean,

00:11:00.920 it's just, it's, it's, it's got a track record that's just incredibly bad. And, and, and Argentina

00:11:06.440 was the, the really good example. Miele is turning that around because what he's undoing

00:11:11.180 are those pernicious destructive policies that, that tied down the economy, that kept out foreign

00:11:18.220 investment, drove foreign investment out. And, and so he's turning it around. I think it's going

00:11:23.240 to take a lot longer than a couple of years, but at least he's taking it in the right direction to

00:11:28.560 great criticism, of course, by, by, by a think tank, some think tanks and some academics.

00:11:34.360 Yeah. It's a great criticism, but great success. I'm thankful that he, he's showing that he's

00:11:39.580 lighting the way he's the, you know, courage is contagious. Hopefully, you know, some of our

00:11:43.420 governments, our first world governments, the pejorative, I suppose, take advantage of that.

00:11:48.940 Now you previously described Canada's tariff relations as nonsensical. I I'm of the same

00:11:54.840 opinion here. I, I think even a poli sci grad like myself and the non-economists in our audience of

00:11:59.900 which I'm right there with them, we can see that months of retaliations have only seemed to

00:12:04.640 exacerbate matters. Yes. Do you still feel that way and why? I felt that way since the very first

00:12:10.100 trade agreement in 1988, I started, I got my tenure track on July 1, 1988. I don't think I was on the job

00:12:16.340 four weeks when I got phone calls from the media saying people in media relations said,

00:12:21.360 you're the guy to talk to about trade. And because the debate that the, you know, John Turner and

00:12:27.380 Mulroney, and I actually was debating some of the NDP and progressive people who are saying things that

00:12:36.400 were just, I believe, hysterical, saying we were going to have to dismantle our public health care.

00:12:40.840 If we signed a free trade agreement, the United States, we're going to be forced to sell our water

00:12:44.000 to the United States. And I was on stage in high school saying, it's not in the agreement. It doesn't

00:12:49.040 say that anywhere. You know, you're making it up. And I've been supportive of free trade and I supported

00:12:56.740 every free trade agreement that we have done in Canada from then until now. Why am I talking about

00:13:01.600 free trade? Because it's the antithesis of tariffs. If you think of free trade at one end of the

00:13:07.500 continuum, tariffs are at the opposite end of the continuum. In fact, free trade agreements,

00:13:14.020 starting with the GATT in 1945, which morphed into the WTO, it's for many, many years, all it talked

00:13:20.660 about was one thing. How can we get rid of or reduce tariffs? That's all. It was just an anti-tariff

00:13:24.800 thing. Later it developed into other, it picked up other issues. But so my point is tariffs are,

00:13:31.340 we've known for 200 years since Adam Smith, probably, that they're very destructive. They

00:13:37.340 slow down growth. They harm economic growth. They create lower incomes. They hurt low-income people

00:13:45.200 more than high-income people, as most government policies do, because the negative impact falls

00:13:52.420 disproportionately on low-income people. And so, just get right to it. Tariffs is a tax. That's all

00:14:00.160 it is. People get mystified by tariffs. All it is, is a tax. Every time you hear the word tariff,

00:14:04.120 just say, no, no, no, they're not talking about tariffs. They're talking about taxes. They want

00:14:07.400 to raise my taxes. So, when the government was saying, we want to do retaliation, what they were

00:14:12.620 saying was, we want to tax and exploit Canadians to show Donald Trump how angry we are at the

00:14:19.260 Americans. Yeah. Wait, wait a minute. You're going to go after me and beat me up and millions of me 0.97

00:14:25.520 so you can show your anger at Donald Trump. I'm not Donald Trump. Why are you whacking me?

00:14:32.280 And that's what we were doing. Ford was doing it in Ontario, and we were doing it nationally.

00:14:37.440 And it was truly, setting aside whether it works, and I've got, there's very good evidence it didn't

00:14:42.740 work in terms of changing the Americans. But even setting that aside, it was a tax on Canadians that

00:14:48.860 made us less affluent. At a time when housing is, there's serious questions about affordability,

00:14:54.220 as well as groceries. So, here were our national leaders saying, let's make life even more

00:15:00.560 unaffordable in Canada. And I've never understood. And I know they were doing it for political reasons,

00:15:06.540 but I don't understand why somebody didn't just stand up and say, look, I can't do this.

00:15:10.980 You know, I've got integrity. I'm not going to stand up and tell fairy tales to the people.

00:15:15.460 And I'm just not going to con you and tell you that we're going to put tariffs on you 1.00

00:15:19.580 to go and hit Donald Trump in the head. And I wish that Premier Ford had had the courage to say it. 0.83

00:15:24.260 I wish that Carney had said that at the time.

00:15:26.500 Yeah. And this is the time where they're asking Canadians to make sacrifices, quote unquote. But

00:15:31.580 we know who's making the sacrifices. It's your students. It's our young and working age who can't

00:15:38.280 afford homes and who are struggling to buy groceries.

00:15:42.140 And let me throw, because you know me, I like metrics and I keep them high level. But

00:15:45.980 I'll explain why. I just gave a presentation in Ottawa yesterday on why the tariffs don't work.

00:15:51.200 And I was using the data from Trevor Tome and also just some data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic

00:15:57.760 Analysis. The U.S. has a lower percentage of trade than any other Western country, high income country.

00:16:04.940 They 11 percent of their economy is traded. Now, it's because they're so huge. What that means in

00:16:11.220 plain English is 89 percent of their economy is traded inside the United States. The phrase that

00:16:16.440 economists like to use is they self-trade. They trade with themselves because the economy is so

00:16:20.860 enormous. OK, we are a third Europe. There's some countries in Europe that are up to 50 and 60 percent.

00:16:27.080 I'm not against trade. I believe in trade. What I'm trying to say is anything you do to the Americans

00:16:32.500 is not going to have the same impact, A, because they're huge, and B, because they only trade 11 percent.

00:16:38.480 And when you look at the trade by state, it's very small. I mean, all these Canadian politicians

00:16:44.700 are running around saying the U.S. is going to come to its knees if we put these. This is just absurd.

00:16:50.900 This is just silly. If you look at the size of the states, the percentage of our trade with any 0.60

00:16:57.640 one state, it's less than two digits. Many of the states, it's 2 percent, 3 percent, 4 percent.

00:17:04.120 And we're saying that two or three or 4 percent is going to bring that Kentucky to its knees. No,

00:17:09.080 it's not. No, it's not. No, we're wrong factually. They're just plain wrong factually. It's as if

00:17:16.000 somebody was saying the Blue Jays won the World Series. Well, no, I wish they did, but they lost.

00:17:22.480 And we've got to deal with factual reality. And these people are blowing smoke, and they're just

00:17:28.460 substituting ideology and emotion for hard empirical evidence. And so the impact of the

00:17:35.920 tariffs on the states was very, very minor. Yeah, and we're playing Indian poker with a 1.00

00:17:40.820 two on our forehead and acting like we have this incredible leverage. We don't.

00:17:44.920 It's no. And that might play well. And this sort of spite based policy might play well with

00:17:50.980 with some in the liberal base. But it's yeah, it's it's falling on everyone else to pick up

00:17:55.240 the pieces. The budget projects a seventy eight point three billion dollar deficit for this fiscal

00:18:00.340 year, marking the largest in Canadian history outside of the pandemic. How sustainable do you

00:18:05.580 view this level of deficit spending in this current economic climate? I'm glad you asked the question.

00:18:10.400 I really do, because I think I'm going to sound like I'm patting myself on the back, but I think

00:18:14.780 I have a more nuanced view. I am not one of those conservatives that say all government of debt is

00:18:18.960 bad. And, you know, it's just just austerity. Yeah, I just don't believe that I am not somebody who

00:18:25.020 thinks that we should be borrowing for our groceries. And that's what I mean by that phrase is

00:18:28.580 consumption. Yeah. You know, borrowing money to pay for a consumption program called PharmaCare

00:18:33.240 or daycare, I just think is terrible. I do agree with Carney on that point. If you're going to borrow,

00:18:38.260 you want to borrow for long term assets called infrastructure that has a big multiplier. It

00:18:43.560 pays into the future, many years into the future. Consumption for those who don't and there are

00:18:48.680 people especially, I think some of my progressive friends who don't understand this. And that's why

00:18:53.800 I'm saying this. Consumption doesn't have a big multiplier. You give people money, they go spend it

00:18:59.640 and that's it. It's gone. It doesn't keep on generating wealth down the road. You build a bridge

00:19:03.900 and it's generating economic value for the life of the bridge, which could be 40 or 50 or 60 years.

00:19:10.160 And so economic infrastructure has a much, Adam Smith taught us this 250 years ago, by the way,

00:19:16.260 he actually wrote about this and Nobel Prizes have been given in this ever since. When you,

00:19:21.320 what infrastructure does is it speeds up the movement of goods and services over distance.

00:19:26.980 And that is economically valuable. And so true infrastructure, true investment, and I don't

00:19:33.560 mean investing in a daycare center and I'm not against daycare. I'm just saying that that's not

00:19:37.860 infrastructure and that doesn't have that multiplier. Investing in ports, roads, railroads,

00:19:44.040 airports, anything where you're moving stuff is going to speed up the economy or reduce the cost of

00:19:51.920 doing it is going to add value to the economy. And because we've neglected our infrastructure

00:19:58.140 for many years, because of the past government, we have a deficit in infrastructure that we've got

00:20:04.340 to make up, which will benefit the economy. So to your question, I don't believe that Canada is

00:20:13.500 going to hit the wall, a debt wall, like we did in 1995. We're not there yet. But that's no

00:20:18.840 justification for saying, oh, well, then let's just keep on going to debt. I mean, because I've

00:20:23.660 heard this over and over. And then Coyne wrote a very nice column about three weeks ago, making a

00:20:27.180 very, very similar argument. No one economic decision makes you hit the debt wall. Yeah. You

00:20:33.240 know, it's the accumulation of many, many, many decisions saying, oh, well, you know, it's another

00:20:38.660 $5 billion. So what's another $5 billion and $5 billion and $5 billion and $5 billion. Then one day

00:20:42.580 you wake up and you know, your, your debt is much, much larger. And now you are approaching the debt

00:20:48.260 wall. That's one danger is that, that we are incrementally, you know, it's the, the boiling

00:20:53.840 frog analogy. And that's one fear I have that we're slowly doing what we did again in the run

00:20:59.700 up to 1995. No one decision in any one year caused us to hit the debt wall in 1995. It was the

00:21:07.200 accumulation of all the past decisions that started under Pierre Trudeau that caused us to hit the

00:21:12.500 debt wall. Second point I want to make, and this is where I wish Mr. Carney, who I do respect,

00:21:17.440 he's a well-educated man, obviously, but he is perpetuating the spin out of Ottawa that we have

00:21:25.940 one of the lowest debt to GDP because they're using net debt and they're playing games. Everybody

00:21:31.260 dishonest games. Why do I say that? Because if you look at the OECD, not my opinion, not Ian Lee's

00:21:38.860 opinion, the OECD, the IMF, all of the international agencies, and they're not partisan. They're funded by

00:21:46.700 us and the other high income countries. They use gross debt, not net debt. For a very obvious reason,

00:21:53.780 you owe the interest on the gross debt. And yet there's the people running around saying,

00:22:00.400 oh, well, you know, gross debt doesn't count because we've got all these assets in the pension

00:22:03.660 fund and we've got all these government buildings. You're not going to repossess the pension fund and

00:22:08.140 repossess government buildings if ever that you did run into a crisis. You use gross debt because you

00:22:13.500 owe the money. It's like saying, you know, my house has a lot of equity, so I'm going to subtract

00:22:17.940 it from my mortgage. So now go to the bank and say, you know, I know my mortgage says I owe a million

00:22:22.540 dollars, but I really don't owe you a million dollars. I only owe you a half a million because

00:22:26.700 I've got a half a million of equity. So I'm going to subtract that from the money I owe you.

00:22:30.560 That is just nonsense, people. That's dishonest. If you have a mortgage and you signed a debt for a

00:22:37.320 million dollars, you owe a million dollars. And people, some economists who are real pure say you

00:22:43.100 can't draw parallels between the individual and the state because the state can borrow through a

00:22:47.240 central bank. That is true. But to say then, therefore, that all of the principles that somehow

00:22:52.060 you don't owe money on debt, you don't owe interest on debt is not true. There are things that are still

00:23:00.080 true for individuals and companies and governments. One of them is if you borrow money, you have to pay it

00:23:05.880 back and you have to pay it back with interest. And so our gross debt, debt to GDP, is actually in

00:23:13.780 the middle of the OECD. We're right up there below France, by the way. I'm worried about the creative

00:23:18.940 accounting there, but I appreciate your perspective on investment. This isn't all bad, even if I see

00:23:24.460 some political terminology they're using. My concern is that I want meaningful investment. I don't want

00:23:30.320 the credit for projects already underway. I don't want small little tchotchke investments. I want 1.00

00:23:37.620 pipelines. I want anti-resource legislation to go away. I think the budget suggests that the emissions

00:23:43.840 cap on oil and gas could be scrapped, but replaced with further industrial carbon tax increases,

00:23:49.700 incentives for carbon capture. We're still not seeing the removal of these anti-resource bills or

00:23:55.620 a tanker ban. How effective do you think this will be for economic competitiveness for our energy

00:24:01.760 sector? I think it's crucial because, again, more empirical data. Stephen Gordon, who just retired

00:24:08.740 from Laval, published these studies based on StatsCan data. StatsCan has been publishing this.

00:24:13.600 Trevor Tome has. The industries with the highest productivity and the highest profit contribution to

00:24:20.840 the Canadian economy is the resource sector and oil and gas. If you listen to Premier Ford or anybody in

00:24:26.420 Ottawa, you would absolutely be convinced that cars are it. That's our future. It's our EV subsidies that

00:24:31.520 no one wants. Yeah. You know, and yet we have to pour billions and billions and billions into the auto

00:24:35.940 industry to keep it alive. We don't have to pour billions into the oil and gas industry because, as the

00:24:40.020 German chancellor told us, we don't want your cars. We want your oil and gas. And the Japanese prime

00:24:45.940 minister said the same thing. And the South Korean prime minister. The world wants our resources,

00:24:50.420 not our great, big, huge cars. I thought there was no business case for those resources.

00:24:55.120 Isn't that what we said? Yeah. And he was saying it at the very moment that Biden was approving

00:24:59.000 LNG tankers to go to to go to Europe because of the war because of Putin. And it was just so

00:25:05.020 embarrassing. It was so embarrassing. He said there's no business case for the exporting of LNG. And

00:25:08.680 literally, the ships were going out on television that day out of the States, which showed

00:25:13.420 either he doesn't read anything or he was just ignoring what he had been told. I don't know.

00:25:20.740 But your larger point on the investment, yes, I agree with Carney that investment is going to have

00:25:27.320 a much better benefit for the economy. But then you get into the methodology, because if we broaden

00:25:33.460 the definition to include things that are not investment, community arenas, daycare centers,

00:25:39.840 this is not infrastructure. It isn't. That's spending. That's spending. That's consumption.

00:25:45.320 And I'm not saying we should spend consumption. We have lots of, of course, there's a lot of

00:25:48.880 consumption. Old age pensions is classified when I say it's consumption. You're not building something

00:25:53.440 that's going to last for years and years into the future. So I know they broadened out the definition

00:25:58.520 of investment in part to drive down the consumption number so they can say that they're solving the

00:26:04.540 deficit because they're defining it now as only consumption spending. I don't agree with that.

00:26:10.840 I think all debt is part of the national debt and we can still talk about the need to prioritize

00:26:17.440 investment and we should be. And so he's doing that. I mean, I support him on that, but I'm worried

00:26:25.340 that they're going to broaden using this new definition. They're going to use it to slip a lot

00:26:30.400 of consumption type spending into what they're calling investment when it isn't. And so that

00:26:37.420 uses the support for what he's doing. Yeah. I want to be wrong about my concerns here. I see

00:26:44.600 some political exit ramps. I see rhetorical devices and even changes to immigration where on one hand,

00:26:51.880 it's looking favorable for young people who are having their wages suppressed or they're unemployed in

00:26:56.260 the market. But then you see a call for this kind of potential blanket amnesty that could be abused

00:27:01.640 that is just going to keep the problem in the country for them of a temporary foreign worker 0.78

00:27:06.800 seemingly grandfathered in. Have you had a chance to go through the immigration changes? What do you see

00:27:13.060 for how that might impact our labor market dynamics or even our chance to, let's say, to give our young

00:27:19.680 people some growth from a GDP per capita perspective? I only looked at the high level numbers because

00:27:25.180 that's normally what I look at is the high level rather than going deep down into the particular

00:27:28.900 program. Yeah, they are. And I will give them credit for this, Mr. Trudeau. And I'm just doing

00:27:34.680 a compare and contrast when I keep going back to Trudeau. Trudeau had driven down immigration has three 0.76

00:27:39.480 components. Yeah. Okay. So it's got economic immigration where you're bringing people in because

00:27:43.700 they've got the skills we need and want in our country. And then you have family reunification.

00:27:50.240 And these, I want to be careful, but they tend to be older people who are, you know, mom and dad,

00:27:55.640 mom and granddad. And they're, I'll be very blunt and probably offend some people. They're not going to

00:28:02.480 help our economy because most of them are tired. Yeah. And or they're very, very near retirement.

00:28:08.120 And then the third category are refugees. And so Mr. Trudeau drove down. It used to be 1.00

00:28:13.460 75, 80%, if I recall, for many, many years was economic, 75% was, was economic migrants, which we

00:28:19.460 need still do. Yeah. And then Mr. Trudeau drove that down very significantly. Well, in the budget,

00:28:25.920 it says that that percentage is going back up. Well, that's good. That is good. I didn't look far

00:28:32.100 enough to find out if he reversed some other of the things that Mr. Trudeau had done. I can name one

00:28:37.000 that drives me crazy. And I'm hoping you'll pick it up in your program. And Harper passed

00:28:43.220 late in his administration. He passed, I think it was late. And I think it was at the tail end at

00:28:47.580 the back end, a law, an amendment that said, if you are coming to Canada, you must, must be fluent

00:28:54.980 in English or French. If you can believe it before that was passed, a person could come here if they

00:28:59.400 had the points and not speak a word of English or French, which meant you can't work because

00:29:04.160 business operates in English. We all know that. So Trudeau passed that law, excuse me, Harper passed it.

00:29:10.340 And then Trudeau changed it, reversed it. So what were we doing? We're bringing in lots of people

00:29:15.580 who couldn't speak a word of English or French. So what did we do? We put them on welfare. We don't

00:29:18.540 call it that, but that's what it is because they can't work. It's not their fault. We brought them

00:29:22.720 in. We said, come on into Canada. And by the way, you can't work. So then we had to end putting them 0.99

00:29:27.240 into housing paid for by the government. We had to give them an income to be able to eat and survive.

00:29:32.340 And so it was literally a government-made policy decision that undermined ourselves.

00:29:37.360 That's called, you know, shooting the puck into your own net. And I hope that they bring

00:29:41.560 back that rule. It's not that I'm being ethnocentric. The reality of this country is

00:29:45.860 if you're in Quebec, you have to speak French. I understand that. I live like three kilometers

00:29:50.620 from the border with Quebec and I have family on the Quebec side in Gatineau. And I've been

00:29:56.840 over there many times and you got to speak French if you're going to live in Quebec and the rest

00:30:00.500 of Canada, you have to speak English. That's what all the companies operate in, whether

00:30:03.160 it's retail malls or whatever. And so abolishing that rule that Trudeau did created dependency,

00:30:11.220 created welfare, created ghettos. I mean, I thought it was almost just a weird form of harm 0.81

00:30:20.700 to new Canadians. They were hurting. They weren't helping new Canadians. They were consigning 0.90

00:30:26.540 them to a very low status. A balkanized existence too. A balkanized existence. And it was unnecessary

00:30:35.100 when we could say, look, we'll bring anyone in. You have to have the skills and the points. And one

00:30:40.600 of those things is you must be fluent in English or French, because if you don't, you can't function

00:30:45.780 and then you don't integrate. That's the other problem. If you don't speak English or French,

00:30:49.920 how on earth can you integrate if you don't speak the language of the culture? And so I think it

00:30:55.640 created social problems that didn't need to be created. Yeah. And there are obvious tweaks there,

00:31:00.920 and that's one of them, whether it's a return to a more diligent point system, obviously sustainable

00:31:07.160 numbers, but there has to be cohesion. There has to be assimilation. Lost in the sort of, but the GDP

00:31:14.300 goes up or throwing numbers at a problem coming out of COVID is the fact that you're just making

00:31:19.440 conditions worse for all involved, whether it is the frustrations of Canadians seeing, you know,

00:31:24.340 issues piling up in the housing or healthcare or, or, or even public safety, the chaos with trucking

00:31:29.660 on our roads or the newcomers who live this, this balkanized existence, or maybe they're 15 to a 1.00

00:31:34.940 basement and they're part now of this, this caste system, this replacement cog system. They don't

00:31:39.880 speak the language. Well, they're not going to assimilate. It is, it is a non-winning scenario for

00:31:44.260 absolutely everybody. And you know, for many years we had an immigration system that was

00:31:48.760 admired around the world. Envy of the world. And Canadians supported it. It was a bipartisan

00:31:53.740 consensus because we didn't go overboard. We were bringing in 300, 350,000 a year.

00:31:59.700 And there was a consensus around that. And we did, I think a, I didn't say perfect, but we did a

00:32:04.640 way better job integrating immigrants than Europe. I've been to Europe many, many times. I've seen the,

00:32:10.280 what they call the, where they, these are immigrant ghettos because France has done a terrible job. 0.99

00:32:16.080 And Germany did a terrible job integrating their immigrants. Let's be blunt. 0.99

00:32:19.920 Yeah.

00:32:20.120 We didn't. We didn't. We integrated people in Canada. And one of the, I think, reasons was because most 0.98

00:32:25.940 of the immigrants did speak English or French. And we made sure they didn't go into ghettos,

00:32:31.420 into immigrant ghettos. And I think that Mr. Trudeau blew that up. I really do believe he blew it up. 0.99

00:32:36.640 That's one of the great damage, one of the great policies that damaged our country. And he undermined the,

00:32:43.060 the strong support for immigration, which has been there for 80, 90 years. He successfully managed

00:32:48.820 to, uh, when the majority of people now think that there's, they're not, they're opposed to

00:32:52.720 immigration. I know to us on the immigration, you couldn't do it. It's like, if you were trying

00:32:59.440 to create the conditions for unrest to an unhappiness, like you, you would have done it

00:33:03.060 that exact way. I would, I was speaking to a politician who will stay off the record last night

00:33:08.040 from Surrey. And he told me that, you know, he's, he's a born and raised, you know, the integrated

00:33:13.780 Canadian proudly. So, uh, the Sikh and heritage. And there, he says there are now neighborhoods in

00:33:20.600 Surrey when he's doing his constituency work or entire buildings, like no English, no English

00:33:26.280 whatsoever. And so it's that, that balkanization concern is real. That, that, that lack of cohesiveness,

00:33:31.640 we see it in our economy. And this isn't, some people say that's anti-immigrant. No,

00:33:35.920 it's not. It's pro-immigrant because you want them to integrate. And if they can't speak the 0.92

00:33:40.360 language, they're not going to integrate. This is just so fundamental. And I thought it was such a

00:33:45.560 destructive and pernicious policy of Mr. Trudeau when he said, no, no, no, you don't have to speak

00:33:50.900 English or French to come to Canada. I thought it caused great damage to Canada. It was so thoughtless 1.00

00:33:55.040 that tweet that, you know, opened us up to the world that we, we stopped vetting even our, our foreign

00:33:59.660 students. And so I am glad to know that there are, there are, you know, some signs of optimism coming

00:34:04.060 out of the budget here. I greatly appreciate your perspective. I know our audience does as well.

00:34:08.200 Professor, thanks for joining us. My great pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you.

Juno News - November 07, 2025

Carney budget ignores the big problems

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