Juno News - September 26, 2022


How dangerous is ＂democratic socialism＂？


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

164.29207

Word count

492

Sentence count

2


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the question: How socialist is Canada and how big is government in Canada? How much government does Canada really have? And what role does government play in our economy?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.080 let's get back to this question how socialist is canada we've seen our political spectrum is
00:00:05.040 moving to the left but this doesn't answer the question so how do we measure how socialist the
00:00:10.320 country has actually become well the mcdonald laurier institute put out a really cool graphic
00:00:15.600 a few years back looking to answer this exact question now as a caveat this data was released
00:00:21.120 before justin trudeau became prime minister so take that with a grain of salt that said the
00:00:26.720 mcdonald laurier institute found that the size of government in canada was around 44 but that's only
00:00:34.080 when you look at government spending and of course the size of government it gets a little complicated
00:00:39.120 but it's actually much bigger than that so they point out that measuring the size of government
00:00:43.600 really should include things like tax expenditures or price regulation because for example the price
00:00:49.840 of supply management or the cost rather incurred by canadians by our supply management program which
00:00:55.200 is obviously government run could run around 600 per year but that's not reflected in government
00:01:00.880 spending so you have to factor that in another way so when you include all of these factors a much more
00:01:06.720 accurate representation of the size of government in canada is 64 of gdp in other words the government
00:01:14.080 controlled 64 of our economy and keep in mind that number's from before trudeau took over now why does
00:01:21.120 size of government matter well as the fraser institute reports the size of government relative to a
00:01:26.480 country's economy actually has an impact on economic growth and social progress so the ideal size for
00:01:34.960 government spending would be somewhere between 26 to 30 percent of gdp as we pointed out at the beginning
00:01:42.320 before trudeau came into office canada was around 44 so already what we know what we can conclude
00:01:48.400 is that government in canada is way too big already i mean think of all the areas where the canadian
00:01:53.760 government interferes in the market obviously canada's socialized healthcare and education
00:01:58.320 systems are top of mind because they're the most expensive items but think of these other places
00:02:02.960 where the government interferes nationalized child care programs provincial liquor boards and hydro
00:02:08.160 corporations canada post the media including our state-sponsored broadcaster cdc and of course the media
00:02:15.520 bailout of hundreds of millions of dollars the trans mountain pipeline which trio bought from
00:02:20.800 kinder morgan for 4.5 billion back in 2018 via rail auto sector bailouts many of which have still not
00:02:28.480 been repaid and ongoing corporate welfare not only to the automotive sector but to various favored
00:02:34.560 companies in this country and those were just a few literally off the top of my head that i thought of
00:02:39.440 but there are a lot more so it's no wonder that when you start adding all of these things up
00:02:43.760 you start to realize how government quickly becomes 64 of our economy