Juno News - January 04, 2019The True North Report： Canadians want to pay down debt. Why don't politicians？
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Summary
In this episode of the True North Initiative's new podcast, Andrew Lott takes a look at where the priorities of Canadian politicians are, and why they are so different than those of the people they are supposed to serve.
Transcript
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Hello, everyone. Welcome. It is just after 5.05 Eastern Time. My name is Andrew Lott and a fellow with the True North Initiative.
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And whether you are enjoying a lovely day at 2.05 on the West Coast, perhaps you're enjoying some Alberta weather,
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which apparently right now is pretty darn terrible at 3.05 or whatever time it is everywhere else.
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Newfoundland is always the fun one because what are we in Newfoundland right now?
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We're 6.35 because they always have to throw us off with the half-hour time zone there.
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Wherever it is for you tuning in, hope you're having a great day.
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This is my first Facebook Live of 2019, and that has zero significance whatsoever,
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except that because New Year's is apparently a spectacular occasion,
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we're always supposed to talk about the fact that it's New Year's.
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I think I saw one person share online a couple of hours ago that we only have to wish people a Happy New Year for another four days.
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So after January 7th, we're all supposed to just move on, accept that it's 2019, and hope for the best.
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But I do hope you have a very, very wonderful New Year season, just as I hope you had a wonderful Christmas season.
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And whether you have any New Year's resolutions or not is kind of playing into this.
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I'm kind of the New Year's Grinch, just as a fair warning.
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I don't pay attention much to New Year's, and I don't have any New Year's resolutions.
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But I do every now and then kind of look forward to the year ahead and say,
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all right, what do I hope the politicians' New Year resolutions are?
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And the problem is every year it's pretty much the same list.
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So I'm going to talk a little bit about that this year and give a bit of a primer,
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as I think a lot of people are looking at the election year as now being in full force,
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because, well, we're going to be headed to the polls nationally in just under 10 months,
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which means there is the question of where the priorities for politicians really are.
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And the one element of this that I find to be fascinating is when you look at debt.
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There was a report that came out just a day or so ago from CIBC, the bank,
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and they looked at Canadians and their financial priorities.
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And the poll found that for the ninth consecutive year,
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the number one financial priority for Canadians and their households is paying down debt.
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So when you look at the numbers on this, I'll pull up the little chart here.
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26% of Canadians say it's their top financial priority,
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keeping up with bills and saving for vacation, growing well, saving for retirement.
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So the top priority every year, 26% say paying down debt.
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Now, in fairness, the top priority is typically losing weight.
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That's like the number one New Year's resolution.
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As you can tell, I've been failing for several years at that.
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But paying down debt when it comes to non-weight loss is typically the number one priority,
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and certainly for financial goals, the number one.
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And it really struck me as interesting here to see how much of a divide there is between the goals and realities that Canadians make for themselves and have for themselves and the goals and priorities for politicians.
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And why this is so interesting is that a government is supposed to be, a democratically elected government anyway,
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is supposed to be a reflection of the people it serves.
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So if you have people that are saying we support XYZ and governments saying we support manganese, hydrogen, boron,
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I mean, is this something that you had in your own life?
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If you made a New Year's resolution, let me know in the poll box there.
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But the fact remains that for politicians in Canada, they are looking at, let me pull up the exact numbers now,
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So $631.9 billion in debt, which if you look at the percentage of GDP is 31.2%.
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So we have a GDP of $2.03 trillion or something like that.
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Debt makes up just shy of one-third of our GDP.
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And if you look at that, that percentage has kind of fluctuated over the years.
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Obviously, when you go back over the last 10 years, we had some skyrocketing debt to GDP.
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As you look at the response to the recession and the spending that Harper put in in that period of 2008-2009.
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But the problem is it's such an abstract number for so many people.
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They don't really care about the implications of it.
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And in their own household, you don't have that option.
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And this is where I wanted to really merge these two topics.
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In Canadians' own households, debt reduction has to be a priority because you can't keep debt at those levels.
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You can't have a debt that's 33% of your net worth, not pay it down, keep adding to it,
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and expect that you're not going to have to pay the piper at some point down the road.
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But what I find so fascinating about this discussion is that Canadians don't actually seem to care when it comes to voting.
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Many of you know I ran as a candidate in Ontario's election back in June.
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And my team and I knocked on, it was actually 21,000 doors in the span of about six weeks,
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And you'd always want to, when you're meeting people, find out if they're supporting you, yeah.
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But you want to find out the issues that they care about.
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We would ask people, you know, what do you care about headed into the election?
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And I'd say the number one answer, you know, hydro rates was a big one in Ontario.
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But the number one answer was either hydro rates or I care about debt, debt or government spending.
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And when I heard this, I was so pleased because, you know, I'd never been a candidate before.
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And they say, oh, I care about government spending.
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And I'm like, all right, I'm the conservative candidate.
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And you find out that a lot of these people will say, ah, I might vote NDP.
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And you say, okay, well, just so you know, the conservatives are the only party that are saying
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And the liberals and NDP are saying we want more spending.
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And, well, the fact that I'm doing this and not right now sitting in Queens Park tells you that
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all of these people that said government spending was a priority, when push comes to shove, don't
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And I do wonder why we see people so abstractly looking at government issues in a way that they can't
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and don't have the luxury of doing with their own.
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And it brings to mind that old Margaret Thatcher quote.
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But she says, you know, if you can't run a household, how could you ever dream of running a country?
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And same as when we talk about running a business versus running government, obviously, there
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But the idea of getting value for money, the idea of trimming the fat, the idea of not having
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unsustainable debt levels, these are universal things in your household, in a business that
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When you go back to 21,000 doors that you knock on and people that say, yes, I care about
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government spending, one of the things that I fear is that people say it because they want to
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If some politician knocks on your door, you don't know they're coming.
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You're too busy, you know, mowing the lawn or whatever.
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It's the same as this one thing that happens in the US.
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I don't know if it still happens, but used to, where PBS would score in surveys like
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And NPR would score extraordinarily high because everyone, when they're asked in a survey,
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what do you read or what do you listen to or what do you watch?
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But when you look at the metrics, people aren't doing it because they just want to sound smart
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And I think in Canada, you'd see the same thing with CBC or, you know, whatever the equivalent
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I mean, the Globe and Mail, I guess, like everyone would say, oh, I read the Globe and I watch
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But they're just doing it because they want to sound smart to a pollster or to a politician.
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And the debt problems in Canada have gotten so monumentally large that no one even really
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cares about it anymore because they don't think it impacts them.
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And whenever I encountered this, the line that I would use, which is not an original
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thought by any stretch, is, okay, well, you know, let's put it in practical terms.
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You know, in Ontario's case, Ontario is the largest subnational borrower anywhere in the
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world, 300 and some odd billion dollars in debt.
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It is the third highest, third largest line item in the provincial budget in Ontario, debt
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and interest payments after health care and education.
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And you'd say to people, all right, if debt is taking up X percentage of the budget, that's
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That's money that's not going towards health care and education, money that's not going
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But when push comes to shove, don't see how directly it impacts them.
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And this is something that is not a liberal issue by any stretch.
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Justin Trudeau, we'll talk about very shortly, has certainly been incredibly dishonest on this.
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But Stephen Harper was hardly a superstar when it came to spending.
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Like, I'm looking right now at the federal debt from 2008 onward.
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And we went from, not a single year debt went down, by the way, but starting at $457.6 billion
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in 2008, that was when Stephen Harper got his majority government, to now we're at $616 billion.
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So $616 billion, which is an increase that is quite substantial.
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And most importantly, we're looking, and that's, by the way, based on an adjusted for inflation
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So if you look at inflation, it's still a significant increase, though not as significant
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But again, the way that we look at these numbers as political wonks, as the diehards, for me,
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people in media, is different than the way the average voter does.
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And when you look right now at what's happening in the U.S. with a shutdown that I think is
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12 or 14 days in, something like that, that is actually giving people a real-world understanding
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of what happens when government spends beyond its means, when ultimately you don't have
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And I actually wish that we had in Canada something analogous to a government shutdown.
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Because first off, shutdowns are a great way to save money.
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But when the government is shut down, and you can see in the U.S. just how many billions
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of dollars are being spent, it's like, oh, it's not the best way to do it, but I'll
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In Canada, I think we'd see something very similar, where first off, we'd start to realize
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how many government services we can live without.
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And that was true when Canada Post went on strike.
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I think if CBC were to go on strike, I'd be like, yeah, that's fine.
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But actually, for Canadians, these things are only as justifiable as they are relatable.
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And I would love for a politician to actually take the debt issue on, but do it in a way
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that Canadians start to understand it and drive home the importance of it.
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And I don't know how to do that, because no one has succeeded in doing it.
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The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has a great little initiative it does with the debt clock.
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They have a clock on a flatbed, I think, and they just drive it around the country.
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And you can look at the debt clock, and it's pretty much in real time, racking up the numbers.
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And something like that, I think, is great, because it gives you a visualization of it.
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The media doesn't care about debt, which admittedly is kind of a boring issue.
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And I'm going to put another bold question up, asking if debt sways how you vote.
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And just so you know, when you vote, I don't see who voted how.
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I'm not going to call you stupid, because I don't think people are stupid if debt doesn't
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But I am curious to know if it sways how you vote.
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I mean, as far as the issues that you are concerned about, whether it's free speech or the
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environment or taxes or whatever, does government debt sway how you vote?
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And for a lot of people, my experience is that they say it does.
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But when push comes to shove, it's not the ballot issue for them.
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But it really is one of the issues from which all other issues flow.
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Immigration is one of the most pivotal issues in Canada right now.
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I think it will be a ballot issue in the 2019 election, this year's election.
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And certainly, I hope it will be a ballot issue this year.
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But let's say that immigration is the focal point.
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And for the next, however long it takes for me to go through this, it is.
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We have a security risk that comes from immigration.
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We have an issue of Canadian values that comes from, and I'm talking about unrestricted,
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open borders, just and true dopey in immigration.
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There's also the concern about taxing of government resources.
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And that issue comes back to the fundamental one, which is that it costs money and costs
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When you have a country that doesn't care about protecting its borders, that has to deal
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And when you don't have the money budgeted, that triggers a deficit, which triggers debt.
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And we're back to square one with looking at what, for 2017, was a $632 billion debt loan.
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And then as the debt gets bigger, the percentage of your budget that you have to spend maintaining
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your debt gets bigger, which means less money to spend on border security, on policing, on
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So every other government failing, where government is either spending money inefficiently or overspending
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or not caring about how much it spends, comes back to the debt issue, which then makes it
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so there's less money to spend on all of these other things.
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And I'm not trying to, you know, just get you to glaze over as I talk about numbers and
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But we all, and Thomas in the chat here, Thomas Prince says, we all suffer.
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I mean, if you don't take public health concerns seriously, if the government is going to deliver
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health care, you're going to spend more money in the long run on health care, which you
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don't have money for, if you're spending on maintaining your debt.
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But Canadians are also so bogged down and so beaten down by the things that are impacting
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them on a more direct basis, like a carbon tax that you see, and like potholes that you
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see aren't fixed, and hospital wait times that you see, and unemployment that you see, that
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it becomes very difficult to get Canadians to care about the much bigger issues that seem
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abstract, even if they are more directly related to what you're going through.
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So again, I don't know what the silver bullet is here in how we get the debt looked after.
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And I think that one component would be a balanced budget.
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Now remember, a balanced budget doesn't mean you're going to be debt-free, because you could
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budget in spending, I mean, you could budget in, you know, taking out debt.
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But having a balanced budget and keeping that budget balance for years in a row, would at
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the very least bring it more into alignment, because people would see it, people would see
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Like there was a town not far from me called, well, a county, Essex County, which is down
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They paid it off, I think it was in 2014 or so, and it was just, yeah, it was 2014.
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And I remember interviewing on my radio show at the time, the warden of Essex County, and
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I said, okay, let's face it, you're Essex County, you're not Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver.
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Do you think that your experience is different because you're a rural county compared to what
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bigger cities or provinces or the country would see?
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And his perspective was, look, if you look at the decisions we made and we had to make,
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this is something that any government could do.
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And you actually have to really buckle down and do it.
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You have to tighten your belt, but it's possible for any government level.
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And I remember interviewing local politicians at the time.
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And all I got from these were city councilors were excuses of, oh, well, you know, yes,
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And, you know, when the economy is bad, you don't want to, you don't want to rein in your
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spending because, you know, people need the spending.
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And when the economy is good, you don't want to because, oh, it could get bad.
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And there's never a good time to politicians to actually rein in their spending.
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And, again, this started, if you're just tuning in, with a report from CIBC that they do every
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year that found that the top financial priority for average everyday Canadians was paying down
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The top priority for politicians is always giving out money like they're Oprah Winfrey every
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And let's just do a little bit of a flashback here.
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You may remember in 2015, Justin Trudeau was running the election against Stephen Harper,
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and he was talking about how he was going to balance the budget the next year.
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There was going to be nothing that was going to happen as far as the deficit goes.
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And then it became a little itty bitty deficit.
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And that was the one Stephen Harper made fun of in the election when he was talking about
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that itty bitty deficit, so small you can't see it.
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And I think it was probably within a couple of years that Canadians started to wake up
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to the possibility that, you know, maybe, just maybe, this budget isn't getting balanced.
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And then in November, we finally got the proof that everyone pretty much knew from Bill Morneau
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that not only will there be no balanced budget by October 2019, there's not going to be in
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the projections any balanced budget within sight.
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Even if the Liberals get reelected, there will not be, according to the Liberal government's
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And one thing that I would love to see, and I know these are kind of contentious, but one
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thing that I'd love to see is a balanced budget law, and a law that actually binds lawmakers
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to balance the budget, something that they are forced to find a way to balance.
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Now, the problem with this is that you'd love for governments to have a bit more latitude
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and flexibility to make the right decisions themselves.
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So if you put on the books a balanced budget law, it might make a little bit of a tricky
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It also could do, and this is the downside of it, is that governments would want to spend
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all this money, and they'd have to say, oh, well, you know, we don't have the money to
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do this, so we've got to balance the budget, so let's raise taxes.
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If you don't want to cut spending, and you have to balance the budget, the only other thing
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But at least then it's being done transparently, because that's the only way to do it.
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Right now, you get governments that just shift money around, and they put basically any number
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they can, anywhere they need to, to make it look like they're doing a lot better, which
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is why whenever a government takes office, they say, we looked at the books for the last
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four years and have no idea what was going on there.
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A message from Andrea that I wanted to read here, she writes, actually, I have no idea what
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she writes, because my screen just disappeared.
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She says, I may have no debt, but my husband and I work very hard to keep things that way.
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She continues that if one of us is lacking money, austerity measures are made.
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If the government wanted to pay down debt, they could, but instead politicians are more
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Yeah, and that is so key, Andrew, and I thank you for saying that, because the fact is always
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going to be that you can do it, it just becomes harder and harder when you have all of these
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And to go back to things that I learned when I was running as a candidate, people would
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say, as I told you, yes, I support balanced budgets, and yes, I want to get rid of spending
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that's too high, and yes, I want to pay down the debt, and yes, I want to do all this, but
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If I've told it, well, tough luck, I'm telling it again, but I don't think I've told it on
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a Facebook Live, where I was knocking on doors in a very, I shouldn't say very, fairly affluent
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neighborhood, upper middle class area, and meeting some really nice people, and I think
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And this woman said, yeah, you know, I'm thinking of voting PC or NDP, which right then
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there is, shows you how, and I was in an NDP-held writing, but shows you how people can be very
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fickle sometimes, that the conservatives and the socialists are the two options.
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And I said to her, okay, what do you care about?
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She said, well, you know, government spending and healthcare and hydro and all the things
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And she's like, well, I got to be honest with you, the NDP is offering free dental care,
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And I said, yeah, look, I think it's, I understand as well, dental care is expensive.
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I know why it's palatable for people to want it to be free.
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I said, but the question is, who's going to pay for it?
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And this woman, an educated family woman in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, I say,
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And it was as though asking how a government program was going to be paid for was like the
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first time she had ever even imagined that a government program had to be paid for.
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And this is where, unfortunately, a lot of Canadian voters are, that you can talk about
00:24:16.960
But when push comes to shove, people like the giveaway.
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And conservative governments are just as bad about this.
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Stephen Harper loved the boutique tax credits, the tax credits that were very populist in nature,
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people looking and saying, yes, that's my family that benefits, whether it's child fitness
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Whereas when you get someone that comes in and says, like what Maxine Bernier is saying,
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by the way, which is get rid of all tax breaks that are specifically targeted and just have
00:24:47.820
You can't sell that to individual people because people love one that they can claim.
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Everyone loves checking off boxes on your tax return that when you check those boxes,
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you feel like, you know, just you are getting a little goody just for being you.
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So what I'm trying to get people to do here is understand that the realities that you deal
00:25:09.240
with in your household finances are the same as the realities that the government is dealing with.
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But you as a Canadian have to start putting a lot more pressure on the government to make
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the decisions that you would have to in your household or in your business.
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If the government were being run in the private sector right now, it would be so far from solvent
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and so far from profitable and so far from success.
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Do you honestly think you could take the government's books, the government of Canada's books,
00:25:41.660
And I don't know who's on Dragon's Den right now.
00:25:45.240
But I don't know if you could go to whoever's on Dragon's Den and be like, all right,
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here's my business, you know, here's my net worth, and here's our net debt, and here's our spending.
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And do you think you could get them to invest a dollar in your company if your company was Canada?
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There is no business case for Canada right now.
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And lawmakers have allowed that problem to get bigger and bigger by refusing to do the decision
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making that is required to bring our economy into order.
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And Justin Trudeau made some very clear and decisive promises four years ago that he was
00:26:23.500
The implication is that getting the debt in check was going to be a priority.
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Justin Trudeau has never met a tax like he didn't like.
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This is a guy who looks at the hardworking small business owners who are making better financial
00:26:37.540
decisions than he and Bill Morneau are and calls them tax cheats.
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This is what Justin Trudeau's approach to the economy is.
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So when you look at the average Canadian right now and see the challenges that they're facing,
00:26:50.100
let's start extrapolating some of those to the bigger scale.
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And we've all seen, I mean, these have been circulating in email forwarding chains for like
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These decisions that, you know, if you were to take the government debt and reduce it down
00:27:06.440
to a household level, there was one great example of this.
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And what had happened was he took thousands and thousands of pennies and each penny represented
00:27:19.540
however many millions or billions of whatever it was.
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And he said, you know, this is the government spending right now.
00:27:28.680
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how much the government is cutting as
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And he picked up one penny and a pair of wire cutters.
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And he like took out a quarter of it or three quarters of it.
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And I actually saw a data visualization workshop where he didn't teach me how to say data visualization.
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A workshop he did where he was talking about that.
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And this may be the answer to that question I raised earlier of how do you get Canadians
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to care about it to really let them visualize how bad the problem is.
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So we know Maxime Bernier is pretty solid on this issue.
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He wants to get rid of boutique tax credits, lower corporate taxes, lower personal taxes,
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get rid of corporate welfare, balance the budget.
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We know where Andrew Scheer is on this issue in a more theoretical way.
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But I would love for Andrew Scheer to come out swinging on this and say, yeah, this is
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And to not fall into the trap of every politician before him, which is to think that you need
00:28:38.960
You have to see someone who's prepared to change that.
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And as much as it's tempting, because yes, there are going to be people that would love
00:28:47.560
the giveaway and love nothing more than the giveaway.
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That is not going to be the way that we get the country back on track.
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And in fact, if we have politicians on all stripes of all stripes that just decide to do
00:29:01.700
that, then even when a conservative minded one wins, it's not going to make a difference
00:29:07.320
because all they're doing is just putting different types of credits and giveaways in compared
00:29:15.460
So that's going to be where if I'm going to make a New Year's resolution for 2019, that's
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where I'd love for the country to take this right now to start demanding of politicians
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a lot more fiscal restraint and to start expecting government to behave the way that your own
00:29:31.440
business has to and the way that your own household has to.
00:29:34.700
Because if you have to, there's no reason they shouldn't as well.
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To go back to what I said at the beginning of this, government that is democratically
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elected should be a reflection of the demographics that it's representing.
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And right now it's not because it's not a reflection of anything that's economically
00:29:54.400
I'm going to be back with more Facebook excellence next week.
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And we'll have lots of videos between now and then.
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Hope you're having again a great New Year's week, a post New Year's week, whatever you
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I look forward to spending some more time with family in the next couple of days and