Juno News - The True North Report： Canadians want to pay down debt. Why don't politicians？

00:00:00.360 Hello, everyone. Welcome. It is just after 5.05 Eastern Time. My name is Andrew Lott and a fellow with the True North Initiative.

00:00:08.660 And whether you are enjoying a lovely day at 2.05 on the West Coast, perhaps you're enjoying some Alberta weather,

00:00:16.060 which apparently right now is pretty darn terrible at 3.05 or whatever time it is everywhere else.

00:00:22.840 Newfoundland is always the fun one because what are we in Newfoundland right now?

00:00:25.780 We're 6.35 because they always have to throw us off with the half-hour time zone there.

00:00:31.240 Wherever it is for you tuning in, hope you're having a great day.

00:00:34.040 And also a very happy New Year to you all.

00:00:37.220 This is my first Facebook Live of 2019, and that has zero significance whatsoever,

00:00:44.100 except that because New Year's is apparently a spectacular occasion,

00:00:47.840 we're always supposed to talk about the fact that it's New Year's.

00:00:51.540 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.

00:00:59.080 So after January 7th, we're all supposed to just move on, accept that it's 2019, and hope for the best.

00:01:05.000 But I do hope you have a very, very wonderful New Year season, just as I hope you had a wonderful Christmas season.

00:01:11.760 And whether you have any New Year's resolutions or not is kind of playing into this.

00:01:16.560 I'm kind of the New Year's Grinch, just as a fair warning.

00:01:20.640 I don't pay attention much to New Year's, and I don't have any New Year's resolutions.

00:01:24.800 But I do every now and then kind of look forward to the year ahead and say,

00:01:28.400 all right, what do I hope the politicians' New Year resolutions are?

00:01:32.840 And the problem is every year it's pretty much the same list.

00:01:35.900 So I'm going to talk a little bit about that this year and give a bit of a primer,

00:01:40.540 as I think a lot of people are looking at the election year as now being in full force,

00:01:45.480 because, well, we're going to be headed to the polls nationally in just under 10 months,

00:01:49.640 which means there is the question of where the priorities for politicians really are.

00:01:55.040 And the one element of this that I find to be fascinating is when you look at debt.

00:02:00.280 There was a report that came out just a day or so ago from CIBC, the bank,

00:02:05.900 and they looked at Canadians and their financial priorities.

00:02:10.120 And the poll found that for the ninth consecutive year,

00:02:14.380 the number one financial priority for Canadians and their households is paying down debt.

00:02:20.280 So when you look at the numbers on this, I'll pull up the little chart here.

00:02:24.760 26% of Canadians say it's their top financial priority,

00:02:28.280 keeping up with bills and saving for vacation, growing well, saving for retirement.

00:02:33.540 These are all way behind.

00:02:35.560 So the top priority every year, 26% say paying down debt.

00:02:39.460 Now, in fairness, the top priority is typically losing weight.

00:02:44.080 That's like the number one New Year's resolution.

00:02:45.980 As you can tell, I've been failing for several years at that.

00:02:49.000 But paying down debt when it comes to non-weight loss is typically the number one priority,

00:02:54.780 and certainly for financial goals, the number one.

00:02:57.100 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.

00:03:12.840 And why this is so interesting is that a government is supposed to be, a democratically elected government anyway,

00:03:20.320 is supposed to be a reflection of the people it serves.

00:03:22.920 So if you have people that are saying we support XYZ and governments saying we support manganese, hydrogen, boron,

00:03:32.560 then there's clearly a gap there.

00:03:34.940 And we see this time and time again.

00:03:36.960 And we certainly see it on anything financial.

00:03:39.500 And that's where I wanted to start off here.

00:03:43.480 So let me ask you point blank.

00:03:45.380 I mean, is this something that you had in your own life?

00:03:49.040 Well, for starters, let's do a fun one here.

00:03:50.780 I'm going to put up a poll.

00:03:51.980 Did you make any New Year's resolutions?

00:03:54.060 We know the politicians typically don't.

00:03:56.760 If you made a New Year's resolution, let me know in the poll box there.

00:04:00.280 Just to have a little bit of fun with this.

00:04:01.860 But the fact remains that for politicians in Canada, they are looking at, let me pull up the exact numbers now,

00:04:11.540 because this is as far as 2017 goes.

00:04:14.880 We had $631.9 billion in debt.

00:04:20.080 So $631.9 billion in debt, which if you look at the percentage of GDP is 31.2%.

00:04:28.260 So we have a GDP of $2.03 trillion or something like that.

00:04:34.640 Debt makes up just shy of one-third of our GDP.

00:04:41.020 And if you look at that, that percentage has kind of fluctuated over the years.

00:04:45.880 Obviously, when you go back over the last 10 years, we had some skyrocketing debt to GDP.

00:04:50.980 As you look at the response to the recession and the spending that Harper put in in that period of 2008-2009.

00:04:58.940 But these numbers are not small numbers.

00:05:02.300 But the problem is it's such an abstract number for so many people.

00:05:06.200 They don't understand the implications of it.

00:05:08.400 They don't really care about the implications of it.

00:05:11.520 And in their own household, you don't have that option.

00:05:14.640 And this is where I wanted to really merge these two topics.

00:05:17.760 In Canadians' own households, debt reduction has to be a priority because you can't keep debt at those levels.

00:05:24.460 You can't have a debt that's 33% of your net worth, not pay it down, keep adding to it,

00:05:29.140 and expect that you're not going to have to pay the piper at some point down the road.

00:05:33.840 But what I find so fascinating about this discussion is that Canadians don't actually seem to care when it comes to voting.

00:05:42.880 And this is something that I saw firsthand.

00:05:46.980 Many of you know I ran as a candidate in Ontario's election back in June.

00:05:51.100 And my team and I knocked on, it was actually 21,000 doors in the span of about six weeks,

00:05:56.480 which we're so very proud of.

00:05:58.180 And you'd always want to, when you're meeting people, find out if they're supporting you, yeah.

00:06:02.500 But you want to find out the issues that they care about.

00:06:05.720 And we did this.

00:06:07.020 We did this a fair bit.

00:06:08.380 We would ask people, you know, what do you care about headed into the election?

00:06:12.940 And I'd say the number one answer, you know, hydro rates was a big one in Ontario.

00:06:18.540 But the number one answer was either hydro rates or I care about debt, debt or government spending.

00:06:24.880 And when I heard this, I was so pleased because, you know, I'd never been a candidate before.

00:06:30.400 So I'm knocking on someone's door.

00:06:31.880 They're a complete stranger.

00:06:33.020 I have no idea what they care about.

00:06:34.600 And I say, all right, what do you care about?

00:06:36.120 And they say, oh, I care about government spending.

00:06:37.820 And I'm like, all right, I'm the conservative candidate.

00:06:39.960 This person will vote for me.

00:06:42.040 And you get talking to them further.

00:06:44.780 And you find out that a lot of these people will say, ah, I might vote NDP.

00:06:48.060 I might vote liberal.

00:06:49.080 I might vote conservative.

00:06:50.520 And you say, okay, well, just so you know, the conservatives are the only party that are saying

00:06:55.660 we want to reduce spending.

00:06:57.920 And the liberals and NDP are saying we want more spending.

00:07:00.580 And, well, the fact that I'm doing this and not right now sitting in Queens Park tells you that

00:07:05.500 all of these people that said government spending was a priority, when push comes to shove, don't

00:07:10.700 actually vote based on that issue.

00:07:12.440 And I do wonder why we see people so abstractly looking at government issues in a way that they can't

00:07:22.940 and don't have the luxury of doing with their own.

00:07:25.660 And it brings to mind that old Margaret Thatcher quote.

00:07:27.940 And this isn't verbatim.

00:07:29.000 I'm paraphrasing here.

00:07:30.100 But she says, you know, if you can't run a household, how could you ever dream of running a country?

00:07:34.820 And I think those are so true.

00:07:36.520 And same as when we talk about running a business versus running government, obviously, there

00:07:40.880 are differences.

00:07:42.140 But the idea of getting value for money, the idea of trimming the fat, the idea of not having

00:07:47.840 unsustainable debt levels, these are universal things in your household, in a business that

00:07:54.180 should be there in government as well.

00:07:56.860 And they're not.

00:07:58.260 For lawmakers, they're not.

00:07:59.880 And also for voters, they're not.

00:08:03.340 So I do wonder why that is.

00:08:05.100 When you go back to 21,000 doors that you knock on and people that say, yes, I care about

00:08:09.680 government spending, one of the things that I fear is that people say it because they want to

00:08:16.260 sound smart.

00:08:18.080 It does make you sound smart.

00:08:19.960 If some politician knocks on your door, you don't know they're coming.

00:08:22.940 You're too busy, you know, mowing the lawn or whatever.

00:08:25.020 And they say, what do you care about?

00:08:27.000 No, government spending debt.

00:08:28.360 Yeah, that sounds like a real issue.

00:08:30.720 It's the same as this one thing that happens in the US.

00:08:33.560 I don't know if it still happens, but used to, where PBS would score in surveys like

00:08:39.540 extraordinarily high.

00:08:40.820 And NPR would score extraordinarily high because everyone, when they're asked in a survey,

00:08:45.860 what do you read or what do you listen to or what do you watch?

00:08:48.100 They say, oh, I watch PBS.

00:08:49.800 And oh, I watch NPR.

00:08:51.240 But when you look at the metrics, people aren't doing it because they just want to sound smart

00:08:56.640 by saying it.

00:08:57.400 And I think in Canada, you'd see the same thing with CBC or, you know, whatever the equivalent

00:09:02.780 of it is for newspaper.

00:09:04.380 I mean, the Globe and Mail, I guess, like everyone would say, oh, I read the Globe and I watch

00:09:08.160 CBC.

00:09:08.760 But they're just doing it because they want to sound smart to a pollster or to a politician.

00:09:14.700 And the debt problems in Canada have gotten so monumentally large that no one even really

00:09:22.380 cares about it anymore because they don't think it impacts them.

00:09:25.880 And whenever I encountered this, the line that I would use, which is not an original

00:09:31.860 thought by any stretch, is, okay, well, you know, let's put it in practical terms.

00:09:36.180 You know, in Ontario's case, Ontario is the largest subnational borrower anywhere in the

00:09:40.900 world, 300 and some odd billion dollars in debt.

00:09:44.560 It is the third highest, third largest line item in the provincial budget in Ontario, debt

00:09:50.840 and interest payments after health care and education.

00:09:53.420 And you'd say to people, all right, if debt is taking up X percentage of the budget, that's

00:09:59.140 money that's not going towards special needs.

00:10:01.240 That's money that's not going towards health care and education, money that's not going

00:10:04.740 towards roads, policing, all of these things.

00:10:06.960 And people do get it.

00:10:08.860 People do get it.

00:10:09.800 But when push comes to shove, don't see how directly it impacts them.

00:10:14.060 And this is something that is not a liberal issue by any stretch.

00:10:17.820 Justin Trudeau, we'll talk about very shortly, has certainly been incredibly dishonest on this.

00:10:23.820 But Stephen Harper was hardly a superstar when it came to spending.

00:10:28.120 Like, I'm looking right now at the federal debt from 2008 onward.

00:10:33.900 And we went from, not a single year debt went down, by the way, but starting at $457.6 billion

00:10:40.920 in 2008, that was when Stephen Harper got his majority government, to now we're at $616 billion.

00:10:49.920 So $616 billion, which is an increase that is quite substantial.

00:10:57.320 And most importantly, we're looking, and that's, by the way, based on an adjusted for inflation

00:11:02.420 number, if you go 515.3 to where we are today.

00:11:08.060 So if you look at inflation, it's still a significant increase, though not as significant

00:11:13.420 as the actual dollar value.

00:11:16.220 But again, the way that we look at these numbers as political wonks, as the diehards, for me, 0.94

00:11:24.120 people in media, is different than the way the average voter does.

00:11:27.320 They're concerned about services.

00:11:29.080 And when you look right now at what's happening in the U.S. with a shutdown that I think is

00:11:32.940 12 or 14 days in, something like that, that is actually giving people a real-world understanding

00:11:39.580 of what happens when government spends beyond its means, when ultimately you don't have

00:11:43.960 money in the budget.

00:11:45.120 So you actually flip the lights off.

00:11:47.660 And I actually wish that we had in Canada something analogous to a government shutdown.

00:11:53.980 Because first off, shutdowns are a great way to save money.

00:11:57.140 I'm not saying I like impasses like that.

00:11:59.300 But when the government is shut down, and you can see in the U.S. just how many billions

00:12:02.980 of dollars are being spent, it's like, oh, it's not the best way to do it, but I'll

00:12:07.320 take it.

00:12:08.680 In Canada, I think we'd see something very similar, where first off, we'd start to realize

00:12:13.080 how many government services we can live without.

00:12:15.900 And that was true when Canada Post went on strike.

00:12:19.360 I think if CBC were to go on strike, I'd be like, yeah, that's fine.

00:12:22.420 Keep them on strike.

00:12:24.020 I'm okay with it.

00:12:24.960 But actually, for Canadians, these things are only as justifiable as they are relatable.

00:12:35.820 And I would love for a politician to actually take the debt issue on, but do it in a way

00:12:42.340 that Canadians start to understand it and drive home the importance of it.

00:12:46.520 And I don't know how to do that, because no one has succeeded in doing it.

00:12:50.400 The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has a great little initiative it does with the debt clock.

00:12:56.140 They have a clock on a flatbed, I think, and they just drive it around the country.

00:13:01.060 And you can look at the debt clock, and it's pretty much in real time, racking up the numbers.

00:13:05.340 And something like that, I think, is great, because it gives you a visualization of it.

00:13:10.000 But the media gives it so little coverage.

00:13:12.460 The media doesn't care about debt, which admittedly is kind of a boring issue.

00:13:16.680 And I'm going to put another bold question up, asking if debt sways how you vote.

00:13:22.200 And just so you know, when you vote, I don't see who voted how.

00:13:25.000 I only see the numbers.

00:13:25.980 So it's completely anonymous, I believe.

00:13:28.080 I'm not going to judge you. 0.99

00:13:29.200 I'm not going to call you stupid, because I don't think people are stupid if debt doesn't 1.00

00:13:33.240 sway how they vote. 0.99

00:13:34.520 But I am curious to know if it sways how you vote.

00:13:37.860 I mean, as far as the issues that you are concerned about, whether it's free speech or the

00:13:42.540 environment or taxes or whatever, does government debt sway how you vote?

00:13:47.820 That's the question that I would ask.

00:13:49.620 And for a lot of people, my experience is that they say it does.

00:13:54.860 But when push comes to shove, it's not the ballot issue for them.

00:13:58.760 But it really is one of the issues from which all other issues flow.

00:14:04.240 And even let's look at immigration.

00:14:06.680 Immigration is one of the most pivotal issues in Canada right now.

00:14:09.960 I think it will be a ballot issue in the 2019 election, this year's election.

00:14:14.880 And certainly, I hope it will be a ballot issue this year.

00:14:18.820 But let's say that immigration is the focal point.

00:14:22.780 And for the next, however long it takes for me to go through this, it is.

00:14:26.100 We have a security risk that comes from immigration. 1.00

00:14:29.660 We have an issue of Canadian values that comes from, and I'm talking about unrestricted,

00:14:34.560 open borders, just and true dopey in immigration. 0.85

00:14:37.420 There's the security risk.

00:14:38.680 There is the integrity of our borders issue.

00:14:42.080 There's also the concern about taxing of government resources.

00:14:47.180 And that issue comes back to the fundamental one, which is that it costs money and costs

00:14:54.300 huge amounts of money to deal with it.

00:14:58.460 So let's put this in another perspective.

00:15:01.500 When you have a country that doesn't care about protecting its borders, that has to deal

00:15:05.640 with a years-long wait list for asylum claims.

00:15:08.560 That triggers government spending.

00:15:10.660 And when you don't have the money budgeted, that triggers a deficit, which triggers debt.

00:15:14.400 And we're back to square one with looking at what, for 2017, was a $632 billion debt loan.

00:15:22.020 And then as the debt gets bigger, the percentage of your budget that you have to spend maintaining

00:15:27.460 your debt gets bigger, which means less money to spend on border security, on policing, on

00:15:32.180 the CBSA, on all of these other things.

00:15:34.420 So every other government failing, where government is either spending money inefficiently or overspending

00:15:41.720 or not caring about how much it spends, comes back to the debt issue, which then makes it

00:15:46.820 so there's less money to spend on all of these other things.

00:15:49.860 And I realize this sounds very circular.

00:15:52.620 And I'm not trying to, you know, just get you to glaze over as I talk about numbers and

00:15:58.200 debt-to-GDP ratios and all of this.

00:16:00.680 But we all, and Thomas in the chat here, Thomas Prince says, we all suffer.

00:16:04.360 We do.

00:16:05.100 We all suffer.

00:16:06.080 That's immigration. 0.53

00:16:06.900 The same is true of health care.

00:16:09.200 I mean, if you don't take public health concerns seriously, if the government is going to deliver

00:16:13.100 health care, you're going to spend more money in the long run on health care, which you

00:16:17.100 don't have money for, if you're spending on maintaining your debt.

00:16:20.640 So I think debt should sway how people vote.

00:16:24.660 But Canadians are also so bogged down and so beaten down by the things that are impacting

00:16:31.260 them on a more direct basis, like a carbon tax that you see, and like potholes that you

00:16:37.680 see aren't fixed, and hospital wait times that you see, and unemployment that you see, that

00:16:44.640 it becomes very difficult to get Canadians to care about the much bigger issues that seem

00:16:50.400 abstract, even if they are more directly related to what you're going through.

00:16:56.440 So again, I don't know what the silver bullet is here in how we get the debt looked after.

00:17:03.260 And I think that one component would be a balanced budget.

00:17:06.680 Now remember, a balanced budget doesn't mean you're going to be debt-free, because you could

00:17:11.000 budget in spending, I mean, you could budget in, you know, taking out debt.

00:17:15.960 But having a balanced budget and keeping that budget balance for years in a row, would at

00:17:22.300 the very least bring it more into alignment, because people would see it, people would see

00:17:28.280 it more.

00:17:28.680 Like there was a town not far from me called, well, a county, Essex County, which is down

00:17:33.460 near Windsor, and they have zero debt.

00:17:36.920 It's a county that has zero debt.

00:17:38.620 They paid it off, I think it was in 2014 or so, and it was just, yeah, it was 2014.

00:17:45.700 And I remember interviewing on my radio show at the time, the warden of Essex County, and

00:17:49.940 I said, okay, let's face it, you're Essex County, you're not Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver.

00:17:54.380 Do you think that your experience is different because you're a rural county compared to what

00:18:00.300 bigger cities or provinces or the country would see?

00:18:02.740 And his perspective was, look, if you look at the decisions we made and we had to make,

00:18:08.120 this is something that any government could do.

00:18:10.660 It's just not easy.

00:18:12.040 And you actually have to really buckle down and do it.

00:18:16.240 And it's not going to be natural.

00:18:17.920 You have to tighten your belt, but it's possible for any government level.

00:18:22.300 And I remember interviewing local politicians at the time.

00:18:24.920 And I said, look, they've done it.

00:18:26.040 Can you?

00:18:26.760 And all I got from these were city councilors were excuses of, oh, well, you know, yes,

00:18:31.660 but this isn't the year to do it.

00:18:33.180 And, you know, when the economy is bad, you don't want to, you don't want to rein in your

00:18:37.380 spending because, you know, people need the spending.

00:18:39.940 And when the economy is good, you don't want to because, oh, it could get bad.

00:18:42.800 And there's never a good time to politicians to actually rein in their spending.

00:18:49.260 They never want to.

00:18:50.640 They're never going to.

00:18:52.820 And, again, this started, if you're just tuning in, with a report from CIBC that they do every

00:18:57.940 year that found that the top financial priority for average everyday Canadians was paying down

00:19:04.100 debt.

00:19:04.420 The top priority for politicians is always giving out money like they're Oprah Winfrey every

00:19:09.100 day of the year.

00:19:10.260 And let's just do a little bit of a flashback here.

00:19:13.000 You may remember in 2015, Justin Trudeau was running the election against Stephen Harper,

00:19:18.520 and he was talking about how he was going to balance the budget the next year.

00:19:23.140 He said the budget was going to be balanced.

00:19:25.300 There was going to be nothing that was going to happen as far as the deficit goes.

00:19:29.600 And then it became a little itty bitty deficit.

00:19:31.840 And that was the one Stephen Harper made fun of in the election when he was talking about

00:19:35.840 that itty bitty deficit, so small you can't see it.

00:19:38.620 And I think it was probably within a couple of years that Canadians started to wake up

00:19:46.520 to the possibility that, you know, maybe, just maybe, this budget isn't getting balanced.

00:19:51.720 And then in November, we finally got the proof that everyone pretty much knew from Bill Morneau

00:19:56.860 that not only will there be no balanced budget by October 2019, there's not going to be in

00:20:02.300 the projections any balanced budget within sight.

00:20:05.720 Even if the Liberals get reelected, there will not be, according to the Liberal government's

00:20:10.380 projections, a balanced budget.

00:20:12.720 And one thing that I would love to see, and I know these are kind of contentious, but one

00:20:23.120 thing that I'd love to see is a balanced budget law, and a law that actually binds lawmakers

00:20:30.520 to balance the budget, something that they are forced to find a way to balance.

00:20:35.840 Now, the problem with this is that you'd love for governments to have a bit more latitude

00:20:42.260 and flexibility to make the right decisions themselves.

00:20:46.020 But it's safe to say they're not doing that.

00:20:48.500 They're not making the right decision.

00:20:50.820 They're not making the smart decision.

00:20:52.760 So if you put on the books a balanced budget law, it might make a little bit of a tricky

00:20:58.800 time if you are in a recession.

00:21:00.640 It also could do, and this is the downside of it, is that governments would want to spend

00:21:06.940 all this money, and they'd have to say, oh, well, you know, we don't have the money to

00:21:11.680 do this, so we've got to balance the budget, so let's raise taxes.

00:21:16.220 If you don't want to cut spending, and you have to balance the budget, the only other thing

00:21:19.980 you can do is raise taxes.

00:21:22.200 But at least then it's being done transparently, because that's the only way to do it.

00:21:27.260 Right now, you get governments that just shift money around, and they put basically any number

00:21:34.520 they can, anywhere they need to, to make it look like they're doing a lot better, which

00:21:38.780 is why whenever a government takes office, they say, we looked at the books for the last

00:21:43.000 four years and have no idea what was going on there.

00:21:45.820 A message from Andrea that I wanted to read here, she writes, actually, I have no idea what

00:21:51.020 she writes, because my screen just disappeared.

00:21:52.860 There we go.

00:21:53.240 She says, I may have no debt, but my husband and I work very hard to keep things that way.

00:22:00.400 She continues that if one of us is lacking money, austerity measures are made.

00:22:07.680 If the government wanted to pay down debt, they could, but instead politicians are more

00:22:11.660 interested in buying votes.

00:22:14.040 Yeah, and that is so key, Andrew, and I thank you for saying that, because the fact is always

00:22:19.500 going to be that you can do it, it just becomes harder and harder when you have all of these

00:22:26.700 things on your wish list.

00:22:28.220 And to go back to things that I learned when I was running as a candidate, people would

00:22:32.100 say, as I told you, yes, I support balanced budgets, and yes, I want to get rid of spending

00:22:36.940 that's too high, and yes, I want to pay down the debt, and yes, I want to do all this, but

00:22:41.040 they also are so easily bought by things.

00:22:44.420 And there was one great story.

00:22:46.840 If I've told it, well, tough luck, I'm telling it again, but I don't think I've told it on

00:22:50.140 a Facebook Live, where I was knocking on doors in a very, I shouldn't say very, fairly affluent

00:22:56.240 neighborhood, upper middle class area, and meeting some really nice people, and I think

00:23:01.000 we came very close in this polling district.

00:23:04.320 And this woman said, yeah, you know, I'm thinking of voting PC or NDP, which right then

00:23:09.600 there is, shows you how, and I was in an NDP-held writing, but shows you how people can be very

00:23:15.120 fickle sometimes, that the conservatives and the socialists are the two options.

00:23:20.720 And I said to her, okay, what do you care about?

00:23:23.100 She said, well, you know, government spending and healthcare and hydro and all the things

00:23:26.960 that everyone was saying.

00:23:28.300 I said, okay, cool.

00:23:29.520 And she's like, well, I got to be honest with you, the NDP is offering free dental care,

00:23:34.060 and I kind of like that idea.

00:23:36.680 And I said, yeah, look, I think it's, I understand as well, dental care is expensive.

00:23:40.700 I know why it's palatable for people to want it to be free.

00:23:45.480 I said, but the question is, who's going to pay for it?

00:23:47.740 And this woman, an educated family woman in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, I say,

00:23:52.660 yeah, how are we going to pay for it?

00:23:53.600 She said, oh, I never thought of that.

00:23:55.700 And it was as though asking how a government program was going to be paid for was like the

00:24:02.900 first time she had ever even imagined that a government program had to be paid for.

00:24:08.420 And this is where, unfortunately, a lot of Canadian voters are, that you can talk about

00:24:15.040 all of these different things.

00:24:16.960 But when push comes to shove, people like the giveaway.

00:24:20.960 And conservative governments are just as bad about this.

00:24:23.280 Stephen Harper loved the boutique tax credits, the tax credits that were very populist in nature,

00:24:28.240 people looking and saying, yes, that's my family that benefits, whether it's child fitness

00:24:32.900 tax credit or something like that.

00:24:34.860 Whereas when you get someone that comes in and says, like what Maxine Bernier is saying,

00:24:38.740 by the way, which is get rid of all tax breaks that are specifically targeted and just have

00:24:43.480 a general flatter tax that's lower.

00:24:47.820 You can't sell that to individual people because people love one that they can claim.

00:24:52.640 Everyone loves checking off boxes on your tax return that when you check those boxes,

00:24:57.400 you feel like, you know, just you are getting a little goody just for being you.

00:25:02.320 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.

00:25:14.180 But you as a Canadian have to start putting a lot more pressure on the government to make

00:25:19.660 the decisions that you would have to in your household or in your business.

00:25:23.060 If the government were being run in the private sector right now, it would be so far from solvent

00:25:31.800 and so far from profitable and so far from success.

00:25:35.500 Do you honestly think you could take the government's books, the government of Canada's books,

00:25:39.540 go on Dragon's Den?

00:25:41.660 And I don't know who's on Dragon's Den right now.

00:25:43.740 It changes over a lot.

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,

00:25:47.860 here's my business, you know, here's my net worth, and here's our net debt, and here's our spending.

00:25:54.120 And do you think you could get them to invest a dollar in your company if your company was Canada?

00:25:58.540 No, you couldn't.

00:25:59.840 There's no way.

00:26:00.780 There is no business case for Canada right now.

00:26:04.480 And lawmakers have allowed that problem to get bigger and bigger by refusing to do the decision

00:26:11.160 making that is required to bring our economy into order.

00:26:14.980 And Justin Trudeau made some very clear and decisive promises four years ago that he was

00:26:20.100 going to balance the budget.

00:26:21.660 That hasn't happened.

00:26:23.500 The implication is that getting the debt in check was going to be a priority.

00:26:27.420 That hasn't happened.

00:26:29.220 Lowering spending has not happened.

00:26:30.920 Justin Trudeau has never met a tax like he didn't like.

00:26:33.520 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.

00:26:41.700 This is what Justin Trudeau's approach to the economy is.

00:26:44.880 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.

00:26:53.900 And we've all seen, I mean, these have been circulating in email forwarding chains for like

00:26:58.440 15 years now.

00:26:59.860 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.

00:27:09.440 He was in the U.S.

00:27:10.580 I think it was back in 2009.

00:27:13.000 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.

00:27:22.940 And he had his living room full of these.

00:27:24.580 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

00:27:32.780 far as spending.

00:27:33.380 And he picked up one penny and a pair of wire cutters.

00:27:36.380 And he like took out a quarter of it or three quarters of it.

00:27:39.900 And it was a great thing.

00:27:41.280 And Matthias Shapiro was his name.

00:27:43.220 And I actually saw a data visualization workshop where he didn't teach me how to say data visualization.

00:27:49.520 There we go.

00:27:49.920 I got it.

00:27:50.560 Data visualization.

00:27:51.960 A workshop he did where he was talking about that.

00:27:53.960 And this may be the answer to that question I raised earlier of how do you get Canadians

00:27:58.720 to care about it to really let them visualize how bad the problem is.

00:28:03.880 So we know Maxime Bernier is pretty solid on this issue.

00:28:07.460 He wants to get rid of boutique tax credits, lower corporate taxes, lower personal taxes,

00:28:13.820 get rid of corporate welfare, balance the budget.

00:28:16.000 We know where Andrew Scheer is on this issue in a more theoretical way.

00:28:20.820 But I would love for Andrew Scheer to come out swinging on this and say, yeah, this is

00:28:24.780 what we as a country need to do.

00:28:27.220 This is how we're going to do it.

00:28:29.040 And this is why it's important.

00:28:30.760 And to not fall into the trap of every politician before him, which is to think that you need

00:28:36.600 to win the election by giving things away.

00:28:38.960 You have to see someone who's prepared to change that.

00:28:43.480 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.

00:28:50.380 That is not going to be the way that we get the country back on track.

00:28:53.960 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

00:29:11.940 to what the liberals are putting in.

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

00:29:21.240 where I'd love for the country to take this right now to start demanding of politicians

00:29:26.060 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.

00:29:37.320 To go back to what I said at the beginning of this, government that is democratically

00:29:41.660 elected should be a reflection of the demographics that it's representing.

00:29:46.980 And right now it's not because it's not a reflection of anything that's economically

00:29:51.080 sound or viable.

00:29:52.980 That's it for me.

00:29:54.400 I'm going to be back with more Facebook excellence next week.

00:29:57.440 And we'll have lots of videos between now and then.

00:29:59.680 Hope you're having again a great New Year's week, a post New Year's week, whatever you

00:30:03.280 call it.

00:30:03.700 I look forward to spending some more time with family in the next couple of days and

00:30:07.960 more time with you in the next year.

00:30:09.580 Thanks very much, Canada.

00:30:10.680 Thank you.

00:30:11.080 God bless and have a great day.

Juno News - January 04, 2019

The True North Report： Canadians want to pay down debt. Why don't politicians？

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