Juno News - December 15, 2019


Trudeau needs to get serious about the economy


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

182.79329

Word count

818

Sentence count

51

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of the podcast, I talk about the recent tax increase the Trudeau government has passed and why it's a good thing. I also talk about some troubling jobs numbers from the latest jobs report and why we should all be worried about them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I'd like to say something nice and positive and approving of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and
00:00:10.880 the Liberal government agenda right now if you will so allow me. They've done one new endeavor
00:00:16.160 that they've that they've passed since the House of Commons has resumed. That is one that we should
00:00:20.900 all support. They have actually raised the basic personal exemption amount on the income tax.
00:00:25.800 It used to be about $13,000. Now it's going to be about $15,000. Meaning all low-income people and 1.00
00:00:32.060 middle-class people, they're going to get a bit of a benefit because that's another $2,000 that they
00:00:36.760 are not paying tax on towards the low end. And people who are just scraping by who are only making
00:00:42.160 $15,000 a year and there are some tax filers in that situation, they're getting off the tax rolls. Now
00:00:48.320 it is important for people to pay tax because then you feel you have a stake in your government and
00:00:53.880 in how tax dollars are spent and you feel some purchase in all of that. But I think for people
00:00:57.900 who are really struggling and just scraping by, it's okay to take them off the tax rolls. So let's
00:01:03.120 applaud that. That's a good measure. And I liken it to back in 2015 when Trudeau first got into power.
00:01:08.680 One of the first things they did was they cut the tax rate, one of the middle-class tax rates,
00:01:13.060 from 22% to 20.5%. Great idea. Although there was a caveat the Fraser Institute later found they
00:01:19.880 crunched the numbers and realized that all the other tax increases the Liberals had done had
00:01:24.120 negated the benefits of that and it was actually a higher tax rate for those people at the end of
00:01:30.120 the day. So I hope what's happened this time around isn't going to be the case. So though with concerns
00:01:34.420 about the carbon tax rising, it very well could be. But the Liberals, I hope they're onto something
00:01:41.100 here, focusing on the economy and affordability rather than some of these more social justice,
00:01:47.040 trendy climate alarmism stuff that Justin Trudeau is going on about. You remember back in the first
00:01:52.080 term, all we heard about was feminism non-stop and thought, what were the results? And it actually 1.00
00:01:56.920 turned off women voters. They got really frustrated with Trudeau going on about feminism non-stop as if
00:02:02.540 it was some sort of a party trick. So let's hope he stays on affordability, cost of living,
00:02:09.220 and these sorts of issues. I'm not holding my breath, but who knows? Let's be optimistic,
00:02:14.820 cautiously optimistic here in this minority term because there's some really troubling numbers out
00:02:20.880 there. First, we have that stats can number from one month the other month, 71,000 jobs lost when
00:02:28.360 analysts had been expecting job growth. Now it's true, you look at these numbers over the long term,
00:02:34.080 you want to take like a year over year, not a month over month because of different sectoral changes,
00:02:38.180 but still it's not good. Analysts said we're going to see an up. Instead, we saw a massive drop. That
00:02:45.560 is a major problem. But here's the thing, speaking about sectoral, dive down more specifically into
00:02:51.200 particular provinces and you see that Alberta has an unemployment rate for young men of 20%.
00:02:59.840 That is enormous. That is huge. We have not seen numbers like that, specifically on a national
00:03:08.920 level, in decades. I mean, that is a figure. You see it, you go, we have a workforce, we have a
00:03:15.200 country. That is in crisis. So if the liberals think, okay, we're going to do things on affordability,
00:03:21.920 cost of living, general economy, please focus on that because economy still needs to be the top issue
00:03:27.840 regardless of whatever else is happening in the world. But hold on a second. In Alberta, you see this?
00:03:34.060 This is a major problem. This is a five alarm fire. So when we talk about getting Trans Mountain built
00:03:40.740 or the new frontier project that Jason Kenney is calling on Justin Trudeau to approve right when it
00:03:46.020 hits his desk in February, these are things that must be done. These are really existential issues for
00:03:52.420 the lifeblood of much of our country, for our economy here. 20% unemployment rate.
00:03:57.840 For young men in Alberta. So I think it's time the liberals stop saying, oh yeah, we care about
00:04:02.620 Alberta, but we still must transition to a low carbon economy. They always have that but there
00:04:07.080 when they say they care about Alberta. Stop with the caveats. Get off the agenda of phasing out the
00:04:13.460 oil sands, which basically means phasing out jobs in Alberta, and really get serious. Look at these
00:04:18.500 numbers and realize that these are human beings. These are people's lives. And you just certainly can't
00:04:24.620 see these numbers stay up and you need an action plan to bring them down.