Juno News - September 30, 2019Trudeau promises to spend, spend, spend!
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
178.96185
Summary
The Liberal Party of Canada has unveiled its platform for the upcoming election, and it's a doozy. The platform is a fully costed wish list of what the government would like to accomplish in the next few years, but it comes with a hefty price tag. In this episode, Andrew Lutton explains why this is a bad idea.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Spend, spend, spend, and we know that's going to ultimately mean tax, tax, tax.
00:00:14.520
That's the biggest takeaway from the Liberal platform, the fully costed platform
00:00:18.720
officially unveiled by the Liberal Party of Canada with just three weeks to go
00:00:22.840
until the election. Now what's interesting is that the Liberals have been in government
00:00:27.260
for just under four years, which means they've had an opportunity to set an economic course for
00:00:32.480
Canada, and more importantly, through the most recent budget, they've even had an opportunity
00:00:36.600
to lay out projections for spending in the next few years. However, the platform that was unveiled
00:00:42.500
by the Liberals actually deviates from even the budget the Liberal government had been putting
00:00:47.540
forward. Now this budget, and we talked about this earlier in the year when it was released,
00:00:52.000
only promised a $19.7 billion deficit in 2020 to 2021, which would fall to a $9.8 billion deficit
00:01:01.260
by 2023 to 2024. Now this platform is monumentally more in deficit spending. Next year, the deficit
00:01:09.800
would be $27.4 billion, and the year after $23.7 billion, the year after that $21.8 billion,
00:01:18.060
and the year after that $21 billion. We're talking about more than $100 billion in deficit spending
00:01:24.780
over the next four years, and by the way, over $30 billion in new government debt for a government
00:01:31.080
that will have been in power for eight years by then and racked up billions and billions and billions
00:01:35.660
in deficit spending. Now what's more concerning than this is that what is really the Liberals'
00:01:41.320
biggest ticket item in the campaign, Universal Pharmacare, which could run up to $15 billion,
00:01:47.180
isn't even included in the platform. So that would be an additional expenditure on top of that.
00:01:53.180
And another development in this that a friend pointed out to me is that all of the revenue
00:01:57.160
projections, when assessed by the Parliamentary Budget Office, are not guaranteed. They're not set
00:02:02.820
in stone. The Liberals are banking on bringing in the revenue they expect, but it could be that if
00:02:07.460
their spending keeps up and the revenue is in fact less than they're projecting, that we are looking
00:02:12.720
at even more, billions and billions more, on top of the existing billions in government spending that
00:02:18.940
will be running up deficits. Now we all know the economic harm that deficit spending causes to a
00:02:24.040
country. For starters, increased debt, and more importantly, less money that's going towards the
00:02:29.540
services government should be providing. This is an election wish list that the government is putting
00:02:34.900
forward as policy here. The government right now is very much devoted to trying to tell Canadians this
00:02:41.260
is what we're going to do for you, but it comes at a cost and it comes with a price tag. When that old
00:02:46.520
saying, nothing in life is free, was uttered, there's a reason. Even government promises, even political
00:02:51.460
promises, they are not free. They have to be paid for. But the challenge is that people understand the
00:02:58.640
promises. People understand the tangible that's provided, like Universal Pharmacare. They don't understand as
00:03:04.240
much the idea of deficits. They don't understand debt to GDP ratio. And I'm not calling people stupid.
00:03:09.840
The fact is most Canadians are not economists. And there's a reason for that. Canadians defer to
00:03:14.460
experts and yes, defer to politicians to make these decisions. But oftentimes we get captivated by
00:03:20.440
whatever the promise is without looking at what went into making that promise happen. In this particular
00:03:25.480
case, spending. And what's interesting is that this is the first election in Canada where the
00:03:30.600
parliamentary budget office has had to cost projections. And the Liberals have bragged that,
00:03:34.960
hey, this platform of theirs is costed by the PBO. And yes, that's true. But all that really is,
00:03:40.080
is to look at whether the math adds up. It's not whether it's good policy. And more importantly,
00:03:44.600
it's not whether there is a guarantee of revenue. And it was the PBO that assessed these revenue
00:03:50.040
projections as not entirely certain. So that means that this government will have to make up the
00:03:55.460
useful by finding a way to add even more revenue into the mix. And you know what that means?
00:04:01.420
Taxes. We don't know who's going to be taxed or how, but that's the only way the government can make
00:04:06.040
that up unless it's prepared to scale back on spending. But we haven't seen any indication in
00:04:10.680
this platform that scaling back spending is what the government would like to do.
00:04:14.760
I'm reporting right now from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia on my cross-country tour covering the issues that
00:04:21.160
matter to Canadians and talking to the people that matter in this election. We can't do this alone.
00:04:26.360
There's a cost to doing this. If you can chip in to our election coverage fund,
00:04:30.340
please head on over to tnc.news and offer a donation as you're able. For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.