Juno News - July 10, 2020


We could've avoided a $343 billion deficit


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

194.20494

Word count

458

Sentence count

30


Summary

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

Bill Morneau announces a $343 billion deficit and $1.2 trillion debt in Canada. What can we blame the Liberal government for this? Is it their fault? Or is it the fault of Justin Trudeau and Bill Morneau?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 $343 billion. Wow, what a staggering, unprecedented sum. That, ladies and gentlemen,
00:00:12.100 is now the deficit in Canada. The debt, pretty massive as well, exceeding $1.2 trillion.
00:00:20.000 Those were the figures that Bill Murnau released on Wednesday speaking in the House of Commons.
00:00:24.520 Although I should note, he didn't actually reveal those numbers. The fiscal snapshot
00:00:28.820 document that the government released, that says those numbers, and reporters poured through it
00:00:33.080 all. They found the numbers. They reported them. Murnau, giving a speech, never actually mentioned
00:00:37.520 the numbers that he was there to announce. Kind of can't blame the guy, because these are not things
00:00:44.020 to be proud of. You certainly don't want to focus on that stuff. You want to try and spin and redirect
00:00:49.020 people towards happier numbers, happier times. So I can't blame him for that. But here's the question.
00:00:54.700 What can we blame the liberal government for, Bill Murnau and Justin Trudeau? What should
00:00:58.260 we blame them for? Because for a number of years, there were a lot of us who were saying,
00:01:02.280 why are you running these major deficits, $28 billion and so forth, when times are good?
00:01:07.240 Now are the times you should be paying down the debt. So that way we can prepare for when
00:01:11.820 unprecedented, unexpected bad times, such as this, suddenly materialize. But they did not do that.
00:01:18.360 They kept spending, spending, spending. The other big thing, the big criticism the liberals are on the
00:01:22.980 receiving end of, is business leaders are looking at that fiscal snapshot and they're saying, hold on
00:01:28.060 a second. We support the economic support that was brought in in March and April to shore up all
00:01:33.420 those individuals and businesses who were forced to shut down, not open for business, not go to work
00:01:38.660 through no fault of their own. Of course, it was up to the government to make them whole. But here's
00:01:42.840 the question. At what point do we pivot from economic support to economic recovery? A lot of people say,
00:01:48.960 hold on a second, these programs, they do not incentivize people returning to work. Why not?
00:01:54.440 Why is that? Personally, I think that if you look at how Justin Stowe is riding pretty high in the polls
00:01:59.020 right now, because all he's really doing is giving out free money, maybe he sees, I want to keep giving
00:02:04.060 out this money right now because it's good for me electorally. A bit cynical, I know, but hey,
00:02:08.700 that's politics and I wouldn't put it past them. So what do you think? Do we cut them some slack for
00:02:13.300 this $343 billion? We're in unprecedented times. We have to shore up the economy. Or could they have
00:02:18.940 done better? I say yes, the latter.