Juno News - April 15, 2022


What Trudeau and Freeland don’t want you to know about the budget


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

177.01218

Word count

596

Sentence count

41

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation's Franco Terzano joins us to talk about the Trudeau government's $52.8 billion deficit and $1.2 trillion debt. We also hear from Candice Lebron and The Hub's Rudyard Griffith.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 We took the weekend to read it through very carefully so we can report on all of the hidden
00:00:04.040 details that the Trudeau government doesn't want you to know. So as you saw, Trudeau's faithful
00:00:09.900 lackeys in the parliamentary press gallery were hiding the ball and telling you that this was a
00:00:14.760 budget that was modest, restrained, prudent, and yes, even conservatives, they said that it focused
00:00:20.960 on fiscal responsibility and growing the economy. Of course, the opposite is true. The new deficit
00:00:27.020 is now $52.8 billion. That's how much they're spending every single year more than what they
00:00:32.420 bring in. New spending in this budget amounted to $56 billion. Our debt is now $1.2 trillion or will
00:00:40.180 be at the end of the year. That means that each individual Canadian, including yourself, owes $31,000
00:00:46.280 of that debt. Your children owe $31,000 of that debt. The debt is growing $400 million per day,
00:00:54.140 according to our friends over at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. And so to help really break
00:00:59.920 this down, we wanted to bring in our friend from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Franco Terzano.
00:01:06.200 Franco is the federal director of CTF. He has a master's degree in public policy and a bachelor
00:01:11.020 in arts and economics. Franco writes about the costs associated with tax increases, inefficient
00:01:15.940 government, unintended consequences of government policies. Franco, it's great to see you. Thank you so
00:01:20.980 much for joining us. Hey, well, thanks so much for having me on today. So tell us about this budget.
00:01:27.980 We've had a couple of days here to digest it and to see how the media is covering it. I want to get
00:01:33.520 your thoughts, though. What does the budget mean? What are the day-to-day impacts of it?
00:01:37.900 Well, we're seeing another credit card budget from this credit card government. And just like all huge
00:01:43.600 credit card tabs, it's really going to come with a sting for taxpayers already, but also down the road.
00:01:48.980 As you mentioned, another huge deficit, right? The third year in a row with massive deficits. Back
00:01:55.160 in 2020, the deficit was over $300 billion. Last year, over $100 billion. This year, still over $50
00:02:01.800 billion. And of course, with all of that borrowing for years and years and years, it means taxpayers are
00:02:07.820 losing out on a ton of money just to pay interest on the debt. Candace, this is a number that really
00:02:13.040 stuck out to me. Every single month, taxpayers are losing out on more than $2 billion just to pay
00:02:21.260 interest charges on the government's credit card. To put that into more perspective, it means that
00:02:26.060 this year, Canadian taxpayers are paying more just on interest charges on the federal debt than the
00:02:31.660 Alberta government is spending on health care. That's wild. That's incredible. And no wonder our
00:02:38.340 health care system is lagging behind. No wonder our country isn't getting ahead. It's interesting
00:02:42.780 because when you listen to the Liberals and Chrysia Freeland, you know, one of the things I saw her say 0.98
00:02:48.220 in an interview with Global was that her focus is on growing the economy. Okay. So that's the key
00:02:55.260 focus for Chrysia Freeland in this budget. Well, Rudyard Griffith, who is an editor over at The Hub,
00:03:01.340 he put out a graph from the budget that shows that Canada is dead last in per capita GDP growth for
00:03:09.980 the coming decades, shows less than 1% growth in our GDP, which is way below the OECD average. And yet,
00:03:16.640 at the same time, our government spending is growing by about 2% per year.