Juno News - April 15, 2022


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

Topics
government spending and debt growth
Mentioned
Franco Teresano Trudeau Chrystia Freeland Rudyard Griffith
Jason Kenney defends record as UCP members vote on his leadership What does the future hold for Canada？

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

177.01

Word count

596

Sentence count

42

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.