The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - November 18, 2025


The Prime Minister has already cooked the books.

Topics
excessive spending
Hosted by
Jamie Schmal
Mentioned
Mark Carney Jamie Underneath Harper Gabriel Guindy Justin Trudeau Thomas Mulcair Mulroney Philip Clark
Reintroduce mandatory minimum sentences The world needs more Canadian energy.

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

154.45

Word count

1,898

Sentence count

160

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the PBO's report on the Liberal government's 2019-20 budget. We talk about the mistakes made by the government, how they misallocated the money, and the impact on the economy.

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 .
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 There's, you know, basically what we're talking about, you know, slamming the Mark Carney, the Liberal government, for their budget.
00:00:09.580 And let's queue up cut one.
00:00:12.020 And then, so the Parliamentary Budget Officer brings up some good points, talks about where the budget's failing.
00:00:18.600 And then something amazing happened as well with the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
00:00:22.420 Now he's only interim, but we'll get to that in a second.
00:00:24.660 Play cut one.
00:00:25.360 From our perspective, we think that the definition the government's used around capital investments is overly expensive.
00:00:32.500 And in particular, they've thrown some things in there, some categories of spending, which other jurisdictions in other countries would not typically include.
00:00:41.140 Most notably, the inspiration, of course, for this framework comes from the United Kingdom.
00:00:45.840 And in the case of the UK, it's a far narrower definition.
00:00:48.380 And, of course, the biggest risk with all of this is if you're not spending on productive capital investments, if you have an overly broad definition, then you're not going to get the investment impact and the growth in the economy that the government expects.
00:01:02.000 So, Mark Carney, in large part, printed a lot of money when he was the governor of the Bank of England, right?
00:01:09.880 He printed a lot of money, created a lot of problems as well.
00:01:14.600 And we're getting these warnings from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who is interim.
00:01:18.800 And then the government says, let's get the next graphic here.
00:01:23.520 We're going to replace that Budget Officer. 0.97
00:01:25.940 Yeah.
00:01:26.300 So, let's just take a half a step back so that folks can understand what Mark Carney, Prime Minister Carney, attempted to do.
00:01:34.760 So, what he was doing is he said, we're going to divide the budget between operational and capital.
00:01:40.720 They are set definitions for what operation and capital is.
00:01:44.480 His idea was that I can say that I'm going to spend less and invest more.
00:01:50.460 The reality is spending is spending.
00:01:52.700 But that's what he was attempting to do.
00:01:55.660 But what he saw was that there is so much spending on the operations that he couldn't do it honestly.
00:02:01.760 And so, what the PBO is saying is that he actually moved things from the operational ledger to the capital ledger in order to make the books look better.
00:02:14.060 So, basically, not only did he cook the books, he overcooked the books.
00:02:17.460 And so, what we're left with now is a false stating of the spending by putting operational dollars in the capital ledger so that he can have a quote-unquote win of balancing the operational budget, which he still won't do.
00:02:34.020 But the whole, it was just a shell game meant to trick Canadians that he was actually fiscally responsible.
00:02:41.060 When the reality is they spent $78 billion.
00:02:44.580 Then, as they said, so the PBO comes out and as is his job and his duty to come out and say, well, actually, we've got some difficulty.
00:02:55.220 He used in an earlier committee testimony, stupefying, stunning the amount of the spending.
00:03:00.960 Unsustainable.
00:03:01.700 Unsustainable.
00:03:02.260 And he said that you are not correctly allocating the spending between spending and capital.
00:03:09.800 And the government's response is to put out an advertisement to replace him.
00:03:16.940 And the crazy was the terminology they used in there.
00:03:20.620 They used terms like diplomatic and tact.
00:03:23.800 No, that's not what I want on my PBO, Jamie.
00:03:25.700 I want you to be direct and truthful.
00:03:28.100 And quite frankly, this PBO has been exactly that.
00:03:32.460 They're telling the truth to Canadians. 1.00
00:03:33.620 He's telling the truth to Canadians and good on him for doing it. 1.00
00:03:37.940 Now, it should be also noted, the parliamentary budget officer reports to parliament as a whole, right?
00:03:45.220 The government has their bureaucrats and department and officials that do their thing.
00:03:48.940 This individual is meant to shine some light for parliamentarians of all stripes so that we are able to do better do our jobs.
00:03:58.900 And one of the most important functions that we have is to hold the government to account, but also look over the country's finances.
00:04:06.060 This individual helps us do that.
00:04:07.760 Yeah.
00:04:07.980 I mean, the reality is that there are tens and hundreds of different departments.
00:04:12.220 The financial statements for the government are tens, if not hundreds of pages.
00:04:17.200 Just the budget alone is hundreds of pages.
00:04:20.720 So being able to parse that information and get a full understanding of it is extremely difficult.
00:04:26.400 And that's why we need a professional like the PBO.
00:04:30.860 And it's his job to go through and with his extensive training and accounting, et cetera, to be able to pull out the important bits of information that parliamentarians and, more importantly, Canadians can see.
00:04:45.060 And, like, for someone in his role to come out and use the words like stupefying, stunning, or to call out the government for misallocating the spending or mislabeling the spending is something.
00:04:59.060 This is just not something that he would take lightly, and I think he said that as much.
00:05:03.240 This is very serious.
00:05:04.560 This is a very important issue.
00:05:06.640 And quite frankly, we all need to pay attention.
00:05:08.760 And that goes to the overall point that we were having earlier is about affordability.
00:05:14.800 Canadians are having trouble to get by.
00:05:16.360 So we look at some of the things that we're looking.
00:05:19.120 Meat's up 8.4%.
00:05:20.760 This is year-over-year inflation increases.
00:05:24.700 Beef, frozen or fresh, 16.8%.
00:05:27.440 It's up.
00:05:28.220 Ham and bacon up 7.4%.
00:05:29.760 Talking about the provinces and how they're not doing so well compared to other states.
00:05:38.440 Fruit juice is 7.3% up.
00:05:41.040 Orange is 7.2%.
00:05:42.260 The list is incredible.
00:05:44.260 And anyone who is a single income, fixed income, even just normal working people are struggling to get by.
00:05:51.880 But the CBC has a fantastic idea for those struggling.
00:05:55.700 Play cut two.
00:05:56.540 This kind of grocery store in Quebec is promising big savings at a time when food prices keep rising.
00:06:02.060 The low-cost chain sells discounted items, sometimes past their best-before date.
00:06:06.540 As the CBC's Gabriel Guindy found out, shoppers say the deals are hard to beat.
00:06:11.520 I'm at a type of grocery store that's gaining a lot of momentum.
00:06:15.120 It sells discounted items and people shopping here say they're saving a lot of money.
00:06:19.620 The food is sourced through distributors and manufacturers.
00:06:21.860 So products that are mislabeled or can't be sold in regular grocery stores end up here.
00:06:27.160 Like this beef that was supposed to go to a restaurant.
00:06:30.660 It's sold at a discount, making prices more affordable.
00:06:34.080 Another reason for why prices are so cheap is because they sell items that are near or past their best-before date.
00:06:40.640 How out of touch do you have to be?
00:06:41.860 Holy mackerel, right?
00:06:43.740 Like the message here is clear or what we should take from this.
00:06:48.240 The fact that the government is spending billions and billions of dollars.
00:06:52.460 They need to mine their budget so Canadians can stay in their budget.
00:06:55.560 It is not acceptable in Canada for our solution to be, instead of the government retaining expenditure, you go out and get rotten food.
00:07:04.300 Like that's mayonnaise.
00:07:05.960 You're selling rotten mayonnaise?
00:07:07.660 That's our solution, CBC?
00:07:09.400 Good grief.
00:07:10.440 And now the CBC is going to get well over a billion dollars to tell Canadians to go out there and buy rotten food.
00:07:17.340 That is the solution.
00:07:18.700 It really is absolutely mind-blowing.
00:07:20.960 The interest on this debt, the deficit will be over $5,400 per Canadian.
00:07:26.100 That would buy a lot of fresh food and groceries.
00:07:28.680 So let's return that to Canadians instead of telling them to go down to their local discount rotten food retailer and purchase it there. 0.99
00:07:37.840 Yeah, wouldn't it be so much easier if people had their spending power back?
00:07:41.440 Wouldn't it be so much easier if there was a decrease in the cost of food?
00:07:46.860 But instead, we keep devaluing our currency.
00:07:49.720 We keep increasing our debt.
00:07:53.760 Taxes on farmers, that's still there.
00:07:55.640 The industrial carbon tax, it's still there.
00:07:57.640 About the same amount that was taken off by the consumer side.
00:08:02.640 No rebate, because that was gone.
00:08:05.000 The amount of spending is causing this pain.
00:08:07.940 And I can't hammer this home enough, because you need to understand how we got here in order to take the path forward.
00:08:17.500 Because if you forget how we got here, you might just say, oh, we need to spend more or invest more.
00:08:22.980 No, that's how we got here.
00:08:25.320 That's the problem.
00:08:26.460 I mean, you're exactly right.
00:08:28.460 And if you want historical proof, it even goes back before Justin Trudeau, right to his father.
00:08:33.780 If you guys go, I've got some homework for your audience here, especially if you're on your iPad right now or watching this, go and Google the U.S. dollar compared to the Canadian dollar and then overlay that with who was in power.
00:08:47.020 You will see incredible correlation between when conservatives are in power and a strong Canadian dollar and when liberals are in power and a weak Canadian dollar.
00:08:56.380 And that all has to do with excessive spending.
00:08:59.000 So, underneath the Mulroney air, the Canadian dollar is strong.
00:09:02.820 Underneath Harper, we almost hit parity. 0.81
00:09:05.080 I think we did.
00:09:05.660 In fact, we did.
00:09:06.260 I think we did.
00:09:06.760 You're absolutely right.
00:09:07.540 And now we're back down to around 71 cents and falling.
00:09:12.220 Well, even when we did hit parity, remember the CBC having a freak out about that, how bad that was?
00:09:17.400 They found every negative they could.
00:09:19.680 Finally, a powerful economy with a dollar that was on par.
00:09:24.260 And the CBC, I remember them, what did they say, Thomas Mulcair called it the Dutch disease or something like that.
00:09:29.840 They just found the negative.
00:09:31.580 The reality is a strong dollar backed by a strong Canadian government that knows how to spend within its means.
00:09:40.580 It means that the purchasing power of Canadians gets stronger and stronger.
00:09:44.160 And in addition to the Canadian dollar getting weak, which in itself helps or hurts the inflation numbers, increasing inflation higher and higher,
00:09:53.040 that expenditure also crowds out investment dollar, meaning that those dollars which are printed create more and more inflation.
00:10:00.280 And so you get this just nasty death cycle of an economy where you end up getting a weaker and weaker dollar that feeds on itself, which is greater inflation.
00:10:09.140 We need to have a turn away from central planning, a turn away from excess of expenditure and back to empowering Canadians because it's Canadians that made this country the best place on earth.
00:10:20.980 And it'll be the Canadian people that return us back to where we need to be. 1.00
00:10:24.900 Well, hopefully we have some gold reserves.
00:10:26.740 Oh, wait.
00:10:27.220 No, we don't.
00:10:27.760 We sold those.
00:10:28.720 Anyway, I'm pretty much out of time.
00:10:30.580 But as you know, the guests get the last word.
00:10:32.760 Philip, the floor is yours.
00:10:33.740 Thank you very much, Jamie.
00:10:34.780 Thank you very much, Jamie.
00:11:04.760 Thank you very much for your time.
00:11:05.640 Thank you.
00:11:06.180 Thank you for yours.
00:11:07.360 Member of Parliament for Northumberland.
00:11:08.980 Clark, appreciate you liking, sharing, making a comment or two and telling your friends to download it as well,
00:11:15.900 because in order to get the message out, we need your help.
00:11:18.980 Please do that.
00:11:19.980 And we will have new content for you, as mentioned off the top, every single Tuesday, 1.30 p.m. Eastern time.
00:11:25.360 Until next week, remember, low taxes, less government, more freedom.
00:11:29.040 That's the blueprint.
00:11:34.760 Thank you.
00:11:36.020 Thank you.
00:11:38.260 Thank you.
00:11:47.360 Thank you.