The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Carney Expects You To Believe This!

00:00:00.000 Prime Minister Mark Carney is an excellent salesman. His product of choice? Nothing.

00:00:07.180 Carney is amazing at selling nothing to a large portion of the Canadian general public

00:00:12.120 and making them feel satisfied as they are getting nothing. I even see some conservatives online

00:00:18.340 falling for the nothing that Carney is selling because of his flowery language

00:00:22.300 and the charts that he posts on social media. But it's not real. When you move past the marketing,

00:00:29.160 there's no substance to many of the things that he claims that he is doing or has done.

00:00:35.080 This is something that Pierre Polyev and the Conservative Party need to get better at responding to.

00:00:40.580 Show the claim that Prime Minister Mark Carney made, and then break down the nothingness that it is.

00:00:47.200 And that's exactly what we are going to be doing in this video today,

00:00:50.920 because there's a few things that Mark Carney claimed today,

00:00:53.800 and I'm seeing many people swayed by it or not arguing effectively against it,

00:00:58.780 because they are taking the nothing that he is selling at face value. But before we get into it,

00:01:04.740 I just want to remind you guys, if you like the channel, leave a like on the video. Subscribe if

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00:01:13.940 a comment on what you think about all this. And of course, consider hitting the join button if you

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00:01:23.180 Let's start off with just this little speech snippet from his investment summit he's held

00:01:28.180 over the past few days which resulted in nothing it's a lot of just gathering people in the room

00:01:35.200 to deliver a high a high-minded sounding speech but there's no actual investment taking place

00:01:42.940 he's basically selling this whole idea that canada's the easiest place to invest simply because

00:01:49.100 he is slightly adjusting how tax deductions are done for new businesses but we'll get to that in

00:01:55.420 just a second here. We have a clear advantage now. Our marginal effective tax rate for new

00:02:00.860 investment, put it simply, the incentive for companies to invest in Canada is twice as high

00:02:08.740 as it is in the United States. Twice as high in the United States. And what does this mean for

00:02:13.480 Canadians in catching up that ground? It means more jobs. It means a stronger country. It means

00:02:20.800 more resilience, more independence, more sovereignty. It means we get to live our lives

00:02:24.900 as we want to. Oh, we get more resilience and more sovereignty. That's why he's trying to make us the

00:02:30.720 28th member of the European Union, which we wouldn't even get voting rights in, but we would

00:02:35.700 still have to follow the rules and potentially pay many of their taxes. But what do I know?

00:02:40.080 So he's pushing this whole marginal effective tax rate scheme as like the thing that's going to

00:02:45.480 bring Canada back quick, baby. But when you actually look into it, this is like a lateral

00:02:52.160 move pretty much. It's not terrible. It's just not very good. So here is this post by

00:02:58.920 Canada Spends. I believe this is a government nonprofit that is marketing Canada as an

00:03:04.480 investment destination. Canada Spends says, Canada is making 66% of capital investments

00:03:11.380 immediately deductible through a productivity mega deduction. This makes Canada's average

00:03:16.540 marginal effective tax rate METR for companies a third of what it costs to do business in the US.

00:03:23.300 Okay, by the way, I don't think it's a necessarily a bad idea. I don't think what Carney's doing

00:03:28.560 here is like negative. I'm not going to like pull back the curtain and say, actually, your taxes

00:03:32.540 have gone up. That's not what has happened here. But you know, it looks good. Oh, hey, look,

00:03:37.120 the marginal effective tax rate is going down to 6.4 percent, down from, you know, before budget

00:03:44.120 2025, a 15.4 percent. The U.S. has also been doing this. They were at 21.2, and when Donald Trump came

00:03:52.040 in, I believe at some point he lowered corporate taxes by quite a bit. The problem here is that

00:03:58.780 this is a very narrow and very kind of, I guess, mispresented change that the liberals have made

00:04:06.460 deliberately so. As the conservative MP candidate from last election in Mount Royal in Montreal,

00:04:15.540 Neil Oberman describes here, this is really not that good. And it's effectively

00:04:20.300 no change at all when you actually know what's going on. Because in fact, what they're doing

00:04:24.640 is saying, if you're a new business, if it's a new investment, in theory, will make in your first

00:04:30.800 year, your corporate tax rate 6.4%. That isn't what it's going to stay at. This is only talking

00:04:38.080 about new investments. And by the way, deductions have always been available. This is effectively

00:04:43.720 doubling up on what deductions we're already doing, but it's not like it's going to do any

00:04:48.600 better than what you already had. It just sounds good that we lowered your corporate taxes by a lot.

00:04:53.980 So Neil Oberman here says, respectfully, while any lower taxes to increase business competitiveness

00:04:59.900 is a good thing, Carney's 13% to 6.4% marginal effective tax rate should be taken with a grain

00:05:06.920 of salt. It is a modeling average, not a rate any specific project pays. It's based on the

00:05:13.520 Department of Finance's own METR, is a theoretical economy-wide number built on assumptions about

00:05:20.680 returns, depreciation, and which taxes count. He goes on here to say, METR hides big sectoral

00:05:29.180 gaps, as economists, including Jack Mintz, have outlined in the past. Oil and gas, for example,

00:05:34.540 face much higher effective rates. Manufacturing can face negative rates at net of subsidies.

00:05:40.220 Construction, think of all the housing that Carney wants to build over the coming years,

00:05:44.480 sits at over 20%. Property taxes, royalties, carbon fuel levies, and the global minimum

00:05:50.240 tax are largely excluded in the METR calculation. Immediate expensing, which already exists in the

00:05:58.000 form of accelerated investment incentives, all can push effective tax rates below zero for some

00:06:04.680 assets favoring short-lived capital over long-lived structural and distorting investments towards tax

00:06:10.260 favored categories rather than higher return uses. Let's be clear and fair. This mega deduction is a

00:06:16.620 real subsidy that will help some projects. How many remain to be seen but 6.4% equals the best

00:06:23.200 place in the world to build is pure spin permitting risk trade war exposure and exact execution

00:06:28.700 uncertainty matter more than a single model metr but let's see if there's more to come and he's

00:06:34.760 absolutely right it's not that i'm here saying there's no there's you know that this isn't

00:06:39.580 negative and it's going to hurt your you know it's going to hurt companies bottom lines or

00:06:44.180 something like that no that's not what's being claimed by me or by neil oberman or by other

00:06:48.600 people who've been poking holes in this. What we're saying is, well, most companies already

00:06:53.760 could make the deductions, especially in their first few years anyways. And actually, this

00:06:59.060 reduction is just kind of synchronizing what people's own deductions were already able to do.

00:07:04.680 It's not bad necessarily, but it's kind of, to put it this way, putting a hat on a hat.

00:07:10.720 We already had this. And now I guess we're like reannouncing the fact that tax deductions exist,

00:07:17.160 especially for new investments and as he's pointing out you can't just take this marginal

00:07:22.760 effective tax rate for businesses and the theoretical minimum and compare it to like

00:07:27.880 averages in other countries when you're not including all the other sectoral taxes and

00:07:34.280 regulatory costs that a lot of these companies are also having to face that are far higher in

00:07:40.200 canada than they are in other jurisdictions and even if you lower taxes significantly which this

00:07:47.300 really isn't doing it might lower it a little bit for some companies but it's mostly just kind of

00:07:51.780 enshrining what we already had in the form of deductions would you invest in canada for the

00:07:57.360 one time one year big deduction potentially when you then have to face the higher ongoing taxes

00:08:03.860 and regulations and other sort of hurdles present in the canadian economy when you could go to the

00:08:10.040 United States, or you could go to Europe or Asia or any other jurisdiction where it's much easier

00:08:16.320 to do business. This really isn't much of anything. It's not setting the world on fire. And a lot of

00:08:21.640 the people who came to the investment summit probably would have already been told, generally

00:08:25.520 speaking, of what would be announced. And the turnout from what has been reported has been,

00:08:30.760 meh. If there was actually like just the corporate taxes were to have in Canada,

00:08:36.900 not that that's what he was claiming he's claiming this kind of you know startup new

00:08:41.080 investment tax or going down but like if you just as a hypothetical just slashed corporate taxes in

00:08:47.720 half or did what i always propose the conservative party should promise and say let's stop with all

00:08:52.280 this nonsense and just cut corporate taxes 20 across the board you would get people talking

00:08:56.940 because that is actually significant you would actually dip below where the where the americans

00:09:01.640 are in terms of their corporate taxes and some people might start eyeing canada because it is

00:09:06.460 actually every year for every company easier to do business not just new companies will get some

00:09:12.800 benefit in the short term which really they already had because this is effectively replacing

00:09:18.260 the deductions you could already make over their first few years as a new business so it's like

00:09:24.160 the mega deduction that is lowering your effective tax rate to 6.4 theoretically is just replacing

00:09:30.400 all the other piecemeal deductions you would get over the first few years of your business

00:09:34.880 Okay, but now let's move on to another one, because I did promise that we were going to react to a few of these.

00:09:40.000 This one is quite interesting.

00:09:42.300 So Carney is, here's another nothing promised by him.

00:09:46.500 Great clipping by Ryan Gerritsen here.

00:09:50.200 I always do rely heavily on the people who make it their job to clip things on social media.

00:09:54.720 But here Prime Minister Mark Carney claims that we are going to balance the budget.

00:09:59.820 Except we're not balancing the budget, we're balancing the operating budget.

00:10:02.240 And that doesn't mean squat, if you actually understand what an operating budget is.

00:10:08.520 Check this out.

00:10:10.340 I can announce today that we are on track to balance the operating budget next year,

00:10:16.420 one year ahead of schedule, while maintaining the lowest overall deficit in the G7.

00:10:25.440 Okay, who cares?

00:10:27.000 do you know what the operating budget is and how fungible the money is in this situation?

00:10:34.140 Operating budget isn't anything. Operating budget is like, I was going to describe it just there,

00:10:40.620 and then I realized you can't because it doesn't mean anything. Because government makes up what

00:10:45.120 operating budget is. And I'm going to be getting to Franco Teresanos' breakdown of this in a second

00:10:51.780 from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation because he did it in a really good way. I could just simply

00:10:56.100 claim that road repair is on federal highways. That is no longer operating budget. That's capital

00:11:05.620 budget. Even though you would say basic repair should probably be part of operating budget.

00:11:10.900 Infrastructure needs to be prepared. And even though it is infrastructure, it's not capital.

00:11:15.840 Capital budget would be stuff like the Alto High Speed Rail Project. But maybe certain parts of the

00:11:21.760 Alto high-speed rail project and some of the surveying and some of the, you know, hiring of

00:11:26.160 employees and consultants to kind of, you know, be shepherding the project along. Some of those

00:11:31.520 probably shouldn't be considered operating because they're reoccurring every year and

00:11:34.980 they're permanent employees. But maybe we can make those employee salaries capital by saying

00:11:39.520 it's all part of the overall Alto high-speed rail project. That's effectively what's going on here.

00:11:44.560 So this is like the most hollow promise ever. It makes it sound like, oh my goodness, are we

00:11:48.960 a deficit no you can have a balanced operating budget and have an over 100 billion dollar deficit

00:11:55.760 absolutely realistic as long as you just claim that a smaller portion of your overall spending

00:12:01.920 is operating and hey if you think about it we don't have a deficit when we arbitrarily consider

00:12:07.840 less than our tax revenues to be the operating budget uh so frank terrazzano here franco

00:12:13.440 Teresano says, cutting through Carney's claim on government finances. One, Carney keeps talking

00:12:18.880 about balancing the operating budget. That claim relies on relabeling tens of billions of dollars

00:12:25.380 of operating spending as capital. With normal definitions, there is no balanced operating

00:12:30.940 budget. See PBO graphic below. And we can go to that in a second here. It says table four,

00:12:36.940 day-to-day operating balance, billions of dollars. And it's showing the actual day-to-day

00:12:42.040 operating balance and the budget every single year changing fairly rapidly each year, depending

00:12:48.600 on how people are actually defining things as. And when you use the stricter definition of what

00:12:54.720 capital and what operating is, the Parliamentary Budget Office, which is a watchdog organization

00:13:00.740 in the government, so they're not with the government, although they operate within it,

00:13:04.480 they have their own strict definitions that the liberals do not control. And when you actually

00:13:08.640 look at that, our operating deficit actually keeps getting worse every year. But number two here,

00:13:13.860 Franco says, balancing the operating budget was already a poor guardrail. Carney plans to borrow

00:13:18.660 tens of billions of dollars every year, and you pay interest on every dollar Carney borrows.

00:13:23.500 Right now, every dollar you pay in federal sales tax goes to paying interest on the debt.

00:13:28.440 Three, Carney routinely promises to cut consultants, but he is increasing spending

00:13:32.640 on consultants, contractors, and outsourcing to $27 billion this year. This spending doubled

00:13:37.720 between 2015 and 2024. At the same time, we have been reducing the amount of civil servants,

00:13:44.360 which I'm happy with. I'm happy to reduce the amount of civil servants. You can't take one

00:13:49.160 bucket of water outside of one side of the bathtub and then dump one in the other and pretend that

00:13:53.680 we've changed anything. It's all one big federal financial nightmare soup that we are stuck in.

00:14:00.660 We can't say, well, we did cut a bunch of civil servants. So, hey, look, the public sector is

00:14:07.700 shrinking. It's like, yeah, but we've deputized a bunch of private sector individuals, consultants,

00:14:14.060 as effectively public sector workers now. They're not public, but they are public. So when you see

00:14:19.640 jobs being created, and many of them are being self-employed, and they're in the private sector,

00:14:25.620 they're permanent full-time jobs in the private sector. Many of them can be mostly relying on

00:14:31.820 government paychecks because they are consultants for the Alto High-Speed Rail Project or some

00:14:36.780 other nonsense that's going on. Franco then here says, number four, even with small cuts to the

00:14:46.640 number of bureaucrats, 3.5% last year, the cost of bureaucracy is projected to increase by 10

00:14:52.780 billion this year. There is still 86,000 more federal bureaucrats today than 10 years ago

00:14:58.000 since 2016. Bureaucracy grew by 33%. Population grew by 15%. I think he makes a good point

00:15:06.760 here. But yes, we are. You see the theme of the video, everything that Carney says pretty much

00:15:14.160 day to day results in nothing or it is nothing like every time he meets with the with like the

00:15:20.760 premiers and we talk about reducing interprovincial trade barriers and nothing actually happens. We

00:15:26.160 just simply meet and we discuss the fact that wouldn't that be great, but we don't actually,

00:15:30.940 you know, end up getting to any deliverable result where all the premiers, you know,

00:15:36.120 agreed to get rid of these regulations in their jurisdictions because it's making trade between

00:15:40.360 the provinces difficult. That never has actually happened at all up to this point. I'll probably

00:15:47.160 save it for another video, but it's very funny to see right now the liberals are getting in trouble 0.94

00:15:54.980 with kind of the more orange liberal part of the base because Mark Carney, one of the non-nothing

00:16:00.480 things that he's apparently going to do is privatizing for airports. I'm not against

00:16:04.960 privatizing airports. It depends on what the plan is. I'm not for privatizing things the same way

00:16:10.120 I'm against nationalizing things. Typically, I think if anything, if there's flow in any

00:16:15.720 direction, it should always be going from national assets or basically crown assets going to private

00:16:22.240 holders. But he never ran on doing this. And we really have no guardrails on if China ends up

00:16:29.680 buying up airports, or if some other foreign entity ends up buying up our airports, whether

00:16:36.440 they're from the UAE or Qatar or some other country that I don't exactly trust, or at least

00:16:41.900 doesn't have Canada's national interests at heart. This has kind of been a bit of a theme with him

00:16:47.140 recently, trying to sell us out to the EU and then selling off Canadian airports to who knows who,

00:16:53.600 But Mark Carney keeps praising the idea that he has created massive amounts of foreign direct investment in Canada.

00:17:01.800 But actually, as Pierre Polly have pointed out in a really good video that kind of models what I want the Conservatives to do more of,

00:17:07.420 is he pointed out that you can't celebrate foreign direct investment when, in fact, our actual, the amount of money in our economy keeps going down.

00:17:17.580 Like, on net, we are literally losing money.

00:17:22.340 I'll even just quickly play the pure poly of video because I want to show a good example of what the conservatives are doing.

00:17:27.920 Here's pure poly of poking a hole in the nothing that Mark Carney was marketing in terms of the foreign direct investments.

00:17:34.420 Canada, it's been a minute, but it's time for me to do it again.

00:17:37.900 To relaunch my series, I call BS.

00:17:41.400 Let's start with Mark Carney's claim that we're going through a foreign investment.

00:17:45.820 Boom, Canada.

00:17:46.720 He says, foreign direct investment in Canada is at its highest level in two decades.

00:17:52.280 It's running at twice the rate of our nearest G7 competitor.

00:17:56.220 Don't forget, he says it's all because of him.

00:17:58.860 And if you've heard that, you'd probably think that foreign investors are flooding into Canada

00:18:01.840 to build new factories, new mines, new businesses, and create new jobs.

00:18:05.780 Sounds great, except that's not what the numbers show.

00:18:09.560 This is where the foreign direct investment becomes a foreign direct illusion.

00:18:14.440 And so I call BS. Let's start with the number Mark Carney likes to talk about, money coming into Canada.

00:18:20.280 In the first five quarters under Carney, roughly $104 billion in foreign direct investment came in.

00:18:26.700 Pretty good, except there's another number, the amount of money going out.

00:18:32.040 Over the exact same period, Canadians invested $124 billion abroad, so $104 billion in, $124 billion out,

00:18:40.540 for a net outflow of $20 billion,

00:18:43.740 roughly $1,000 for every family in Canada.

00:18:46.480 I think this is a four-minute video,

00:18:48.580 and I think it's well done.

00:18:50.360 I would, if I was a conservative,

00:18:52.160 I'd roll it out into shorter versions.

00:18:54.800 Not that like four minutes is so long, goodness.

00:18:56.840 I'm the king of making bloated videos.

00:18:59.500 But I would be rolling out shorter versions of it

00:19:02.360 that say, hey, this guy who I believe

00:19:04.660 has a PhD in economics or finance, 1.00

00:19:07.860 this guy thinks you're so stupid 1.00

00:19:09.880 that he is going to say that we are in the middle of a boom while we literally have a bigger outflow 1.00

00:19:15.020 of money than there is an inflow. And the inflow of money, which Pure Polly gets into later in the

00:19:20.540 video, is going to buy up Canadian assets effectively went broke. So you have people

00:19:26.120 from China or from Europe or from Asia in general coming in or the Middle East coming in and buying

00:19:33.180 up Canadian assets where the owners of it were basically losing money or they were like, you

00:19:39.280 know, some of them are just getting out of the market naturally, you know, smaller firms, but

00:19:42.600 many of them are like almost defunct or bankrupt, and they're being bought up. That's not economic

00:19:47.280 health. That's called a fire sale. It's a economic or it's a Canadian garage sale going on where our 0.97

00:19:53.700 assets undervalued because of how bad the economy is, is being bought up by other countries who have

00:19:59.040 stronger economies. And they're probably just going to sit there and hold them for a while,

00:20:02.700 maybe operating them, you know, trying to make it profitable again, maybe they can,

00:20:06.680 but they're mostly waiting until the economy heats back up, at which point we'll be having

00:20:11.540 a lot of our assets, mostly paying out money to foreign owners who are going to reinvest that

00:20:17.540 money probably elsewhere in the world. They're only buying now because everything's so undervalued.

00:20:22.780 They don't really care about the Canadian market because when things were good, they were not in.

00:20:26.900 So yeah, it's a little bit hollow that we keep saying that we have all these great things going

00:20:32.720 on yet. We never actually, you know, I don't even know. We don't, we're never actually getting

00:20:38.780 ahead. All the major macro measurements of Canadian economic health are not very good

00:20:44.740 at all. Like food inflation is really bad. The amount of people defaulting on their mortgages

00:20:51.480 is terrible. Jobs went down in August and they're probably going to go down in September again. We

00:20:56.720 can't get a good deal with the Americans, but we can let China dump EVs in Canada, you know, 0.85

00:21:01.640 ones they probably stole a lot of uh ip in order to build you know that's all going we're gonna 0.67

00:21:07.360 that's all going great guns we're gonna go join the european union because i guess we're so

00:21:11.520 economically broken we might as well join the club of economically broken countries

00:21:15.160 and but it's all great because we have silly hollow metrics out there nothing metrics that

00:21:21.120 you know canada's the happiest country in the world you know that canada is the best place to

00:21:26.440 invest it's the hottest investment destination according to mark carney and and the thing is

00:21:31.120 mark carney even admitted in a video that can actually doesn't attract that many investments

00:21:36.760 it's just that in terms of like the overall you know in terms of the overall size of the canadian

00:21:43.700 economy we actually don't bring in that much i have to go find the clip right here uh can i find

00:21:48.760 yes we've here here we go this is from kirk lubomov on x bring up the clip here kirk says

00:21:57.920 no s sherlock mark carney one of the things we discovered over the course of the last year is

00:22:03.600 that foreign capital is under allocated in canada we don't have industries to invest in and some of

00:22:09.060 the biggest companies we do have are because of monopolistic protectionism this is why can canada's

00:22:14.440 development needs to be entrepreneurship led and not government debt fueled and that's the problem

00:22:19.640 a lot of the we're not actually getting in a lot of like high quality uh assets or high quality

00:22:25.540 investment in Canada and Mark Carney admits it here and one of the things that we've discovered

00:22:30.740 over the course of the last year is that foreign capital is under allocated to Canada it's not I

00:22:36.580 mean we're on Bloomberg so I can say that it's not market weight to Canada so even a shift to market

00:22:42.420 weight to Canada will create a tremendous inflow of capital and it's going to help us realize what

00:22:49.300 we think this economy needs which is to catalyze about a trillion dollars of investment over the

00:22:53.460 the next five. I hate when he says catalyze. We need to catalyze a trillion dollars of investment

00:22:58.320 over the next five years. That means he's going to sign a bunch of agreements to maybe have a

00:23:02.600 trillion dollars enter the economy at some point, somehow. What he also described there is that

00:23:08.000 Canada is effectively grading itself on a curve that we're having this big investment boom because

00:23:14.120 we haven't had pretty much any investment in a very long time. The weight of international

00:23:19.480 investment is very much not towards Canada. We are effectively undervalued. We are basically

00:23:26.880 bringing in less than our even population or economic size would imply that we should be

00:23:32.740 getting. The UK, the US is bringing in way more than Canada. And so remember, whenever Carney

00:23:38.340 brags about investments, he also admits elsewhere that we're undervalued or we're very underweighted

00:23:44.020 when it comes to international foreign investment anyways so with all that being said thank you guys

00:23:50.580 for watching this video i want to find a tristan hopper uh post i wasn't able to find it he had a

00:23:55.620 really funny one about just uh mark carney using nothing words to sell nothing to people who don't

00:24:02.060 believe who who have no uh who have no values and principles and whatnot and that really much

00:24:07.260 very much does end up describing much of liberal political world here people are cheering because

00:24:13.160 Carney announced a hollow deal that is not going to result in anything. And we're all cheering

00:24:17.240 because we don't believe in anything other than what Mark Carney tells us to believe in the

00:24:21.580 moment. And, you know, something, something elbows up Canada. Anyways. So with that being said,

00:24:26.900 again, make sure to like, share, subscribe, consider hitting the join button, and I'll see

00:24:31.640 you guys all next time.

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - September 16, 2026

Carney Expects You To Believe This!

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