The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - July 05, 2025


Liberals hit $92 Billion deficit while Carney celebrates fake win


Episode Stats

Length

16 minutes

Words per Minute

171.74178

Word Count

2,820

Sentence Count

179

Misogynist Sentences

2


Summary

Mark Carney has been appointed as the new Governor of the Bank of Canada, and he's already running a deficit of $92 billion in the year 2025, and it's only going to get worse. I talk about why this is a big deal, and why we should be worried about it.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here.
00:00:03.140 Remember how the pitch during Canada's federal election was, like him or dislike him, at least Mark Carney will be good for the economy.
00:00:12.960 He worked at Goldman Sachs, he was the governor of the Bank of Canada and then the governor of the Bank of England.
00:00:18.680 He created record profits for Brookfield Asset Management, mostly through government subsidized industries, but who's counting?
00:00:25.680 And he was supposed to be a guy who understood how to get our fiscal house back in order, as he kept saying.
00:00:33.600 No.
00:00:34.900 He was Justin Trudeau's economic advisor for five years.
00:00:38.960 People should have probably noticed the giant red flag on the field about his own fiscal responsibility.
00:00:45.580 Do you think that when Justin Trudeau was prime minister, that Mark Carney would bring him ideas or advice and Trudeau would be like,
00:00:53.180 well, that's cute, Mark. I'm going to do what I already wanted to do.
00:00:57.080 Or do you think that Trudeau probably did whatever Mark Carney said because Justin Trudeau was deeply incompetent and I don't think was really making any of his own decisions?
00:01:05.660 He relied on a handful of advisors, a few trusted ministers, and people like Mark Carney, and that was it.
00:01:13.280 So when Mark Carney comes in now and is now running us a $92 billion deficit in the year 2025, nobody should be shocked.
00:01:20.960 And by the way, the deficit is going to rise higher because previously estimates about how bad the deficit was going to be,
00:01:30.120 which had said that maximum we're going to be at $90 billion, well, we're already at $92 billion and we're not going to have the digital services tax revenues.
00:01:38.300 And I guarantee government revenue estimates are not actually going to be how they come in.
00:01:45.360 It tends to be, if you're a fiscally conservative government like the UCP government in Alberta, you may project a $5 billion deficit.
00:01:53.800 And then when you actually have the revenues come in because you're being a little more pessimistic, you actually have an $8 billion surplus.
00:02:00.900 That's how Alberta is doing right now.
00:02:03.060 So when the liberal government, who for years has always been saying $40 billion deficit max, that's our red line, then they come in at $62 billion.
00:02:12.340 Well, right now with the government watchdog saying $90 billion, $92 billion, I think we can maybe ballpark this at over $100 or $110 billion.
00:02:23.580 I think I said $90 million, I meant billion.
00:02:27.760 But yeah, this is going to get worse.
00:02:29.880 And this was, again, very foreseeable.
00:02:32.700 But I just want to cut to some of the news about this specific deficit.
00:02:36.820 Then I also want to talk a little bit later about just honestly how simple-minded Mark Carney is when it comes to the economy.
00:02:44.240 It doesn't mean he can't do some good stuff.
00:02:46.420 He may still be more competent than Justin Trudeau.
00:02:49.480 Justin Trudeau, again, relied on people like Carney, but maybe Carney has some slightly better ideas now that he's trying to seem different than what Trudeau's government was like.
00:02:59.920 But overall, I don't think it's going to be great.
00:03:02.600 I want to talk about some of the stuff he's trying to celebrate as big economic wins, that if you know how the economy works, you know that these are not economic wins.
00:03:11.780 These are surface-level, patriotic, I guess, it's just patriotic nonsense.
00:03:17.160 The idea that people are buying more Canadian equals good economy.
00:03:20.680 It's not how it works.
00:03:22.280 But before I get into it further, guys, I just want to remind you, if you like the show, make sure to leave a like on the video, subscribe to the channel, hit the subscribe button if you are not yet a subscriber,
00:03:31.780 and leave a comment on what you think the deficit is going to be at the very end of the year.
00:03:38.780 Again, there's a reason why Carney is actually ducking the parliamentary budget officer.
00:03:44.280 He is not giving him any data when it comes to the spending.
00:03:47.960 They're just giving vague numbers.
00:03:49.300 They're not even, they're not allowing them to do any accounting for the spending.
00:03:52.480 So when they're not even letting the parliamentary budget officer look at the numbers, you can be guaranteed $92 billion is right now a conservative estimate on how bad the deficit could possibly get.
00:04:04.360 But this was from the National Post article written on it.
00:04:07.660 And this was from the C.D. Howe, from C.D. Howe, who was talking about the current projections for the deficit.
00:04:15.980 And they said, quote, it is widely accepted that Canada's economy is at a critical crossroads.
00:04:21.660 They go on to say, so are Canada's finances beyond the economic drag of high deficits arising?
00:04:27.620 It is unfair to pass these burdens to the current young and future generations.
00:04:32.960 And this is what I wanted to highlight down here, because it's absolutely ridiculous that this is the kind of numbers they were putting out just a few months ago, obviously during the election.
00:04:42.200 It says, just four months ago, the parliamentary budget officer projected that the federal deficit would fall to $50.1 billion during this fiscal year.
00:04:51.660 A slight improvement over the $61.9 billion shortfall recorded in 2023-2024.
00:04:58.880 The PBO also said at the time that federal deficits would continue to fall in the ensuing years unless there were new measures to cut revenues or increase spending.
00:05:09.860 And so, yeah, we increased spending.
00:05:14.480 And now we are running a deficit for more than $40 billion more than what they first assumed.
00:05:22.240 They assumed it was going to be $50.
00:05:23.800 Now it is $92.
00:05:25.960 But I just want to jump over to something else, because I think what the Globe and Mail is doing in this article I'm about to show is trying to front run what Mark Carney is going to do.
00:05:37.260 Mark Carney is delivering a very small tax cut.
00:05:41.500 It's 1% lower rate of taxation under $50,000 in which you don't even pay any tax on the first $18,000.
00:05:49.980 They are saying we're going to give Canadians back $850 or every Canadian household is going to get an average back of $850.
00:05:58.080 And they found that the average household could get as low as $230 back or, you know, maybe $400.
00:06:07.100 It's what you get back on your, like, cash back credit card in a year.
00:06:11.120 It's nothing.
00:06:11.800 Your 1% cash back credit card, it generates more money than his tax cut is.
00:06:17.820 But look at this headline from the Globe and Mail.
00:06:20.060 Now, Canada should consider hiking consumption taxes to pay for a defense spending boost analysts.
00:06:28.200 This is by Stephen Chase at the Globe and Mail, a very senior Globe and Mail writer.
00:06:32.960 And what this tells me, and they go over how much our defense spending is going to go up under Carney.
00:06:38.400 And by the way, our defense spending should go up.
00:06:41.300 The only thing I don't trust about the Liberals is that they've had a long time to increase defense spending.
00:06:45.600 And they've hollowed out the military so much with it becoming basically a giant bureaucracy and HR department rather than a real military.
00:06:53.780 I'm very pessimistic that they're just going to dump more money into non-military military spending.
00:07:00.760 It's like how our healthcare systems have a lot of money in them.
00:07:04.000 But if you actually broke down how much money is being spent on people doing paperwork about nothing, it would really shock you.
00:07:10.600 How many people are working HR jobs, DEI training positions that are in the healthcare budget, which obviously don't really represent healthcare in any way.
00:07:21.400 But I think what the Globe and Mail is doing here is front running that they are probably going to potentially increase consumption taxes.
00:07:29.760 The GST might go from 5% to 7% or 8% in order to get the money back that the government needs to be able to lower its deficit and pay for all the defense spending.
00:07:40.220 Because I don't even think they have actually yet added in all the defense spending commitments that Carney has made.
00:07:46.720 When they projected $90 billion, that's back when he said he was going to try and ramp up spending to 2%.
00:07:52.420 Now we're actually already saying 5%, which is a bit of a fudged number because 5% is also going to include certain critical infrastructure key for defense or whatever.
00:08:02.960 But still, we couldn't really afford to go to 2% this fast.
00:08:08.620 Again, we maybe should be going to it.
00:08:11.200 But unless you're going to be cutting wasteful spending, which is a perfectly fine way of paying for 2% defense spending if you're going to cut wasteful spending elsewhere.
00:08:19.160 They're not doing that.
00:08:20.420 That's the problem.
00:08:20.980 They're not doing that.
00:08:22.760 And so that's what is going to result in an even higher deficit now that they've not just gone from 1.3 to 2.
00:08:29.940 They're now going from 2 to 5 all in the same year.
00:08:35.340 So yeah, I think that the Globe and Mail is front running the idea that they will be increasing the GST.
00:08:41.380 But now I want to go to some reactions before I go to Mark Carney celebrating an economic win in the province of Nova Scotia.
00:08:50.380 But I really like this reaction from Tristan Hopper.
00:08:54.200 I kind of referenced it in my opening already, I believe.
00:08:58.100 Tristan says,
00:08:59.120 See, the thing about central banking is that basically all you do all day is set interest rates.
00:09:05.120 It's not like normal banking where you actually have to understand financial stuff.
00:09:09.760 And that's, again, the problem for Mark Carney.
00:09:11.820 A lot of his financial experience, his business experience, it's kind of vapor.
00:09:18.380 It's not real.
00:09:19.680 It's he followed orders from like Flaherty in Canada to keep Canada's economy stable during the economic crisis.
00:09:27.500 He was good at following orders.
00:09:28.980 He kept interest rates.
00:09:30.680 He kept rose interest rates in order to make sure that our economy wouldn't like, you know, wouldn't suffer from massive inflation.
00:09:38.400 You know, keep us on a good fiscal path in the UK.
00:09:43.640 His reviews as the governor of the Bank of England were not great.
00:09:47.760 If you follow Liz Truss, he was actually kind of a bit of a bully wanting to push his vision for how to basically recover the UK economy,
00:09:55.360 which was inflationary spending, lowering interest rates, and which has turned the UK economy into a very poor quality economy with very high prices because of the massive amounts of inflationary spending that didn't actually increase productivity.
00:10:14.520 It just tried to artificially spur investment.
00:10:17.580 That was his performance there.
00:10:18.720 And then again, in Brookfield Asset Management, he, again, it's mostly his network that got him a bunch of money into Brookfield.
00:10:26.440 His success mostly just has to do with his network, not his, you know, business prowess.
00:10:31.280 It's because he invests in industries that he knows that there are massive government subsidies.
00:10:35.580 And that's not everything Brookfield does.
00:10:37.620 But a lot of the big carny successes in Brookfield mostly come from his relationship with governments and his knowledge of the effectively the subsidy system.
00:10:47.420 They invest heavily into areas where the amount of subsidies flowing are massive.
00:10:52.860 But now I want to jump over to some other reactions.
00:10:55.780 Here we have the one of the conservative MPs speaking out about this.
00:11:02.880 This is Warren Steinle from Regina.
00:11:06.380 Which writing is it again?
00:11:07.840 I want to see that Regina Walsh Acres.
00:11:10.740 And he says conservatives keep calling on the liberals to table the spring budget, but Carney refused.
00:11:15.500 Now we know why.
00:11:16.500 A $92 billion deficit, nearly double what the PBO projected just months ago, and the second largest deficit in Canadian history.
00:11:24.520 In fact, if you take out the fact that the highest one was during COVID, it really is the biggest deficit ever.
00:11:30.340 Because you could say in 2020, that was the gimme year where you're allowed to run a big deficit because the economy shut down.
00:11:38.240 This year, you have no excuse to be running this high of a deficit.
00:11:41.860 Like what crisis are we currently in?
00:11:43.360 I guess we have a trade issue with the U.S., which Carney's not doing a very good job on.
00:11:48.480 But what is requiring us to spend $90 billion?
00:11:52.420 The economy would improve if we were cutting spending and letting people use their own money themselves.
00:11:57.760 In the United States, who pays for most of the world's defense, the U.S., the amount of money that public spending represents, you know, government and any other government-related spending, is 36%.
00:12:12.160 In Canada, it's 45%, which is a little bit concerning.
00:12:17.060 But going to somebody else here.
00:12:20.160 Oh, actually, now I think I don't need to go to more and more conservative party reactions.
00:12:25.060 I think you kind of already get it.
00:12:26.660 But yeah, this isn't good.
00:12:28.780 I thought, again, he was supposed to be the guy who's good at the economy.
00:12:31.820 That was like the one thing that Carney was supposed to be good at.
00:12:34.900 But here is Mark Carney celebrating his mini win in Nova Scotia.
00:12:39.000 And Mark Carney here, our prime minister, says, Nova Scotia is breaking down trade barriers and making it easier to buy Canadian.
00:12:46.920 That's how we build one strong Canadian economy.
00:12:49.860 And so before I show you the headline, I can already assure you what he said in the header there of his own post has nothing to do with the CTV News headline in the news.
00:12:59.800 This is the trade barriers have not even really gone down in Canada at all.
00:13:05.400 And this is not what actual trade barriers going down is going to result in.
00:13:13.160 But CTV News says buy local momentum leads to business growth in Nova Scotia.
00:13:18.220 OK, but are people better off or are they worse off?
00:13:22.040 I don't mind people shopping local.
00:13:24.360 That's perfectly fine.
00:13:25.940 Buy the product that you want to purchase.
00:13:28.600 The problem with this is that people are not better off.
00:13:31.960 People are voluntarily choosing to purchase more expensive locally made products in opposition to buying anything from the United States, which leads a lot of people to just try and buy as much Canadian as possible and not buy from anywhere that isn't Canada.
00:13:47.240 Are people better off or worse off?
00:13:50.060 Although I, you know, I'm fine with the patriotism of people wanting to support a local business.
00:13:55.160 This isn't because trade barriers went down because they're, again, they're talking to business growth in Nova Scotia.
00:14:01.240 Is there a lot of Nova Scotian products that are going out to the rest of the country right now?
00:14:05.240 They're still in talks to lower barriers.
00:14:07.420 The barriers being lowered have not resulted in this.
00:14:10.100 This is just people buying more Canadian products.
00:14:13.380 And so because we haven't lowered taxes, because we haven't done anything to actually support our own economy in a real way.
00:14:21.360 I don't want subsidies.
00:14:22.340 I want lower taxes because we haven't lowered taxes.
00:14:24.860 People are just eating the cost of buying local effectively just to thumb their nose at the U.S.
00:14:30.940 And Carney, a guy who's supposed to know economics, claims that this is because Nova Scotia is breaking down trade barriers and making it easier to buy Canadian.
00:14:39.480 No, it isn't.
00:14:40.880 It is not easier to buy Canadian right now.
00:14:43.540 It's just, again, patriotism is why people are doing this.
00:14:48.900 And the government, because it doesn't actually care about people's living standards, it's not doing anything to lower people's taxes.
00:14:55.320 Oh, yes, they lowered 1% of people's taxes under $50,000.
00:14:59.320 But again, what are you giving people back?
00:15:01.240 $250, $300.
00:15:02.700 Who cares?
00:15:04.800 Give people back real, give people real tax relief.
00:15:07.560 Cut taxes across the board by 25% because that is genuinely what Canada needs right now.
00:15:14.180 It needs to cut massive amounts of government spending.
00:15:17.520 We spend on stuff we do not need.
00:15:19.420 If you just cut DEI spending, anything to do with measuring ESG and stuff like that,
00:15:25.380 you would immediately save probably more than $10 billion.
00:15:30.940 If you started slashing a lot of entitlement programs that are abusing Canada, putting in place work requirements for certain social security programs for EI and whatnot,
00:15:43.380 you would actually be able to save massive amounts of money to the taxpayer.
00:15:47.000 But that's not what this liberal government is into because Mark Carney is not actually good on the economy.
00:15:53.140 The pitch was completely wrong.
00:15:55.520 Again, five years as Justin Trudeau's economic advisor.
00:15:59.640 And during that time, Canada's economy was mediocre at best, if not completely terrible.
00:16:05.780 And now, post-COVID, our economy has risen to the levels of deeply mediocre still.
00:16:12.820 But anyways, so that should be it for me today, guys.
00:16:16.240 I just want to, again, remind you, if you like the channel, like the video, subscribe.
00:16:20.460 If you're not a subscriber, leave a comment, and I will no doubt be back later.