Liberals trying to fire PBO who criticized their reckless spending!
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
173.58568
Summary
Jason Jocks, the interim Parliamentary Budget Officer, called out the Liberals for their massive, unsustainable spending. And now, the Liberals are trying to replace him in record speed, because they do not like him sounding off about their spending.
Transcript
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Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. Now, I know that Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberals don't like accountability, but I found this story I'm about to show you guys ridiculous even for them.
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Just a little bit of background before we get into it, we have a Parliamentary Budget Officer, which is effectively a fiscal watchdog inside the government that tries to keep the government accountable for its spending.
00:00:26.540
The last guy who is the official Parliamentary Budget Officer had his term end a couple of months ago, and since then, he was replaced by an interim PBO, who is Jason Jocks.
00:00:38.960
He is fantastic, because he does not hide the fact that he does not like the massive deficit spending that the Liberals are engaging in.
00:00:48.640
And it's not because he's some biased conservative operative, he is a numbers guy, and he doesn't like when the numbers don't add up.
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And right now, the Liberals are trying to replace Jason Jocks in record speed, because they do not like him sounding off about their spending.
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They find it annoying, so although government moves very slowly, they are trying to move very fast in replacing him.
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Right here, Dan Knight wrote this great article, Mark Carney seeks to replace fiscal watchdog with loyal lapdog.
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It goes down, just to read a bit of this article, but that is Jason Jocks right there.
00:01:27.260
It's remarkable, isn't it, after a decade of gaslighting Canadians about their so-called fiscal responsible government,
00:01:33.880
the Liberal Party, now under the direction of Mark Carney, finally runs into a problem they can't spin.
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Jason Jocks, the interim Parliamentary Budget Officer, was appointed for six months, and within weeks, he did something this government considers a fireable offense.
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He reads the books, looked at the numbers, and spoke plainly, that's it, his crime, honesty.
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Remember when Trudeau said the budget would balance itself?
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That myth has now mutated into a projected $68.5 billion deficit, or 2025-2026, up from $51.7 billion the year before.
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Jocks didn't just disagree with it, he called it stupefying, shocking, and this is the one they hated the most, unsustainable.
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Because if there's one thing Ottawa elites can't handle, it's accountability from someone who doesn't need a job after this.
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Now, I want to point out, too, that in fact, the deficit this year will be $78 billion,
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and the actual debt servicing alone is $55 billion.
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So we're just lighting $54, $55 billion, around that range, on fire every year,
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and it will go up in time just to basically keep our creditors away from us.
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Jason Jocks, a guy who actually cares about the numbers balancing, called the Liberals out for this,
00:03:04.260
and now the Liberals are trying to replace him as quickly as humanly possible,
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despite the fact that he had a term of more than six months, or just around six months, to stay on as the interim.
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I want to show you a clip of him speaking in front of Parliament, just to give you an idea for why people hate his guts.
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So after making that comment that the spending by the Liberals is stupefying and unsustainable and shocking,
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I love this clip of a Liberal MP trying to follow up with him and say,
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well, Jason, what you really mean to say is that, yeah, well, the spending's high.
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That, you know, in the long run, it's all going to work out.
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You know, something maybe looks bad in the short term, but in the long term, it's going to work.
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And I love when it cuts back to Jason Jocks, just his facial expression,
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because he doesn't just want to say this guy's an idiot who's asking him the question.
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Obviously, you project, so we're on a good fiscal path, or we're on a better fiscal path than some of our G7 colleagues.
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And you project our deficit staying under 2% of GDP and debt holding near the low 40% range.
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Would you agree that these kinds of thresholds are really in practice fiscal anchors that signal some discipline?
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I would go back to one of the comments I made at the outset that I love whenever his face pauses like this.
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Like, he's like, okay, how do I not get fired while also saying exactly what I want?
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The thing is that you know he knows that he's not supposed to say these things,
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But there's something in Jason Jocks that refuses to not say it.
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I just need to project this larger on the screen.
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Like, oh, my goodness, when the liberals tell you that the fiscal outlook looks good,
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and it's your job to say it's not in a committee meeting.
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Like, the most important word in the release this morning was unsustainable.
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I love his reaction to Vince Gasparro's question.
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It's like, he's kind of musing around trying to see if he could break the news, like, lighter to him,
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Like, the most important word in the release this morning was unsustainable.
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Like, we, like, it, I don't know, we didn't, we didn't choose it carelessly.
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I was working in the federal government putting together budgets for 10 years prior to that.
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You gotta be, like, you choose these words with prudence and care.
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And by the way, he is a nonpartisan actor in the government.
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He'd be the type of guy who, when the government is trying to put together all of the spending they want to do,
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he's the one who has to kind of bound it together with string and twine and try and make the whole thing work.
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So this is, guys, just somebody who just likes numbers and likes when they balance
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and can, you know, do a proper multi-year projection for what things are going to look like in the future,
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and he doesn't go by the government's fake numbers of saying,
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oh, of course, we're going to have a big deficit this year, and then it's going to tail off really quickly.
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He knows what their spending commitments are going to have to keep being in the future,
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and no political spin on the numbers is going to affect him saying,
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no, you can't just have a $70 billion deficit one year,
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have it only drop by $10 billion the next year,
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and think you're somehow going to fiscally survive
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while your actual debt servicing costs keep going up every single year.
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And at the same time, like the current path we're on in terms of federal debt
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that the federal debt portion of every budget is becoming, you know,
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literally bigger than the health transfer costs for the federal government.
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The amount of money that the federal government gives out to each of the provinces
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who put into their health care systems is a smaller number than the amount of money
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in this current budget that goes towards just keeping the creditors at bay
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The idea that Carney was some fiscal wizard is such a lie.
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But now I want to jump over to another news story.
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I'll probably talk a little bit more about it in future videos.
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Carney calls a second batch of major projects transformational.
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Now, I really don't care about him announcing these new major projects.
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It's just him announcing a bunch of names of projects that may or may not be fast-tracked.
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It's just the major projects office, a boondoggle of a bureaucracy if I've ever seen one,
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basically just releasing a list of a few more things that they may end up doing
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and we're supposed to give them a big pat on the back for it.
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But what I found so interesting about all this is how the person who is currently the CEO of the major projects office
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just had to admit that, like, yeah, a lot of these projects were only announcing them
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because they were effectively already done anyways.
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I'm not sure where it was specifically mentioned in here.
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I've already read this article, but I read it on my phone.
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And then somewhere in here, I don't want to basically just read you guys the whole article.
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But what was really funny is the person who is currently the CEO of the new major projects office
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basically said, well, yeah, we're announcing stuff because it's effectively low-hanging fruit.
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Now, that's the conservative criticism of it, specifically calling it just doing low-hanging fruit.
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But, like, the CEO also had to say, well, yeah, of course we're announcing most of these projects
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because either they're almost done anyways and we're going to fast-track an almost-done project
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or it's like an expansion of a project that was already successfully completed.
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And so all this stuff is, like, not shocking that we're doing.
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But it makes it seem like they're up to more activity than they really are.
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When you come out and you announce something big-sounding,
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but it was never told to you that they've tried to get this thing done since 2013
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and it's taken them so much longer than it should have.
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And now McCartney's basically announcing that he's going to take this project seriously
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It's basically him just going back in time and trying to make things his own win.
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It's because the average person, including myself,
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doesn't know what major projects are currently underway in the country
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or if anything McCartney is announcing is something that should have been done 10 years ago
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and it's only being taken seriously now and it doesn't actually mean anything's going to be started.
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McCartney himself even knows that many of these projects,
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even if they get announced by the major projects office as being something they're looking at
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to potentially fast-track, doesn't actually mean it's going to be done in five years.
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In fact, it doesn't even mean it's going to be fast-tracked in the next year.
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And then if they don't end, if they finally fast-track it,
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you know, it seems like, oh, wow, it's fast-tracked.
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Well, it also could have already been well behind schedule
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and we're not actually, you know, getting it ahead of schedule
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and maybe if we didn't fast-track it, it would have never gotten done.
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But this is all just a bunch of fake achievements
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to make up for the fact that Mark Carney doesn't have any achievements yet in office.
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that are going to be hamstringing your ability to spend in the future.
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So, yes, we're going to spend less and invest more,
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and it's going to, like, fiscally hem us in more and more in the future
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as our debt servicing costs quickly outpace our ability