The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - November 14, 2025


Liberals trying to fire PBO who criticized their reckless spending!

Topics
unsustainable debt major projects announcements
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Jakari Jackson Mark Carney McCartney Dan Knight Vince Gasparro Trudeau
Poilievre calls out hypocrite Chris d'Entremont for floor crossing! Carney Liberals create fake success narrative for NEW election in 2026!

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

173.59

Word count

1,975

Sentence count

90

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 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.
00:00:13.620 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.
00:00:55.700 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.
00:01:05.460 They find it annoying, so although government moves very slowly, they are trying to move very fast in replacing him.
00:01:12.960 Right here, Dan Knight wrote this great article, Mark Carney seeks to replace fiscal watchdog with loyal lapdog.
00:01:19.620 It goes down, just to read a bit of this article, but that is Jason Jocks right there.
00:01:25.500 And Dan Knight reads, or writes,
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.
00:01:40.000 Someone told the truth.
00:01:41.580 Jason Jocks, the interim Parliamentary Budget Officer, was appointed for six months, and within weeks, he did something this government considers a fireable offense.
00:01:53.100 He reads the books, looked at the numbers, and spoke plainly, that's it, his crime, honesty.
00:02:00.180 Here's what he found.
00:02:01.800 First, the deficit.
00:02:03.080 Remember when Trudeau said the budget would balance itself?
00:02:06.680 That myth has now mutated into a projected $68.5 billion deficit, or 2025-2026, up from $51.7 billion the year before.
00:02:17.780 Jocks didn't just disagree with it, he called it stupefying, shocking, and this is the one they hated the most, unsustainable.
00:02:27.060 Because if there's one thing Ottawa elites can't handle, it's accountability from someone who doesn't need a job after this.
00:02:34.440 Now, I want to point out, too, that in fact, the deficit this year will be $78 billion,
00:02:41.040 and the actual debt servicing alone is $55 billion.
00:02:47.060 So we're just lighting $54, $55 billion, around that range, on fire every year,
00:02:53.580 and it will go up in time just to basically keep our creditors away from us.
00:02:59.180 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,
00:03:09.640 despite the fact that he had a term of more than six months, or just around six months, to stay on as the interim.
00:03:17.720 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.
00:03:24.200 So after making that comment that the spending by the Liberals is stupefying and unsustainable and shocking,
00:03:33.120 I love this clip of a Liberal MP trying to follow up with him and say,
00:03:37.760 well, Jason, what you really mean to say is that, yeah, well, the spending's high.
00:03:43.280 That, you know, in the long run, it's all going to work out.
00:03:46.380 You know, something maybe looks bad in the short term, but in the long term, it's going to work.
00:03:51.420 And I love when it cuts back to Jason Jocks, just his facial expression, 0.99
00:03:56.220 because he doesn't just want to say this guy's an idiot who's asking him the question. 0.98
00:04:00.880 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. 0.94
00:04:12.060 And you project our deficit staying under 2% of GDP and debt holding near the low 40% range.
00:04:19.020 Would you agree that these kinds of thresholds are really in practice fiscal anchors that signal some discipline?
00:04:29.240 I would go back to one of the comments I made at the outset that I love whenever his face pauses like this.
00:04:41.900 Like, he's like, okay, how do I not get fired while also saying exactly what I want?
00:04:48.040 The thing is that you know he knows that he's not supposed to say these things,
00:04:52.500 even though it's his job to say these things.
00:04:54.340 But there's something in Jason Jocks that refuses to not say it.
00:04:59.220 I just need to project this larger on the screen.
00:05:02.260 Like, oh, my goodness, when the liberals tell you that the fiscal outlook looks good,
00:05:07.300 and it's your job to say it's not in a committee meeting.
00:05:10.540 There's an actual face to that situation now.
00:05:13.600 Like, the most important word in the release this morning was unsustainable.
00:05:21.200 We, like, it, I don't know, we didn't...
00:05:24.240 I love his reaction to Vince Gasparro's question.
00:05:28.440 It's like, he's kind of musing around trying to see if he could break the news, like, lighter to him,
00:05:32.700 and there's just no way.
00:05:34.620 Like, the most important word in the release this morning was unsustainable.
00:05:40.040 Like, we, like, it, I don't know, we didn't, we didn't choose it carelessly.
00:05:47.540 I've been in the office for 17 years.
00:05:50.040 I was working in the federal government putting together budgets for 10 years prior to that.
00:05:54.460 You gotta be, like, you choose these words with prudence and care.
00:05:58.720 And by the way, he is a nonpartisan actor in the government.
00:06:02.320 He'd be the type of guy who, when the government is trying to put together all of the spending they want to do,
00:06:08.740 he's the one who has to kind of bound it together with string and twine and try and make the whole thing work.
00:06:13.980 So this is, guys, just somebody who just likes numbers and likes when they balance
00:06:18.780 and can, you know, do a proper multi-year projection for what things are going to look like in the future,
00:06:24.540 and he doesn't go by the government's fake numbers of saying,
00:06:28.100 oh, of course, we're going to have a big deficit this year, and then it's going to tail off really quickly.
00:06:32.120 He knows what their spending commitments are going to have to keep being in the future,
00:06:35.980 and no political spin on the numbers is going to affect him saying,
00:06:40.600 no, you can't just have a $70 billion deficit one year,
00:06:45.480 have it only drop by $10 billion the next year,
00:06:48.160 and think you're somehow going to fiscally survive
00:06:50.360 while your actual debt servicing costs keep going up every single year.
00:06:54.580 And certainly we don't want to be alarmist.
00:06:56.120 And at the same time, like the current path we're on in terms of federal debt
00:07:02.440 as a share of the economy is unsustainable.
00:07:06.080 Yeah, exactly what I was saying right there,
00:07:08.740 that the federal debt portion of every budget is becoming, you know,
00:07:12.620 literally bigger than the health transfer costs for the federal government.
00:07:17.060 The amount of money that the federal government gives out to each of the provinces
00:07:21.880 who put into their health care systems is a smaller number than the amount of money
00:07:27.080 in this current budget that goes towards just keeping the creditors at bay
00:07:31.540 and trying to take a chunk out of us.
00:07:33.360 That is how bad it is.
00:07:34.760 The idea that Carney was some fiscal wizard is such a lie.
00:07:38.060 But now I want to jump over to another news story.
00:07:40.620 I'll probably talk a little bit more about it in future videos.
00:07:43.880 But there is this story out there now.
00:07:46.720 Carney calls a second batch of major projects transformational.
00:07:50.900 Now, I really don't care about him announcing these new major projects.
00:07:58.580 It's just him announcing a bunch of names of projects that may or may not be fast-tracked.
00:08:03.820 It's just the major projects office, a boondoggle of a bureaucracy if I've ever seen one,
00:08:09.360 basically just releasing a list of a few more things that they may end up doing
00:08:13.180 and we're supposed to give them a big pat on the back for it.
00:08:15.420 But what I found so interesting about all this is how the person who is currently the CEO of the major projects office
00:08:23.160 just had to admit that, like, yeah, a lot of these projects were only announcing them
00:08:28.580 because they were effectively already done anyways.
00:08:31.800 I'm not sure where it was specifically mentioned in here.
00:08:36.260 I've already read this article, but I read it on my phone.
00:08:41.900 And then somewhere in here, I don't want to basically just read you guys the whole article.
00:08:46.400 But what was really funny is the person who is currently the CEO of the new major projects office
00:08:52.100 basically said, well, yeah, we're announcing stuff because it's effectively low-hanging fruit.
00:08:57.660 Now, that's the conservative criticism of it, specifically calling it just doing low-hanging fruit.
00:09:03.500 But, like, the CEO also had to say, well, yeah, of course we're announcing most of these projects
00:09:07.980 because either they're almost done anyways and we're going to fast-track an almost-done project
00:09:12.860 or it's like an expansion of a project that was already successfully completed.
00:09:17.880 And so all this stuff is, like, not shocking that we're doing.
00:09:20.640 But it makes it seem like they're up to more activity than they really are.
00:09:24.600 When you come out and you announce something big-sounding,
00:09:27.700 but it was never told to you that they've tried to get this thing done since 2013
00:09:31.780 and it's taken them so much longer than it should have.
00:09:35.360 And now McCartney's basically announcing that he's going to take this project seriously
00:09:38.780 when it's already, like, 75% completed.
00:09:41.540 It's basically him just going back in time and trying to make things his own win.
00:09:47.660 It's because the average person, including myself,
00:09:50.340 doesn't know what major projects are currently underway in the country
00:09:54.300 or if anything McCartney is announcing is something that should have been done 10 years ago
00:09:59.620 and it's only being taken seriously now and it doesn't actually mean anything's going to be started.
00:10:04.720 McCartney himself even knows that many of these projects,
00:10:07.820 even if they get announced by the major projects office as being something they're looking at
00:10:12.360 to potentially fast-track, doesn't actually mean it's going to be done in five years.
00:10:17.140 In fact, it doesn't even mean it's going to be fast-tracked in the next year.
00:10:19.840 It just means they're looking at it.
00:10:21.560 And then if they don't end, if they finally fast-track it,
00:10:25.160 you know, it seems like, oh, wow, it's fast-tracked.
00:10:28.100 Well, it also could have already been well behind schedule
00:10:31.060 and we're not actually, you know, getting it ahead of schedule
00:10:34.420 or even getting it done on schedule.
00:10:36.620 We're getting it done four years late,
00:10:38.380 but, you know, we finally got it done
00:10:40.200 and maybe if we didn't fast-track it, it would have never gotten done.
00:10:43.600 But this is all just a bunch of fake achievements
00:10:46.220 to make up for the fact that Mark Carney doesn't have any achievements yet in office.
00:10:50.340 Everything has been pretty blah. 0.99
00:10:52.160 The budget sucks. 0.96
00:10:53.300 He hasn't gotten a trade deal 0.99
00:10:54.480 and we have these massive deficits
00:10:56.620 that are going to be hamstringing your ability to spend in the future.
00:11:00.680 So, yes, we're going to spend less and invest more,
00:11:02.840 except no matter how you put it, it's spending
00:11:05.640 and it's going to, like, fiscally hem us in more and more in the future
00:11:09.880 as our debt servicing costs quickly outpace our ability
00:11:13.580 to actually build infrastructure.
00:11:15.980 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:11:18.740 Thank you for watching this video
00:11:20.020 and I will see you guys all next time.