The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - January 29, 2026


PBO exposes nearly 90% of Liberal investment claims are False!


Episode Stats

Length

20 minutes

Words per Minute

174.83495

Word Count

3,628

Sentence Count

187


Summary

When the Liberals released their budget last year, they claimed that it was going to generate $1 Trillion in new investments in the Canadian economy. However, a recent report from the parliamentary budget office found that the government had in fact invested only $285 billion.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here, and welcome back to the National Telegraph YouTube channel.
00:00:06.060 I know none of us are shocked these days whenever Prime Minister Mark Carney or the Liberals
00:00:10.920 are exposed for lying about something, but I can genuinely say the clip I'm about to show you
00:00:17.320 shocked me, because I didn't expect the Liberals to lie this badly about something so big.
00:00:24.840 So when the Liberals eventually rolled out their budget last year that had $78 billion
00:00:31.280 of a deficit attached to it, they tried to justify the whole thing by saying,
00:00:36.820 don't worry everyone, this is going to result in $1 trillion of new investments in the Canadian economy.
00:00:44.640 Well, that claim is apparently a little bit more than 12% true, and it's like, oh my goodness,
00:00:51.740 why would you lie about something that's that off? That's not like, I thought it was going to create
00:00:58.180 $2 billion of revenue in this area of government, and it only created 1.3, and like, you know,
00:01:04.800 $700 million is a big deal. But it's a big deal to lie about hundreds of billions of dollars of
00:01:11.540 investments. Effectively, what the Liberals did was they just cobbled together things that were
00:01:16.120 already invested into the country, and double counting a bunch of dollars in order to come to
00:01:21.620 this $1 trillion figure. But this is the type of thing that the Liberals do that ends up ticking off
00:01:27.460 the business Liberal base and makes them more likely to go vote for the Conservatives. So as a
00:01:32.460 Conservative, I'm happy, I guess they're lying this blatantly. But at the same time, I'm like,
00:01:37.440 people, come on. So in a second here, I want to show you guys this clip from a parliamentary committee,
00:01:43.540 where someone from the parliamentary budget office was being questioned by a Conservative MP. But
00:01:49.380 before I get into it, I just want to remind you guys, if you like the channel, make sure to leave
00:01:53.840 a like on this video, subscribe if you are not yet a subscriber, leave a comment about what you think
00:01:59.520 about this mess. And if you want to help financially support the channel, you can always hit the join
00:02:03.920 button below the video and give something monthly to make the channel less reliant on the YouTube
00:02:08.900 algorithm and make the whole thing more sustainable for me. But without further ado, I want to show
00:02:15.540 you guys this clip now. It's about three minutes and 30 seconds. I'll probably pause it a little bit
00:02:21.440 as we go through. But you need to see this full thing on the report about the $1 trillion in total
00:02:27.160 investment. My understanding that is a that is not a net new number of investment. Is that correct?
00:02:34.080 That is correct. So basically, what we tried to do in this report is understand where the $1 trillion
00:02:41.640 figure is coming from. And starting from the federal government commitment to support the industries and
00:02:53.560 investors to the tune of $280 billion. We found actually that of those $280 billion, we actually
00:03:04.460 one finding, I guess it's $285 billion. So the $280 is a rounding. So you will see me mentioning the
00:03:11.220 $285, but it's really a rounding. So of those $285, $41 billion approximately are associated with new
00:03:19.480 measures from budget 2025. And the remaining amount is related to measures that were in place prior to
00:03:26.040 the publication of the budget.
00:03:27.840 So when the government says it's, you know, the budget is generating $1 trillion in or will generate $1 trillion
00:03:38.800 in new investment. What I'm hearing from you is a lot of those investments were already being made. Is that a fair
00:03:48.380 characterization?
00:03:49.380 It is a fair characterization, yes.
00:03:51.860 So effectively, what we have going on here is like, if you had made some investment or whatever,
00:03:59.680 or you got a new job, and you claimed, with this new job, I am bringing our household $3 million more
00:04:08.300 dollars, except you're counting all the money you had already previously made at your old job. It's like,
00:04:13.260 that's blatantly stupid, that the liberals are saying, we're going to generate $1 trillion new
00:04:18.940 dollars with this budget. And it's like, well, you can't count all of the old investments that you
00:04:25.640 had taken into the country under Justin Trudeau, and just add it all up, like add it all up. That
00:04:31.440 doesn't even make sense, because the Canadian economy is only a little bit more than like $1 trillion or
00:04:35.920 $2 trillion. Like really, you're gonna more than all you're gonna like increase the Canadian economy
00:04:41.040 by 50% with this budget. Really, the liberals were just trying to justify the $78 billion deficit
00:04:48.720 in the budget, which is more like $85 billion at this point, because of the Ukraine spending and
00:04:53.640 because of the GST rebate. They just want to distract you by making a big claim about financial
00:05:00.320 gains we're gonna have, so that you don't really care too much about the debt, when in fact, they're
00:05:04.720 barely delivering any of the money that they're claiming the budget is going to bring into the
00:05:09.260 economy. I also note an interesting parallel between the way the government has
00:05:15.420 communicated the $1 trillion, along with they have a whole chapter in the budget on is the super
00:05:24.620 deduction that they say will have a monumental impact on investments in this country, encouraging
00:05:33.460 investments. But if you look at the table that they provide about the cost of the super deduction,
00:05:43.060 almost all of the super deduction is already in place today. The only new measure in the budget,
00:05:47.620 I think, is about maybe $300 million in what I'll call stimulus a year. So there seems to be a
00:05:56.100 consistent messaging from the government to say, oh, we're delivering this big number, but actually,
00:06:01.060 the net benefit of what they're delivering isn't as big as the headline. Is that a fair? You don't
00:06:07.700 have to comment on whether you agree with it or not, but they come out with a big headline,
00:06:11.780 but when you dig down, it's actually most of it's measures that were already happening anyway.
00:06:16.980 Well, that's what we found after our analysis is that almost 71% pretty much of the $1 trillion
00:06:25.300 is related to investments or stimulus, whether it's government investment or business investment
00:06:32.980 that was already in place prior to the budget. Final question, what is the number then that would be
00:06:38.500 net new? Is that a fair question or should we follow up on that after? It is, it is a fair question. So
00:06:46.100 there are two numbers, I think, that are important to keep in mind. So the first one is what is net new
00:06:50.660 investment from budget 2025 from the federal government. So that would be 41.3 and how much
00:06:56.820 more investment, I mean, total investment that is expected to be generated by that additional
00:07:03.220 investment. So that amount we estimated to be 126 billion. So only $126 billion of new investments are
00:07:14.260 actually going to be generated by budget 2025. And part of the, you can technically say that it's
00:07:21.140 only a 70, only 77% of the $1 trillion, like why was an actual lie. But you have to remember,
00:07:30.340 you have to take 43 billion out of that. And that's what you leaves you with the $126 billion number,
00:07:36.980 because $43 billion of dollars of it is just taxpayer money being thrown into different industries in order
00:07:43.220 to spur other investment. You can't do that forever. That's effectively a fake economy.
00:07:48.580 When the taxpayer is having to pay money or jobs to exist or for productivity to happen,
00:07:55.140 it means the actual net effect of that productivity is way less than you think.
00:08:01.540 So yeah, this is a great thing to bring up to any liberal friends you have. If they're talking about
00:08:06.340 how much of like a business savvy guru Mark Carney is, or at least how much they think he is.
00:08:11.220 Yeah, he claimed that his budget was going to create a trillion dollars in new investments
00:08:17.700 in Canada, when that's not only not true, because much of that was already around well before his
00:08:23.380 budget came out. But he actually has to pay a lot of money to even generate those new investments.
00:08:28.980 So we're having to pay $43 billion in order to generate $126 billion in economic activity.
00:08:37.300 And you could say like, Oh, that's not too bad. You're paying $43 billion for $128 billion. No,
00:08:43.220 that's horrible. You shouldn't have to be paying pretty much anything to generate productivity.
00:08:48.020 You should just want free productivity by having a good business environment. But we don't,
00:08:52.580 so we're having to bribe people. So effectively, we're burning a large portion of our taxpayer dollars
00:09:00.420 to create jobs that in America, they wouldn't have to spend a single dollar guaranteeing that job
00:09:04.980 to be there. Anyways, I want to now show you this other clip of Ashi Kapelos on CTV News Powerplay,
00:09:11.940 interviewing Steve McKinnon, the Liberal House leader, on the fact that they don't actually have
00:09:17.540 any money to pay for the new GST rebate. And that is going to be layered on top of the already very big
00:09:24.900 deficit that there's no election in the offing. But the announcement in and of itself seems to run
00:09:30.100 very counter to what Mr. Carney talked about during the, the prime minister talked about during the
00:09:34.820 election campaign. He drew a distinction between his approach to the economic growth and what he
00:09:40.260 criticized the Trudeau government of which you were a part, their approach to economic growth,
00:09:44.420 which he identified as just through emigration and population growth and government spending.
00:09:49.780 What you announced yesterday is more than 11 billion dollars of additional government spending
00:09:54.740 that nobody from your government has said how you will pay for it. I imagine because you're not
00:09:59.700 introducing a new tax or something to that effect or described other cuts elsewhere that it will come
00:10:04.500 from additional borrowing. That runs counter to what Mr. Carney said during the election campaign,
00:10:10.500 what you yourself have said on many instances since then. How are we to infer from that anything other
00:10:15.940 than this is about politics and the possibility of an election? Well, I don't think Mr. Carney ever
00:10:22.340 ruled out measures to help vulnerable Canadians. And I don't think most Canadians think that helping out
00:10:28.260 12 million people who get GST rebates now, grocery and essential goods benefit will, will object to that.
00:10:37.940 We saw post pandemic, Vashi, a spike in food prices. And this is meant to help with that. Inflation,
00:10:46.100 largely tamed. That doesn't mean people feel inflation is largely tamed. And that's partly due to things
00:10:53.060 like oranges, coffee, bananas, things where supply chains have been affected, where prices have gone up more
00:11:00.820 than the rate of inflation. So these guys, who apparently are trying to deal with the fact that
00:11:07.220 a lot of that inflation is still hurting a lot of Canadians is still affecting certain products
00:11:11.700 massively, like coffees up 40%. Overall grocery prices are up 6.1%. And they're going to help the
00:11:18.180 inflation by printing another $11 billion they don't have over the next few years in order to send rebate
00:11:26.100 checks out to the bottom 30% of earners. That's blatantly stupid. Like what are, what's wrong with
00:11:34.340 these people? Again, if you have liberal friends and they say, well, I trust Mark Carney because he
00:11:39.940 worked at Goldman Sachs and was the governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England,
00:11:44.020 and he was the chair of Brookfield Asset Management, and they're highly, they're very,
00:11:48.340 very successful. It's like, he's literally just serving up microwaved Trudeau policy. It's just
00:11:55.300 paying people money. It's just paying people money to deal with inflation, which again, again, causes
00:12:01.540 more inflation. Eventually they're going to have to pay for this either by printing money and watering
00:12:06.900 down the value of each dollar, or they're going to have to raise taxes. And inflation is in fact
00:12:12.340 already a tax on everybody. But what that they're also lying, as we just found out about the new
00:12:19.700 investments, all this is going to be creating new and like new investments of a trillion dollars.
00:12:25.300 And it's really only 128, 26 billion dollars. These are the people who people put trust into
00:12:31.620 that they were going to help grow the economy better than Pierre Polyev could. If you got into
00:12:35.860 government and you just cut taxes, that's all you did. You just cut taxes 20% across the board,
00:12:41.300 every bracket GST lowered 20%. You would be doing way better right now than, than Mark Carney and the
00:12:48.820 Liberals. But the problem is, is that Mark Carney and the Liberals want to basically bribe people
00:12:54.020 into voting for them. What Steve McKinnon here was basically trying to portray was the idea that,
00:13:00.100 well, we're, we care more about poorer people than the Conservatives, because we're willing to cut a
00:13:05.220 check. He's not actually helping anyone substantially. If you want to substantially help people, you would cut
00:13:10.420 taxes so the economy functions better, so people get higher paying jobs. But no, no, no. You don't really
00:13:15.940 get to cosign on all of that if you're the Liberals. You only want to do stuff where you literally get
00:13:21.220 to have your name written on it. Mark Carney gets to have checks sent out with the, with the Liberals
00:13:27.220 signing the bottom of each one, so you know who to vote for. I actually don't think this is going to
00:13:32.500 work because it's too sleazy and too obvious in a lot of ways. I think people are kind of tired of
00:13:36.820 this stuff, but this is what they're doing. This apparent business guru, this business genius,
00:13:42.020 is just pushing money into the economy like Trudeau was, which isn't shocking because Mark Carney was
00:13:47.460 the economic advisor to, uh, to Justin Trudeau. Um, so, um, the prime minister, the minister of
00:13:54.100 finance felt strongly that, um, at this point in time where Canadians, uh, many Canadians are struggling
00:14:01.220 with those food prices that we had an obligation to come in. I don't think, uh, that approach has ever
00:14:07.460 been ruled out, but the thing that has not changed is that we know we have to grow the top line in
00:14:12.420 Canada. We have to achieve growth. We have to create jobs. We have to protect the jobs we have
00:14:18.340 that are, uh, threatened by trade measures, punitive trade measures for coming from south of the border,
00:14:24.020 but we have to create more jobs. We have. Okay. Well, they haven't really like they'll say like we
00:14:30.180 created 40,000 jobs since the summer. It's like, well, that also includes the holiday employment spike that
00:14:36.980 happens. A lot of people get these short term retail jobs around the holiday season that end
00:14:42.100 up going away afterwards. And I'm pretty sure they're using the holiday season as they're like
00:14:47.220 top line to show how much jobs went up, even though many of them are temporary, but he talks about,
00:14:52.340 we need to focus on top line growth as well for the economy. Well, we only had like 1.9% growth this
00:14:59.140 year, which means that we are not beating inflation. What at all, I think inflation was like 3% for us or
00:15:04.820 something like that. So we only got a little bit more than two thirds over the inflation number.
00:15:10.580 Uh, what the heck? Like the, again, these guys are the economic geniuses that we gave the country
00:15:16.500 over to. It's almost like the government's basically the same, uh, that it was under Justin Trudeau to
00:15:21.700 build big projects. We have to get things done. Uh, we do that every day. We, uh, wake up, uh, put on our boots
00:15:29.940 and, uh, try and build big projects and create big opportunities for Canada every day that, uh,
00:15:35.860 we will not waver from. But respectfully, uh, minister, the prime minister did criticize
00:15:42.260 the former prime minister for too much government spending. And he had, you know,
00:15:46.260 got food prices were extremely high, 30% higher, uh, during the election campaign than they were five,
00:15:51.780 five years prior. There were no promises made about $11 billion of additional spending. I am not in
00:15:57.140 any way taking away from the very, very specific need as you outline it of Canadians. I know it,
00:16:02.820 I hear it every day as well, but this is not exactly what you promised to do during the campaign.
00:16:08.820 Add 11 billion extra dollars to a deficit. Was it?
00:16:11.940 Uh, look, this is obviously very awkward. I've, I've grown to really love Vashti Capellas and she's
00:16:19.460 right. This was supposed to be like the fiscally responsible government. And we're currently running
00:16:23.700 the second biggest deficit in Canadian history since 2020 or including 2020. It's the biggest
00:16:30.420 if you don't include 2020, where you're paying a bunch of lockdown of paying people to like stay
00:16:34.740 at home and not work. And even this budget, the deficit's pretty close to 2020s. Like we could
00:16:40.740 potentially surpass it with a couple of more big ticket promises like, like, uh, Carney has been
00:16:45.700 making. And Steve McKinnon is now going to have to flop around like a fish out of water here to justify
00:16:50.660 how, you know, we're going to be fiscally responsible and cut down on wasteful spending
00:16:54.180 and invest more and spend less that that's some, this is somehow an investment cutting
00:16:58.340 checks to people. It's not an investment. You know, if you lowered taxes and your deficit
00:17:03.780 was partially made up from the shortfall you're going to experience, I could actually accept that.
00:17:09.060 I am not an, I am not allergic to a deficit. If the desk, if the deficit represents money that you're
00:17:15.220 just letting Canadians have back by lowering their taxes, cutting checks to people, yes, helps them.
00:17:20.420 But only in the short run, because eventually it will cause inflation, make the economy worse.
00:17:26.180 And those people's lives will start to get worse than, or will start to deteriorate further.
00:17:31.140 And the checks will not cover the gap to which it's deteriorated further.
00:17:35.220 What we were elected to do is to be sensitive to the needs of Canadians, many of whom feel anxiety
00:17:41.540 because, uh, whether it's, uh, threatened trade measures, uh, or other things, or whether it's simply,
00:17:48.420 um, uh, increased costs due to food inflation. We're here to help with that. Any responsible
00:17:55.140 government must be here to help, uh, with those kinds of pressures. We have an existing mechanism,
00:18:00.580 a tool already built into the tax system, uh, in the form of the GST rebate. It's easy to build upon.
00:18:08.340 Um, and it's easy to justify in my view, uh, in a world where, uh, food inflation, uh, imported food
00:18:16.580 particularly, um, has seen supply related shocks, uh, and which means that food has increased more than the
00:18:25.780 overall CPI. Um, that is, uh, something that we've been giving a lot of thought to over the last few years.
00:18:33.380 They're giving a lot of thought to that, by the way, in the UK, throughout Europe.
00:18:37.300 Okay. Now he's gonna start blaming other jurisdictions. You know, other jurisdictions
00:18:40.740 have also been as irresponsible as us. It's like, okay, well, I, I don't care about that.
00:18:45.860 I care about what we're going to do and I, what the conservative party needs to do. And I said this
00:18:50.900 in my last video, they need to frame this properly because there is a certain, like giving people
00:18:57.300 money has a certain way of making those people vote for you. There's a reason why public sector
00:19:01.300 employees overwhelmingly vote liberal and NDP. It's because they are the pro employing more people
00:19:07.780 parties and employ, you know, pro keeping people employed, even if they're working fake government jobs,
00:19:13.540 what the conservatives need to do with this GST rebate is frame it as the bare minimum. And it is,
00:19:21.140 the liberals don't actually want to make your lives substantially better. They're just cutting you a
00:19:25.300 check to make you leave them alone. That's it. They're doing the bare minimum to make you go and
00:19:30.900 back and sit at the kids table again. So they can call talk to all their insider friends at the adults
00:19:35.860 table. That is what the conservatives need to be doing. This is a bare minimum plan in order to make
00:19:43.140 Canadians leave Mark Carney alone so he can do the things he's more interested in doing.
00:19:48.340 Anyways, that should be it for this video guys. Oh my goodness. It took me literally three hours to
00:19:53.780 shoot this video. There's something wrong with my brain today where I could not make words come out
00:19:58.020 of my face properly. And so I was restarting the recording like 50,000 times and I finally got to
00:20:04.420 the end of it and I'm having a mini celebration. Well, the conservative party convention is going to be
00:20:10.660 starting tomorrow in my city of Calgary. So I'll be doing that over the next few days. So if you don't
00:20:16.740 see a video on one of these days, I probably just didn't have enough time in the morning to wake up
00:20:20.900 and shoot something and know that I'm doing important things. I'm actually bringing Dallas Brody
00:20:26.420 to the convention, the leader of the 1BC party. And we're going to be able to go around and interact
00:20:31.300 with federal counterparts and talk about places where we can overlap on in terms of our policy and work
00:20:36.980 together. But with all that being said, thank you guys for watching, like, share, subscribe, and I
00:20:41.940 will see you guys next time.