The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - April 26, 2024


The Liberals' 2024 budget flops hard with Canadians

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Jagmeet Singh Angus Reid
Trudeau Liberals prove they have utter contempt for Canadians David Eby's drug policy pivot is totally pathetic

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

210.81

Word count

1,852

Sentence count

111


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about the Canadian public's reaction to the Trudeau government's proposed budget for the year 2020-2021, and why I don't think it's a good one. I also talk about why most people aren't thinking about the budget and why they don't care about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 As you already know, the federal liberal government tabled its 2024 budget last week, and although it hasn't been voted on yet, I think we all know it's going to be passed. It's not going to be a surprise when it gets passed. As much as Jagmeet Singh and the NDP are playing hard to get, pretending they don't know if they're going to vote for the budget or not, they will vote for the budget.
00:00:18.140 They can't afford not to vote for the budget. Both the liberals and the NDP as parties are completely broke. Their polling is horrible. And really, Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau don't really disagree on that much other than Jagmeet Singh is just simply another step to the left of Justin Trudeau. So they're going to vote for it. They have to vote for it.
00:00:37.340 But what was kind of surprising for me in this budget is when you look at the Canadian public's reaction, because a budget in Canadian politics is supposed to be a very, very crowd-pleasing item to pass an ear.
00:00:49.060 Everyone tends to agree what's in the budget. Even if you're a liberal, you tend to agree with conservative budgets. Conservatives tend to agree with liberal budgets. And because most people aren't that partisan, so when you present them with a lot of good-sounding things that money is being spent on, they're just going to say, well, that sounds pretty good.
00:01:03.940 But look at this. This is the Angus Reid poll where they pulled like 3,000 people on what they thought of the budget. You go to the top-line stuff that has more support, but still, only 74% of people agree with spending more money on disability benefits, increased disability benefits. And 74% is very high, but there's 26% of people just saying, stop spending money. In a normal year, that would be like 90% of people saying, yes, spend money on disability benefits.
00:01:27.820 Here, funding free contraceptives and some diabetes medication for all. Only 70% of people in favor of that. Because again, the questions are kind of asked in a bit of a skewed way. I don't think it's because the pollster's biased, but they're basically just saying, are you in favor of spending on this?
00:01:44.140 They're not saying, are you in favor of inflation and taxes going up to spend on this? If you ask that, the polling numbers would be way lower. But the fact that this many Canadians are still saying no to all this good-sounding stuff, I don't think it's actually good.
00:01:57.980 Because under the surface, the private sector would do a way better job delivering this stuff, and I know it's going to cause more inflation taxes and whatnot. But the average Canadian's not thinking that deeply about it.
00:02:07.800 So this one, funding infrastructure for new housing developments, only 65% of people in favor. $9 billion in new funding over five years for Indigenous health, housing, education, income assistance. Only 54% of people in favor of it. More defense spending, only 51.
00:02:22.960 This one's a little bit of an obtuse one, where technically in the budget, they're cutting 5,000 people in the public service, but they're obviously going to employ way more people than that. So it's kind of a weird category. It doesn't really matter for us to talk about it.
00:02:38.620 And this is focusing on general relational fairness to help younger Canadians. Only 51% of people in favor of that. And yes, you can say 51% of people are in favor of that, or 74% of people are in favor of this item or that item.
00:02:51.640 Again, guys, budgets are made so that 90% of people will be in favor of them, right? Because the thing is that the questions are just saying, are you in favor of more disability spending? And, you know, caught in the middle of your day on the phone with a pollster, you're just going to say, yeah, sure.
00:03:05.780 The fact that people are thinking about it, thinking this is Justin Trudeau's budget. No, you have enough money already. Figure out how to do it without increasing spending. That is what is actually being shown in these polls.
00:03:17.760 Because when you look at these other polls that Angus Reid did more on general questions about the budget, this question says,
00:03:23.740 Based on what you've seen, read or heard, does this recent federal government budget make you more hopeful or more pessimistic about the following?
00:03:31.300 Your own personal financial situation, 47% say more pessimistic. The economic future of Canada, 56% say more pessimistic.
00:03:40.140 Only 12% of people said they're more hopeful about the future of the country economically.
00:03:44.920 And 9% said personally, their personal futures that they're more hopeful of.
00:03:49.220 And then you get some people saying no change, but no change is obviously just the default answer.
00:03:53.820 It's even more default than saying not sure, because most people who are not sure will just say no change.
00:03:59.120 But anyways, you go down to this other one.
00:04:01.940 And it says, do you feel the changes planned by the federal government will make the following better or worse or have no effect on the availability and affordability of housing where you live?
00:04:10.720 And so renters are mostly against this budget.
00:04:14.260 All the things that the government is planning to change, basically bribing cities to wipe out zoning rules and to invest more in affordable housing,
00:04:21.520 which is just going to be a massive boondoggle where no real extra housing is going to be put up.
00:04:26.020 But we all get to pay more in taxes and inflation is going to spike.
00:04:29.620 Owners, owners, non-mortgage, other, yeah, has mortgage.
00:04:33.800 Everyone is pretty much against this.
00:04:35.280 There's only 13% of people who think it will be making it much better or better.
00:04:39.780 Or how many people are even saying, I don't think anyone says not much better.
00:04:43.480 Yeah, so there's no one even saying the budget will improve things by any significant margin.
00:04:49.300 The only thing that you could get most people agreeing with, which is just a populist sentiment,
00:04:54.200 it's asking people whether or not they like the changes to capital gains.
00:04:57.020 And because most people are not going to make $250,000 in capital gains in a year, most people are saying, yes, I'm in favor of that.
00:05:05.300 Even that doesn't pull that well.
00:05:07.580 And again, all these changes were things that Justin Trudeau were thinking that the public was going to eat up.
00:05:12.740 And they didn't.
00:05:13.780 For the most part, yeah, you can get most people to agree to some flowery language about the budget.
00:05:18.540 The fact that people are now in almost half of what some of these policies, half of people are saying, no, don't spend more on that, is super telling about the mood of the country.
00:05:27.760 I saw a poll.
00:05:29.140 It might have been an anchors read as well.
00:05:30.400 It was a couple months ago or might have been just last month.
00:05:33.220 65% of people said that they think the government spends too much and the budget needs to be cut.
00:05:37.780 That is unheard of in Canada.
00:05:39.720 In Canada, people are kind of hypersensitive about coming off like an American Republican's conservative.
00:05:45.920 So a lot of people are in favor of government spending as like a knee-jerk reaction to being asked a question like that.
00:05:52.640 To get the majority of Canadians to say we spend too much is, wow, that's insane.
00:05:58.920 That means Justin Trudeau has been, that is an achievement for Trudeau to have spent so much.
00:06:05.780 The average Canadian thinks that we spend way too much money.
00:06:08.820 And only about, I think, 12, 18% of people think we don't spend enough.
00:06:12.340 And those are mostly NDP voters.
00:06:14.180 The liberals are currently dealing with a base of supporters who more than half of them think that the liberals are making massive mistakes in government.
00:06:22.700 And you can't go into a new federal election with most of your base thinking that you're full of it.
00:06:28.280 You even see the polling where they ask people, would you like to see a federal liberal government re-elected or a majority re-elected?
00:06:35.720 And only about 17% of people support that notion.
00:06:38.880 And when you look at the polling, the liberals poll at 24% to 25%.
00:06:43.400 So about a third or a little bit more than a third of the liberal support is saying, we don't actually want to see Justin Trudeau as the prime minister again.
00:06:51.020 Yes, we'll vote liberal locally because maybe we like our local guy or we generally like the liberal brand.
00:06:56.800 But although they're voting liberal, they don't actually want the liberals to win, which means that either they're lying about supporting the liberals or, at the very least, they're probably not going to show up.
00:07:07.260 Or at least they're not going to show up for anyone who's not their local guy.
00:07:10.500 So they're voting liberal, not for Justin Trudeau, but maybe just because they don't like the conservatives for whatever reason because probably they watch way too much mainstream media.
00:07:17.760 So yeah, this budget has been an absolute flop.
00:07:21.280 It was a shot in the arm that Justin Trudeau thought he needed, and it ended up just being poisoned for his party.
00:07:27.620 It just leaned into all the worst things that people already assumed about the liberals.
00:07:31.580 They spend too much, they tax too much, and all their plans are just the same old stuff with more dollar signs attached to them.
00:07:37.720 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:07:40.120 Shameless plug, I, Wyatt Claypool, I'm running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:07:45.060 So if you live on the west side of Calgary, basically the riding is straight west from the city center.
00:07:50.760 This is where that riding is.
00:07:52.800 So if you live over here, buy a Conservative Party membership and check out my website in the description below,
00:07:58.200 WyattClaypool.com, mark me number one on your ballot whenever the nomination gets called.
00:08:02.160 And then also if you want to support our legal fund, the Give, Send, Go link is in the description below.
00:08:06.920 That's just, you know, go down there.
00:08:08.640 If you click on that, donate money, it helps us recover some of the money we've lost having to pay for legal defenses.
00:08:13.980 We are winning the lawsuit that we're currently in.
00:08:16.800 We'll easily win it, but it's a billionaire developer just trying to suck as much money away from us as possible
00:08:21.860 because this is a lawfare tactic.
00:08:24.080 Draw it out a lawsuit that you know you can't win just to hope that you can either force the people to apologize to you
00:08:29.320 or just to at least drain them of a bunch of money temporarily to affect their business.
00:08:34.280 And that's exactly what this guy's doing.
00:08:36.120 So that's what the Give, Send, Go link in the description is for.
00:08:39.140 Donate to that and you can really help us reduce the burden of cost for our legal fees.
00:08:44.180 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:08:46.560 Have a good one.