In this episode, I talk about why Canada is not better than other first-world countries, and why the Liberals are lying to us about it. I also talk about the fact that Canada is actually closer to a balanced budget than the US, Australia, and the UK.
00:00:00.000One of the most annoying things that happens all the time in politics that Canadians have become extremely used to over the past eight years of Justin Trudeau's liberal government is politicians just gaslighting you into thinking that the state of the country is much better than it actually is.
00:00:15.680I'm not trying to be very doomerish here and pretend that all is lost in Canada. Canada still has obviously a lot of virtues, but we are obviously also in economic decline right now because of crazy high taxes, regulations, anti-oil and gas regulations, all the stuff that the liberals have imposed on Canadians.
00:00:33.740Our GDP per capita in 10 years has actually slightly gone down, even though a first world country like Canada has no reason not to be growing at a rapid rate.
00:00:44.660It's because the liberals have been getting in the way. But don't worry, they are here with their own statistics and very skewed studies.
00:00:51.860I just call them studies because I get annoyed whenever someone's like, I have a study here that actually shows we're doing great.
00:00:57.060And that's what Minister Pascal Saint-Onges, the heritage minister, is doing with this report about the G20.
00:01:03.740She says on X, Canada leads the G20 with the strongest overall budget balance sheet, outpacing countries like Australia.
00:01:11.640We know that there is always more work to do to build an economy that delivers for every generation, so let's keep making Canada even better.
00:01:18.760I'm sorry, Canada's not better because we're slightly closer to a balanced budget than the US, Australia and the UK.
00:01:26.420Do you know why we're slightly closer to a balanced budget? It's not because of fiscal responsibility, it's because we jacked taxes up.
00:01:32.680In theory, we could have a perfectly conservative balanced budget. If the liberals just raised middle class income taxes by another 10% or 15%, we could be fully balanced.
00:01:42.840We could have a surplus. And as a conservative person, I actually really don't care that much about a balanced budget if the budget is being balanced off of the personal prosperity of individual Canadians.
00:01:54.140I think that the government should be getting control of its own spending, and when the spending is under control and taxes are low, then they can take pride in a balanced budget.
00:02:04.240A balanced budget is like a symptom of a good economy.
00:02:07.740If you just force the symptom to happen by jacking up taxes, I don't care about that.
00:02:12.860But Pascal St. Doge and other liberal ministers going around repeating little statistics like this, little minor who cares achievements that, wow, we're actually at the top for not having a high debt-to-GDP ratio, or we're getting really close to a balanced budget.
00:02:29.700Who cares? The economy sucks and taxes are high.
00:02:33.560But anyways, before I move on, I want to cover Christia Freeland saying some other stuff and just other nonsense I see liberals pushing to pretend the economy is better.
00:02:41.080I quickly want to plug the fact that I, Wyatt Claypool, am running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:02:47.820This is what the riding boundaries are now.
00:02:49.860So if you live in this riding, buy conservative federal membership, vote for me number one in your ballot, and visit my website in the description below, wyattclaypool.com.
00:02:59.100Anyways, but before I get to this Christia Freeland clip where she pretends that the carbon tax is actually making us super competitive and we're bringing in so many jobs,
00:03:06.580I hate this idea that, well, the liberals' current budget plan puts us on course to reducing our debt-to-GDP ratio.
00:03:15.180And it's like, I don't believe you, just because this budget, because we are taxing people more and ergo are reducing the deficit,
00:03:22.400that's not an achievement that in the long run it will reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio.
00:03:27.040Cool, but that's also requiring some Canadians to be having to pay well over 60% of their income in taxes.
00:03:34.100Also, that sort of, I would say, fake trend line that's assuming that we're going to be reducing the debt-to-GDP into 2028,
00:03:42.400that's the kind of stuff that we had been assuming would happen back in 2015, and then debt-to-GDP keeps going up,
00:03:48.700and every time the liberals put out a new budget, there's some random guy with his study online showing that right now,
00:03:55.000if we actually maintain this sort of spending, the debt-to-GDP will fall down.
00:03:58.700When have they ever actually gotten control of spending?
00:04:01.280You're just lying to yourself, or you're lying to other people knowing that whatever you're saying isn't true.
00:04:41.500But it's never happened in, like, the last 100 years that a liberal government gets control of spending outside of that crisis scenario in the 90s.
00:04:49.320And this is what I said in another video.
00:04:51.260I hate when I see liberals come out and say,
00:04:52.960we've actually reduced the amount of children in poverty in Canada by 2.3 million since 2015.
00:05:03.920What they did was they have an arbitrary metric for what makes children, like, poor or in poverty.
00:05:11.520And they have specifically addressed those couple of issues, even though, objectively, Canadian families are worse off than they were 10 years ago.
00:05:20.140How did we raise 2.3 million children out of poverty when the poverty rate of Canada has not been higher since Justin Trudeau took over?
00:05:30.500It's always on stupid metrics, like, well, you know, teenagers can access free contraceptives, and they can, like, get hygiene products, and they can get data plans from the government for phones.
00:07:14.340If you look at any of the charts of Canadian employment, our employment rate has actually, unemployment rate has been going up.
00:07:20.900The only way our employment rate looks somewhat good is if you minus off all the discouraged workers.
00:07:26.460The amount of discouraged workers in Canada is crazy.
00:07:28.980So the unemployment rate in some months will come down, but it's because people stopped looking for jobs.
00:07:33.540We did not add any jobs that month that would justify the unemployment rate falling because we're looking at in January, February, March.
00:07:41.560The net amount of jobs added was like nothing.
00:07:43.760Yet somehow the unemployment rate fell further because we are now considering people who've lost all hope to now no longer be an employment problem.
00:08:07.000People act like because it's the public sector, it holds up the public interest because it's called the public sector.
00:08:13.860No, bureaucracies, unions, everyone involved in the public sector, in government, has their own incentives that they follow.
00:08:22.240They have their own interests and they're not like nasty and terrible.
00:08:25.900They just have the incentives to create more work for themselves so they can justify higher pay and they can employ more people in their department.
00:08:33.740That is a major reason why the liberals want to keep the carbon tax.
00:08:36.480They have thousands of people who they employ, who support the liberal priority, and probably donate because they work in high-level bureaucratic jobs just administering the carbon tax, just administering universal dental and the pharmacore program.
00:08:50.020This allowed them to hire a ton more people even if they don't deliver a single free dental care plan.
00:09:16.540Yeah, thanks for helping crush more independent media.
00:09:33.760Even if Meta, who is still rightfully holding out, I can't access my Meta page, my Facebook page right now for the National Telegraph, I do not begrudge Mark Zuckerberg or the Meta team.
00:09:45.040It's not their fault that the liberals are trying to extort them.
00:09:48.140Even if they paid up, it wouldn't benefit Wyatt, and I'm just saying this on principle that I don't want them to pay.
00:09:53.220Even if they paid, I'm even slightly being selfish here.
00:09:56.000Even if they paid, I wouldn't get a cent of it because all the money would go to global, CBC, CTV, the legacy media outlets.
00:10:02.920What she has actually done is she has restricted the money that Google has to pay independent media outlets because it's saying that they need to pay the legacy media outlets more for their news.
00:10:13.860Only accredited media gets to actually access the money that the liberals are getting a hold of.
00:10:19.660So really, they're not actually taking money from Google.
00:10:21.920Google is just going to slash ad rates for websites like the National Telegraph and True North and Rebel News and Counter Signal and all the others, and then they're going to hand that money to the CBC.
00:10:36.560This is them giving already rich subsidized journalists who are making six figures for doing a terrible job, and they are giving them even more money that I would have previously earned.
00:10:46.400So I'm being selfish here, but I think it's still principled selfishness that, yes, it benefits me to not want Bill C-18 and Bill C-11 to be implemented, and especially Bill C-63.
00:10:57.080At the same time, it's just the right thing not to do this.
00:11:00.260It's the right thing not to curb algorithms for your media friends to force those companies to pay your media friends more who somehow can't manage a $1.4 billion budget without having to cut employees because these people have massive departments.
00:11:14.220And these, like, massive journalistic organizations that do nothing.
00:11:18.060This is the reason why, and this is turning into a rant, why Alberta, and I'm going to call out my own province of Alberta.
00:11:23.840Alberta, we spend the most per capita on health care, on education, and we have the longest wait times for a lot of procedures, and we have the biggest class sizes.
00:11:33.620It's because we actually don't spend that much on health care and education.
00:11:37.980We could literally cut the health care budget in Alberta by probably 20%, and we could have better health care because it's not about the dollars.
00:11:46.860And we spend half of our dollars in health care on people creating messes, creating paperwork, HR, administration, people who have nothing to do with actual health care delivery.
00:11:57.960I've heard from teachers themselves that about 10, 20 years ago, schools were one principal, one vice principal, some other support staff members, a superintendent who manages multiple school, like the school district and whatnot.
00:12:10.480And now what we have is like seven vice principals in schools, two co-principals, a bunch of extra support staff.
00:12:19.700And that's why we don't have like we don't have enough teachers to reduce class sizes because there's a lot of people incentivized not to teach, to get paid more, to be in these administrative jobs.
00:12:29.320And these administrative jobs tend to be things that the unions are actually in favor of, even though you think they'd be against management, because these jobs tend to be handed out to the most loyal Alberta Teachers Association members.
00:12:39.740This is how Janice Irwin, the current MLA in Edmonton, like Highlands Norwood, barely worked as a teacher.
00:12:46.120She became a vice principal almost immediately because she was a very, very key ATA asset.
00:12:51.320Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:12:54.120I don't want to go on too long about this topic since I know economics can kind of bore people.
00:13:00.280But plug again, I'm running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:13:04.960Check which ride you live in in the city of Calgary and buy a membership if you live in my area.
00:13:11.120And also, if you want to donate to the TNT Legal Fund, I have the Give, Send, Go link for that in the description underneath my website, whyclaypool.com.
00:13:19.940If you guys want to donate anything to that, it really helps us reduce the burden of costs that we've incurred from frivolous lawsuits from billionaire developers suing us for defamation that they cannot prove, have no evidence for,
00:13:30.220but are merely trying to attack us because they don't like independent media investigating things.