Western Standard - July 23, 2022


Franco Terrazzano of the CTF on our latest tax burdens

Topics
pay raises and bonuses inflation in Canada
Mentioned
Corey Justin Trudeau Franco Tiff Macklin COVID-19 Derek
All talk, no action plan of establishment candidates for the UCP leadership Dave Makichuk on things from air travel to military gear

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

189.93

Word count

2,888

Sentence count

184

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Trudeau government is celebrating a big carbon tax rebate, but it s actually costing Canadian families a lot more than they are getting back. And it s not just rebates, it s a second carbon tax coming in 2030 that could be even worse.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 Kind of what first caught my eye this week, though, you've always got lots to cover, lots to say.
00:00:03.800 Unfortunately, in some ways, you know, you're like a firefighter.
00:00:07.060 You kind of wish you didn't have to do your job, but it needs to be done there.
00:00:11.200 And the government makes sure that you've got employment security because they're always wasting our tax dollars.
00:00:15.820 But the big carbon tax rebate, you know, they almost made it celebratory.
00:00:19.360 Look, everybody happy. Look at all the money coming back to you.
00:00:23.360 Not quite the windfall for people in reality that they like to make it out to be.
00:00:27.880 Yeah, that's right. I mean, it turns out that the Trudeau government isn't exactly being honest with Canadians.
00:00:34.900 Corey, I know you're shocked, but the Trudeau government is claiming that families are going to be made better off with its carbon tax and rebate scheme.
00:00:43.580 But hold on a second, because the government's own independent watchdog, the parliamentary budget officer, is showing that the federal government is using magic math.
00:00:51.900 So the carbon tax this year will cost the average household anywhere from about three hundred dollars all the way to six hundred and seventy dollars, even after accounting for the rebates.
00:01:03.280 Again, that's according to the parliamentary budget officer.
00:01:05.740 So the Trudeau government is telling us one thing and the government's own independent watchdog is saying, no, no, no, that's not true.
00:01:11.640 The carbon tax will cost the average family hundreds of dollars, even with the rebate.
00:01:18.000 And best of all, of course, that we always talk about, how well has it worked on reducing emissions so far?
00:01:24.380 Yeah, not well at all. Not well at all.
00:01:26.600 The carbon tax is not this low cost environmental plan.
00:01:31.180 The carbon tax is a high cost tax tax plan.
00:01:35.180 I mean, the Western standard, let's talk about the most Western province in Canada, British Columbia.
00:01:40.960 It has had the highest carbon tax in the nation for years and emissions continue to go up.
00:01:47.580 Data on Trudeau's first year of the national carbon tax shows that emissions went up there.
00:01:54.520 OK, so there's two claims that the federal government is really misleading Canadians on.
00:01:59.460 Number one is they're trying to sell Canadians that this is an environmental plan.
00:02:03.340 Well, if you look at the data, it's pretty clear that it's not an environmental plan.
00:02:07.080 It's a tax plan.
00:02:08.280 The second misleading claim is that they're trying to make Canadians think that you're going to be better off with these rebates than you are paying the carbon tax.
00:02:15.240 And of course, that's not the truth.
00:02:17.140 The carbon tax, even with rebates, is costing those average households hundreds of dollars every year.
00:02:23.660 And this is a time when we can ill afford to be doing that.
00:02:27.340 And of course, we got the other hidden and second carbon taxes that are going to keep slapping on and piling on with this.
00:02:32.320 I mean, this isn't just a static thing.
00:02:34.180 This is the sort of thing that keeps going up every year, right?
00:02:37.120 Well, OK, so there's a lot to break down there.
00:02:39.780 So, number one, you're right.
00:02:41.320 The carbon tax is only going to get worse and worse because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he'll keep cranking up his carbon tax to nearly 40 cents per litre by 2030.
00:02:52.340 So this is what that means.
00:02:53.760 It means that from now through 2030, the carbon tax and rebate will still cost an average household anywhere between $6,400 if you're living in Manitoba, all the way up to $13,000 if you're living in Alberta.
00:03:09.500 And again, that's after accounting for the rebate.
00:03:11.780 And that's the government's own independent watchdog's numbers.
00:03:14.480 But, Corey, you know what else this isn't considering?
00:03:18.660 The second carbon tax.
00:03:20.520 We just saw the regulations that the federal government released of its second carbon tax through fuel regulations that will be coming into effect next year.
00:03:30.440 Now, here's what happens with the second carbon tax.
00:03:33.420 If companies can't reduce the carbon content of their fuel, if they can't meet Trudeau's requirements, they have to pay a second carbon tax.
00:03:42.520 But the government's own research shows that it's going to be consumers who get hammered from the second carbon tax.
00:03:50.240 It could add up to 13 cents per litre extra by 2030.
00:03:54.720 There's no rebates with the second carbon tax.
00:03:57.360 And, Corey, I know I'm going on, but one more point.
00:03:59.720 The government knows exactly who the second carbon tax is really going to impact.
00:04:04.960 If you read their own impact analysis, it shows that it's lower- and middle-income Canadians who are going to get the brunt of this.
00:04:12.080 It's the single moms. 1.00
00:04:13.660 It's the people who are already struggling with energy poverty.
00:04:16.840 It's those seniors who are living on fixed incomes who the second carbon tax is really going to punish. 0.96
00:04:23.700 Well, that's it.
00:04:24.800 I mean, you know, inflation alone is already beating on people in that situation.
00:04:28.840 And they just get their unreasonable requests.
00:04:31.460 You know, well, the single parent should just ride the bus. 1.00
00:04:33.960 Oh, that's great to take the kids to school, to soccer practice, pick up your groceries, go across town, go to work, come back.
00:04:40.440 It's not realistic.
00:04:42.140 But, you know, it's funny.
00:04:43.040 Our woke government likes to throw out the word privilege all the time.
00:04:46.640 But a lot of those ones bringing that down on everybody, it's because they're in such a place of privilege.
00:04:52.220 I don't think they understand the hardships they cause on working Canadians when they do this sort of thing.
00:04:57.380 Corey, I have to pick up right there.
00:04:59.780 There's two things.
00:05:00.720 Number one, I think we have to stop pretending like these high gas prices are an accident.
00:05:06.380 They're not an accident.
00:05:07.220 Every time the Trudeau liberals are passing by a gas station, they must be patting themselves on the back because these high gas prices are exactly what the Trudeau government has been pushing for with its carbon tax hikes, with its second carbon tax hikes, with its attacks on the energy industry that reduces supply.
00:05:24.560 No more pipelines law, discriminatory tanker ban.
00:05:26.900 Corey, you know I can go on and on and on.
00:05:30.040 But one thing we have to talk about here is what you just said.
00:05:33.280 It's the people who are inflicting this pain that seem to be shielded from the pain.
00:05:38.360 And Corey, here's the perfect example.
00:05:40.400 The Bank of Canada has one job.
00:05:42.940 Keep inflation around 2%.
00:05:44.560 And what did we just find out?
00:05:46.480 We just found out that the Bank of Canada has been busy handing out $45 million in bonuses and pay raises during the pandemic when it obviously failed to keep inflation low.
00:05:59.180 Yeah, and I mean, you know, it's been said by a lot.
00:06:02.100 Like, we saw this coming.
00:06:03.320 We were talking about this long ago.
00:06:04.980 I mean, if the Bank of Canada was going to be responsible, they should have been starting to creep up then the prime interest rate six, eight months ago, rather than suddenly coming in with a hammer at this point.
00:06:16.220 And as you said, they're kind of patting themselves on the back now with bonuses for having dropped the ball.
00:06:20.380 Well, look, at best, at best, the Bank of Canada failed to keep a lid on these rising prices.
00:06:28.280 But at worst, it is actually driving the inflation by printing hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air.
00:06:34.320 I mean, the Bank of Canada had its money printer on overdrive during the pandemic.
00:06:39.860 It's printed $300 billion out of thin air.
00:06:43.540 And, Corey, I mean, like, come on.
00:06:45.620 Every layman even understands this, is that if you increase the supply of money, the value of each unit goes down.
00:06:53.660 Right?
00:06:53.880 So, come on, like, the Bank of Canada needs to do a better job.
00:06:57.720 In fact, the deputy governor of the Bank of Canada admitted that they failed to hit their inflation target.
00:07:03.800 So, if you have one of the leaders in the Bank of Canada who's admitting that they failed to hit their inflation target, well, then why are they handing out pay raises and bonuses?
00:07:13.060 I mean, it really doesn't make sense from the perspective of the Canadians whose money relies on the central bank to actually do their job right.
00:07:21.460 Yeah, but that goes to show kind of government versus private sector, right?
00:07:25.920 Like, if I underperformed and I was sourcing columns that were poorly read and my show ratings were crap and our advertisers are fleeing, I know that Derek, if he doesn't fire me, he's at least, he's not going to give me any raises or bonuses.
00:07:40.480 I mean, it just doesn't work that way.
00:07:43.020 But in government, I also, we have the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the ones who want to come after our home equity, they all got bonuses.
00:07:50.100 And CBC executives who came begging for a bailout during the pandemic, they're all getting bonuses.
00:07:56.440 So, I mean, there's definitely two classes in this country and it's between the private and public sectors.
00:08:01.600 Yeah, that's exactly right, Corey.
00:08:03.100 I mean, it's really unfortunate to say this, but we have seen the tale of two pandemics.
00:08:07.860 One pandemic was full of absolute pain by the private sector.
00:08:12.840 So many people.
00:08:13.580 I mean, I was in Calgary, you're in Calgary.
00:08:16.800 How many friends and family members and neighbors do we have who took a pay cut, who may have lost their job, who may have lost their small business and the life savings with it?
00:08:25.540 But then in government, there were no pay cuts.
00:08:28.060 Where were the pay cuts in government?
00:08:29.180 There weren't.
00:08:29.780 There was pay raises.
00:08:30.760 There was bonuses.
00:08:32.140 There was overtime pay.
00:08:34.400 There was all of this, right?
00:08:35.420 And you're touching on an important point here, and that's that taxpayers are being forced to pay for poor performance.
00:08:44.320 The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, they have one objective, housing affordability.
00:08:50.080 Okay, well, home prices went up by 13% in 2020.
00:08:53.160 Home prices went up by another 21% in 2021.
00:08:56.600 So then why did they hand out $60 million in bonuses and pay raises during those years?
00:09:01.900 Let's look at the federal government.
00:09:03.140 They handed out, what, $171 million in bonuses during the pandemic?
00:09:09.300 But the departments failed to meet half of their own performance objectives.
00:09:13.400 Corey, on top of that, the Fed's also handed out $1.6 billion in overtime pay since 2019.
00:09:21.800 So we're spending buckets of cash hiring new bureaucrats, buckets of cash paying for overtime bonuses, pay raises, and we can't even get the government to meet its own performance objectives.
00:09:31.480 Well, yeah, I mean, some of those material things we can see with government services, we're hearing about all the crisis that's going on.
00:09:38.180 People can't get their passports renewed.
00:09:39.880 As simple as renewing a government document that they've been doing since Confederation, we've had passports.
00:09:45.860 And they still apparently can't figure out how to renew them.
00:09:48.480 And we've got millions of people in immigration now on a backlog.
00:09:52.660 Like, the government's spending more and more, and we're getting less and less.
00:09:56.500 Yeah, you know, I can't believe we have to say this, Corey, but bonuses and pay raises are for when you do a good job.
00:10:02.520 But, like, these departments, the Bank of Canada, the CMHC, they're not doing a good job.
00:10:08.280 Why are they getting pay raises and bonuses?
00:10:10.320 And if you just give bonuses away like you're giving away participation ribbons, is it really a bonus or is it just a slush fund, right?
00:10:17.420 But here's the thing.
00:10:19.680 I mean, in the private sector, if you were to fumble the ball like the government is in many of these departments and crown corporations, you'd probably get shown the door, to your point, not be showing a huge bonus check.
00:10:33.080 So, I mean, it's so frustrating from taxpayers' perspective.
00:10:36.900 But, Corey, you know who we should really be looking at here is our politicians in Ottawa.
00:10:41.980 What are they doing?
00:10:43.100 We pay them six figures to actually protect the public purse, if I could say that.
00:10:49.440 But what are they doing?
00:10:50.380 I haven't heard any members of Parliament really make a stink about all these pay raises, all these bonuses.
00:10:55.920 I mean, I've seen a few, but not many.
00:10:58.800 Well, that's it.
00:10:59.660 I mean, we're seeing excuses coming hard and heavy for inflation.
00:11:02.280 They like to keep pretending it's a global thing.
00:11:04.180 We can't do anything about it.
00:11:05.580 I mean, there's a little bit of degree.
00:11:07.120 Okay, there's some things that are going to be beyond their control.
00:11:09.800 But still, there are things they can do to mitigate it.
00:11:12.520 And as you said, the Bank of Canada pouring more and more money into the mix is doing that.
00:11:18.140 But, I mean, we aren't even hearing a whisper from the federal government of getting spending under control.
00:11:22.320 So, I can't see how this is going to change.
00:11:25.240 Well, Corey, I'm so glad you brought that up.
00:11:27.180 I mean, yeah, you're right.
00:11:28.220 Other countries are going to see massive inflation when other countries do crazy things like run unbelievable amount of deficits or have their money printing on overdrive as well.
00:11:37.740 When other countries do that, surprise, surprise, they're going to get the same bad results.
00:11:42.800 And look, yes, global prices or prices are going up around the globe, but Canada isn't exactly doing well.
00:11:51.620 Okay, if you look at the International Monetary Fund, they track consumer price increases around the world.
00:11:57.160 In 2021, only three of 35 industrialized countries had higher inflation than Canada.
00:12:05.940 So, Canada had, what, higher inflation than 31 other industrialized countries, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.
00:12:14.360 So, it's not like the Bank of Canada Governor, Tiff Macklem, can just shrug off this inflation and say, oh, it's just a global phenomenon, because clearly Canada is not doing good.
00:12:23.180 It's not like we're Hong Kong, which is 1.8% inflation.
00:12:27.420 It's not like we're Japan, which is close to about 2.5% inflation.
00:12:31.700 It's not even like we're Switzerland, which is close to, what, 3.4% inflation.
00:12:35.900 Canada just announced 8.1% inflation, which is the highest annual increase since 1983, Corey.
00:12:46.300 Yeah, I mean, if our currency starts losing value, and that's the reality of what inflation is, that's completely within the control of the government.
00:12:53.240 I mean, if there's a loss of purchasing power because of internationally traded commodities like oil and gas, then, yeah, there's only limited things they can do.
00:13:00.680 But there are things within their control, and as you said, when you can point out exceptions with other countries that aren't suffering by this, their excuse starts to fall pretty hollow. 0.99
00:13:08.260 I mean, just because 100 countries are doing a stupid thing doesn't mean it's not still a stupid thing. 0.99
00:13:13.500 $300 billion. 1.00
00:13:15.260 What do you think happens when you print up $300 billion out of thin air, right?
00:13:19.820 That's the problem, is that you have the government that can print $300 billion out of thin air, but you can't just go around printing new farmland or printing new homes out of thin air.
00:13:29.380 So you end up with the perfect storm for inflation, which is too many dollars chasing too few goods, right?
00:13:36.000 We know that that's what happens when you print up a whole bunch of money and you just throw it into the economy.
00:13:42.260 Now, that's exacerbated by the fact that we just went through two years of revolving government lockdowns, which mean that we just can't continue to create as many goods that money could buy during that time, right?
00:13:55.820 So the perfect storm for inflation was created by Canadian governments.
00:14:00.320 Are there many other factors that influence prices?
00:14:03.360 Sure.
00:14:04.140 But we can't let our government off the hook for this mess that they have, at least in part, created.
00:14:11.100 Well, I know you guys won't let them off the hook. 0.98
00:14:13.780 And of course, I love hanging them on the hook whenever possible.
00:14:17.400 But all the same, let's hope we see some positive change.
00:14:20.380 I guess the starts to at least just keep pointing it out and driving it home to people that they got to tell their elected members to change their bloody behavior.
00:14:27.740 So where can people find more information on what you guys are up to and what you're doing, Franco?
00:14:31.900 Well, you know what?
00:14:33.360 I would recommend that all your listeners pick up the phone or send an email to your member of parliament and ask them what they've done during COVID-19 with their pay raises.
00:14:41.120 Because all members of parliament have been busy giving themselves three pay raises during the pandemic.
00:14:46.180 So I would love to encourage your audience maybe to give them an earful.
00:14:49.820 But please, please, please, please check us out at taxpayer.com.
00:14:52.840 We've got petitions you can sign and you can follow all of our work in the newsroom tab.
00:14:57.600 Right on.
00:14:58.260 Well, thanks for the latest update and, well, I'm sure you'll have nothing but a bunch of positive news the next time we get you on.
00:15:05.160 Yeah, don't hold me to that, Corey.
00:15:07.140 All right.
00:15:07.980 Well, I'll let you go and get back to work there.
00:15:09.960 Thanks, Franco.
00:15:10.540 And I'll talk to you soon.
00:15:11.920 See you later.