Western Standard - November 03, 2026


Is Your GST Paying Ottawa's Interest Bill？

Alberta Voted for Immigration Reform. So Where Are the Bills？ What do the US midterms mean for Trump and Canada？

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

197.29

Word count

209

Sentence count

11


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 And look, I want to go back to a point that you just made about how interest charges are
00:00:04.020 a complete waste of money.
00:00:05.300 Let me just lay down a little bit more of the facts here, okay?
00:00:09.140 The federal government will waste more money paying interest on the debt than what it sends
00:00:13.500 to the provinces in healthcare transfers this year.
00:00:16.120 Or think about it this way, the next time you're in that checkout line, every dollar
00:00:19.840 you pay in federal sales tax is going to pay interest on the debt.
00:00:23.900 Okay, so let's just let that sink in for a second here and think of what we could do
00:00:27.680 if we weren't wasting all this money servicing the federal debt?
00:00:31.920 We could essentially double healthcare spending,
00:00:34.300 or we could completely eliminate the GST, right?
00:00:37.760 Wouldn't that go a long way?
00:00:39.160 And before you even think that the biggest threat to a government program is ideology,
00:00:46.180 it's not.
00:00:46.800 The biggest threat to a government program are those interest charges.
00:00:50.660 If you don't believe me, just ask the Saskatchewan NDP of the 1990s
00:00:54.920 What happens when interest charges balloon out of control?
00:00:58.140 Of course, that provincial government was forced to close down dozens of hospitals across the province.