5 hours Ago By Lorne Gunter
Article content It’s not exactly as if the Liberal government’s $62-billion deficit went unnoticed on Monday, but amid the chaos touched off by the resignation of Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland it was easier to ignore the underlying question: How in hell does a government overshoot its spending target by $20 billion (55%) and miss balancing its annual budget by $61.9 billion? The Trudeau government’s expenditures are so out of control they likely couldn’t answer that question. They genuinely don’t know where all the money is going.
When the Liberals came to office in 2015, the federal government was spending $281 billion a year. As Monday’s fiscal update admitted, after nine years of Liberal profligacy this year Ottawa will spend $540 billion. That’s a 92% increase – almost double in less than 10 years.
Even after accounting for the rising cost of living and our rapidly expanding population, the federal government is now more than 30% larger than it was when Justin Trudeau came to office. The federal civil service has grown by more than 40%. Salaries and benefits to federal workers have grown by nearly 70% and pay to federal executives has risen 100%.
That is one of the ways you get into the spending mess the Liberals have created. This was a calculated attempt by the Liberals to expand the reach of the federal government into more and more aspects of Canadian life and business, even if they trampled the constitutional division of powers between the federal and provincial governments. But that still doesn’t paint the whole picture of how the Liberals have frittered away a record amount of tax dollars.
Let’s just pull out just one example of their screwy spending priorities from Monday’s fiscal update. In response to President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods if we don’t stem the flow of illegal drugs and immigrants into the States, on Monday the Liberals announced a $1.3-billion border security plan.
That sounds like a lot, but if you drill down into the charts and footnotes of the fiscal update, you find out that that spending is to be spread over six years, with most of the spending coming in Year 3 and beyond. By comparison, Monday’s fiscal update announced the government would spend an additional $600 million confiscating guns from law-abiding gun owners in an entirely useless attempt to stop street crime and gang violence. RECOMMENDED VIDEO While the border spending is spread over six years, the gun-grab money will all be spent this year and next.
Taking away guns from legitimate owners will solve nothing. Yet the Libs are committing roughly three times as much money to confiscation than to border security over the next two years. It’s a lot of budget items like that that spins federal spending out of control.
Of course, big things matter more. Average deficits are more than double what they were 10 years ago, even after factoring in inflation. That’s because even after topping all developed countries in per capita COVID spending, Trudeau and Freeland announced an industrial stimulus package that spent $100 billion over three years with little to show in new jobs or economic growth.
That kind of spending helped double the national debt under Trudeau, which drove up government borrowing, which triggered the inflation of 2021 to 2023. Now interest on the debt outpaces federal spending on health care and defence. Then there are the hundreds of billions spent on EVs, EV battery and car plants, charging stations and “green” energy such as wind turbines, solar panels.
In general, the Trudeau government’s screwy environmental policies have also driven away about $300 billion in investment from our economy and the tax money that would have come with it. That, and more, is how you expand a government as massively as the Liberals have yet have nothing but debt to show for it..
