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The fancy stats used by economists and business analysts are discouraging enough.
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Since the Liberals came to office in 2015, business investment per worker is down, productivity is down, per capita Gross Domestic Product has fallen for six consecutive quarters, living standards have fallen (especially relative to those in the U.S.) and Tuesday’s Liberal budget unleashed a capital gains tax grab that will scare away as much as $20 billion more in investment and new jobs.
And that list doesn’t include the $200 to $300 billion in energy investment the Trudeau government’s anti-oil and gas, anti-pipeline, anti-oilsands policies have cost the Canadian economy.
The budget contains $77 billion in new spending in the next four years, over and above what was projected in last year’s federal budget. And this year, the national debt will surpass $1.2 trillion, officially doubling since Justin Trudeau became prime minister.
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If your plan was to nosedive a major economy, you could not do it much faster or more thoroughly.
However, while those numbers paint a picture of a government that couldn’t find its economic cheeks with both hands reaching behind its back, they don’t truly explain what such “macro” indicators mean for ordinary Canadians.
So here are a few numbers to drive home the everyday reality of Liberal economic incompetence.
Since the Trudeau government has been in charge, rents and mortgage payments have doubled. According to the Royal Bank’s economic division, the percentage of an average Canadian family’s income needed to buy a home has gone from 44% in 2015 to 63% today.
While housing affordability has become an issue in the U.S., too, the percentage of the average American income needed to buy an average American home has only now reached the levels Canada’s was at when the Liberals took over.
Sure, some of this is due to mortgage rates more than tripling in the last three years. Yet even those higher rates owe much to Liberal overspending and the effect it has had on inflation and interest rates.
Ordinary Canadians simply have a whole lot less money to spend, not only on luxuries like vacations and recreation toys, but also on groceries, clothing, transportation and other necessities.
In 2015, when the Liberals came to power, the average individual income in Canada was $37,000. Today it is about $43,600. However, for that income to have kept pace with Liberal-manufactured inflation, it would have to be $46,800 today. It is $3,200 short of that total, meaning the average Canadian has lost 7% of their income to Trudeau’s economic policies, or about $300 a month.
I remember when I was a devoted backcountry hiker, the conservationists’ motto was “Leave things better than you found them.” By no stretch of the imagination could the Trudeau Liberals be judged to be good conservationists of the Canadian economy.
A lot of the above has to do with immigration. Opening the floodgate has driven up housing prices, in particular, and driven down per capita GDP. Who imagined it would be possible to admit nearly 1.4 million newcomers annually to an economy that is building only enough housing for about 250,000 a year? Of course, the supply became so scarce it sent prices through the roof.
But equally to blame have been the Liberals’ high-spending, high-inflation, virtue-signalling, anti-growth policies. They have been a disaster. Now the Liberals have a political crisis on their hands that requires immediate action if they are to survive the next election. So their solution? A budget full of, in the words of former Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge, “more handouts, higher taxes, mounting debt and interest costs.”
It should surprise no one, though, that the party that brought us ArriveCAN, passport chaos, failing dental care and day-care programs, the carbon tax, the housing crisis and an embarrassment of a foreign policy such be so bungling at managing the economy.
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