It's Just Money

Just print some more of it:

Issues of spending and debt rightly dominate the budget and certainly deserve attention. By my tabulation, between 2019 and 2026 the annual Liberal budget deficits (as per Table A1.4) totals $725.5 billion, exactly $1-billion per page of the budget. The net federal debt will almost double to $1.5-trillion. As the nearby graph shows, that works out to $38,000 for every man, woman and child, up from $21,000 in the last Liberal budget, an increase of $17,000.

The claim is that the great federal spending machine will boost economic growth. One graph in the budget claims that improving potential GDP growth by about 1.1 percentage points per year “would increase per capita GDP by about $6,000.” Which is not a lot considering that the $6,000 output gain per capita means it will take a few years to recoup the $17,000 in new debt per capita.

The overall premise behind the Liberal government’s economic policy and budget is that the Canadian economy needs restructuring — perestroika in Russian — reorganizing and renewal around new social infrastructures — child care and minimum wage laws and a new carbon-free physical infrastructure.

When Soviet President Gorbachev attempted to reform the Soviet economy in the 1980s, his motivation mirrors the claims of the new Liberal reform plans. The Soviet problem was to overcome deteriorating economic and social conditions. Growth rates had slowed, inequality increased and the social needs of the people were not being met.

But you can still make a failed plan work, right?

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Cabinet will levy a $175 million a year equity tax on foreign offshore owners of Canadian residential real estate. A similar British Columbia tax in 2019 was upheld as constitutional by the B.C. Supreme Court: “This is a fairly new concept.”

Or foreigners could simply not buy houses in Canada and drive up prices to the extent where citizens can't buy houses in the country that they live in.