There is no amount of money they WON'T take:
Federal debt servicing charges this year are up 80 percent from pre-pandemic levels in 2020, budget documents show. “We are investing,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland told the Commons.
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Upkeep of the Prime Minister’s 16-room lakeside residence is costing taxpayers almost $20,000 a month, records show. Expenses disclosed by cabinet carry vague budget line items like “snow and ice control” and “pest removal.”
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Cabinet is refusing to say how much it lost on a failed $200 million venture to build a vaccine factory in Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos’ Québec City riding. A factory executive earlier told MPs the company “spent all those monies” it received: “Wow. That’s great.”
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Cabinet will legislate lower internet fees if telecom companies don’t cut prices, says Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne. MPs ridiculed the claim after Champagne approved a $26 billion takeover of Shaw Communications of Calgary by its larger Toronto rival Rogers: “If we don’t see a drop in prices – ”
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Less than 24 hours after the confusion around the future of the $13 billion dental care program in the federal budget, Quebec wants out – but wants its share of the money.
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I wonder how close that comes to the amount Germany just pledged to hand over to Qatar for natural gas. It signed a multi-billion contract mere months after being driven out of Canada because there was “no business case” — as per our green PM — for the same deal here.
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The budget document notes that Canada's electricity demand is expected to double by 2050. Meeting that demand, the budget says, will require "massive investments" to ensure provincial and territorial electricity grids can support neighbourhoods where every garage might soon have an electric vehicle, and can supply energy-intensive industries like steel manufacturing as they switch from fossil fuels to electricity.
To unleash those investments, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland's fiscal plan offers a clean electricity investment tax credit worth $6.3 billion over four years, along with billions of dollars more for a suite of other tax credits and measures.
All told, the government plans on spending $20.9 billion in new money on growing the green economy.
A senior government official speaking on background called clean electricity "the backbone" of the federal government's plan to tackle climate change and keep Canada competitive in a low-carbon economy.
I'll just leave this right here:
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Just like last year, the budget did not have a dedicated section for agriculture or food, but it did offer one interesting attention-grabbing nugget. The so-called “grocery rebate,” a one-time payment, will help some, but only for a very short period, and food inflation will remain a challenge for all Canadians for quite some time. The government got cute by renaming the GST rebate, without providing the 11 million people receiving the payment any relief that was solely dedicated to healthy food purchases inspired by Canada’s Food Guide.
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The Parliamentary Budget Office yesterday confirmed the carbon tax represents a “net loss” for most Canadians even after federal rebates. The report is the second to contradict cabinet claims that taxpayers receive more in rebates called Climate Action Incentive payments than they pay in tax: “Claims that Canadians get more back in rebates for the failed carbon tax have been proven false.”
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“Most households will be worse off when you take into account this slightly lower economic activity,” he said. “So only the bottom quintile is better off but everybody else is likely worse.”The carbon tax is set to rise to $65 per tonne of carbon dioxide, starting April 1st, and will gradually go up by $15 every year to end up costing $170 per tonne on April 1st 2030.By then, the PBO’s report estimates that the net cost of the carbon tax – taking into account fiscal and economic impacts – will be $1,513 on average for Nova Scotians, $1,521 for Islanders and $1,316 for Newfoundlanders. The lowest income households will be receiving hundreds of dollars in rebates, but the cost grows as the household income is higher.
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Bill C-234, sponsored by Conservative MP Ben Lobb, passed third reading on March 29 by a vote of 176–146.Both the Bloc Québécois and the NDP voted in favour of sending the bill to the Senate for further consideration.Voting against the bill were 145 Liberal MPs along with Independent MP Han Dong, who recently resigned from the Liberal caucus amid allegations that he had advised a Chinese diplomat in Toronto in 2021 that Beijing should delay releasing detained Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.However, the Liberals did not whip the vote, as three of the party’s East Coast MPs voted in favour of the bill.Green Party MPs Elizabeth May and Mike Morrice also voted in favour.Bill C-234 aims to amend the 2018 Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act to “expand the definition of eligible farming machinery and extend the exemption for qualifying farming fuel to marketable natural gas and propane.”Speaking in the House a year ago after moving that the bill be read a second time and referred to a committee, Lobb said an increase to the carbon tax would hike natural gas and propane price rates, which in turn would affect farmers who use both to “dry grain and heat livestock barns where there may be a variety of livestock.”“The problem is with the current carbon tax on these areas,” Lobb said on March 25, 2022.
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When Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland presented the federal budget, the most obvious fact was the size of the deficit. It came in at $40.1 billion, after having been forecast at “only” $30.6 billion in the fall economic update less than six months ago. What caused the deficit to shoot up $9.5 billion in such a short period of time?Some analysts pointed to supply-and-confidence deal between the Liberals and the NDP, which has led to increases for health and dental care. Others pointed to lower-than-expected tax revenues caused by an unexpected slowdown in the economy. Both lines of analysis are correct, but many things can be true at the same time in the complex world of public finance.In fact, commentators have overlooked an important cause of the rising deficit—namely, the government’s expenditure on indigenous programs. The indigenous spending total in fiscal 2021-22 was about $25 billion compared to more than $29 billion in 2023-24, an increase of $4 billion in two fiscal years. To put things in proportion, that $4 billion growth is equal to 40 percent of the estimated increase in the overall deficit booked in the last five months.Moreover, the ever-increasing cost of indigenous programs has been an important factor in the deficits the Trudeau government has ran since taking office in late 2015. Earlier that year, the Conservative government brought in a balanced budget, and indigenous spending in fiscal 2015-16 was about $11 billion. Under Liberal stewardship, it’s grown to more than $29 billion in Budget 2023, for an increase of roughly $18 billion. The government, which has the exact numbers, calculates the percentage growth as 156 per cent. Over the same period, the budgetary estimate of overall federal spending has grown from $289 billion to $497 billion, for an increase of $208 billion or 72 per cent. Thus, indigenous spending has been increasing more than twice as fast as overall federal spending since 2015.Another way to look at this picture is to note that indigenous spending has increased by approximately $18 billion since 2015, while the deficit has gone from zero to $40.1 billion. Thus, the increase in annual indigenous spending is equal to about 45 percent of the federal deficit forecast in Budget 2023. Even though Indigenous spending comprises only about 6 percent of total federal spending, its growth is having an outsized influence on the growth of the deficit. In simplest terms, the government is borrowing money to pay for all its promises to indigenous peoples—hardly a good example of fiscal discipline for First Nations. Well-run First Nations, such as Fort McKay or Westbank, who always balance their books, could teach the Trudeau government a thing or two about budget discipline.The meteoric rise of the indigenous spending envelope is bound to continue because of commitments the government is making to pay reparations for alleged historical grievances. It started in 2007 with a $5 billion-plus settlement for Indian Residential Schools, followed by several other negotiated settlements for different forms of Indian education, piling up an additional $7 billion in payouts. But those settlements have been dwarfed by three others in different fields, adding up to almost $50 billion—child adoption (the so-called Sixties Scoop), drinkable water, and foster care (for an unbelievable $40 billion).These payouts will all eventually go through the federal budget in the indigenous envelope. They will be hard to track, because they’re spread over years as individual claims are filed and processed, and as related spending promises are implemented. But they will inexorably swell the annual spending total for indigenous programs.Other claims remain in the pipeline, such as a class action over the quality of care in Indian hospitals. And new claims are being filed every year as class action law firms exploit this new line of business. At this point, is impossible to estimate the total fiscal impact except to say that it’s huge.Indigenous spending will continue to spiral out of control until the federal government develops a backbone and starts saying no to alleged historical grievances. We can’t afford to keep raking over the past, borrowing tens of billions of dollars to pay for claims of what allegedly happened decades ago when social mores were different.
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