Just ... wow:
Deputy Finance Minister Chris Forbes yesterday refused to say who at his department agreed to hire a Brazilian contractor to mismanage a pandemic relief program. Auditors found widespread irregularities including padded timesheets and rates charged at up to $750 per hour: “They really did fail.”
It's just money:
🔥THE CANADIAN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DOLES OUT $102B PER YEAR (1/4 OF THE TOTAL BUDGET)
— Tablesalt 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@Tablesalt13) December 9, 2024
IN A OPAQUE SLUSH FUND TITLED "OTHER TRANSFER PAYMENTS"
This money is TAX-FREE, and only 1 list exists online....and its hard to find.
Heres where the money is going .....BUCKLE UP... a 🧵 pic.twitter.com/7Ik1YrIfOS
**
And how would we know that, Chrystia?:
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has not committed to meeting the $40.1-billion deficit target she set for the government last year, as the Liberal government appears to unshackle itself from constraints on spending ahead of a federal election.
Freeland said Tuesday she expects the fall economic statement, which she will present on Dec. 16, will show a declining debt-to-GDP ratio.
"In next week's fall economic statement, you will see that the government is maintaining its fiscal anchor. Specifically, reducing the federal debt as a share of the economy over the medium term," Freeland told reporters in a news conference.
Canada recorded a Government Debt to GDP of 107.50
percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product in 2023. Government Debt
to GDP in Canada averaged 81.57 percent of GDP from 1980 until 2023,
reaching an all time high of 118.20 percent of GDP in 2020 and a record
low of 44.90 percent of GDP in 1980.
Firstly, it’s true that the overall economy is growing and inflation has been brought back down to the Bank of Canada’s 2 per cent target. While these are positive signs—especially considering the alternative of a shrinking overall economy and rising inflation—they do not necessarily mean that Canadians are better off.
Gross domestic product (GDP)—the value of all goods and services produced in the economy—is the most widely used measure of overall economic prosperity. But measuring it in “aggregate” doesn’t tell us about the individual living standards of Canadians. To gauge how individual Canadians are actually doing, we measure GDP per person (and adjust for inflation). And on this measure, the data tell a different story.
From the middle of 2019 to the end of 2023, Canada experienced one of the worst declines in inflation-adjusted GDP per person of the last 40 years. According to new data from Statistics Canada, this decline in living standards has continued for most of 2024, and as of September 2024, GDP per person ($58,601) was 2.2 per cent lower than in June 2019 ($59,905). Simply put, Canadians have suffered a marked decline in living standards over five years.
And while GDP per person is a broad measure of individual prosperity, other measures tell a similar story.
According to a recent study published by the Fraser Institute, median earnings (i.e. wages and salaries) of workers were lower in every Canadian province than in every U.S. state in 2022 (the latest year of available data). In other words, workers in Canada’s highest-earning province (Alberta) earned less than workers in the lower-earning U.S. states such as Louisiana and Mississippi.
Moreover, Canada’s private-sector employment has stagnated. From 2019 to 2023 (the latest year of available data), employment in the private sector (including self-employment) grew by 3.6 per cent compared to 13.0 per cent in the government sector. And that’s a problem. The private sector pays for the government sector, primarily through taxes. While a growing private sector helps drive wealth-creation in the economy, a growing government sector extracts that wealth and redistributes it elsewhere or even inhibits that wealth-creation in the first place.
Despite data showing that private-sector employment and living standards have stagnated and/or declined for years, the Trudeau government insists that everything is fine and Canadians just “feel” worse off. Clearly, this government is out of touch with economic reality.
An Ontario court has tossed out Michael Chan’s nearly decade-old libel lawsuit against the Globe and Mail over reporting on the former provincial cabinet minister’s alleged ties to Chinese diplomats.
The Ontario Superior Court dismissed Chan’s case in August, Global News has learned, after Chan failed to submit documentation in a timely matter.
The case has dragged on since 2015, when the Globe reported the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was concerned about what it believed were Chan’s “unusually close” ties to the Chinese consulate in Toronto and worried he was under the influence of Beijing. Chan said at the time the allegations were unfounded.
Globe and Mail editor-in-chief, David Walmsley, and the publisher at the time, Phillip Crawley, were named in the suit, as was reporter Craig Offman. Offman is now Investigations editor with Global News, but did not edit this story.
Neither Walmsley nor Andrew Saunders, the Globe’s president and chief executive officer, responded to Global News’ requests for comment.
Chan, who is now deputy mayor of Markham, Ont., also did not return requests for comment last week.
The initial Globe and Mail story reported CSIS believed Chan had developed a “too close” relationship with the Chinese consulate in Toronto, and worried the then-minister was susceptible to Beijing’s influence.
On Tuesday, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said that Ottawa will continue to process Syrian refugee claims but will “monitor” the situation. “We don’t face that flow in Canada, I don’t know what rank they (Syrian refugees) occupy in terms of source countries for asylum seekers, but it’s pretty low,” Miller said. Canada has just shy of 1,600 pending refugee claims from Syria as of Sept. 30, while Germany has over 47,000.
The government’s response is predictable — and misguided. Canada took in 45,000 Syrian refugees between 2015 and 2020. The influx was highly politicized: in the 2015 election campaign, the image of Syrian refugee child Aylan Kurdi dead on a Turkish beach broke the internet and the hearts of Canadian voters. The Liberals accused Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper of dragging his feet on additional refugee admissions and promised to bring in 25,000. Following his election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a great show of greeting Syrian refugees at airports — and spending a lot of money to support them.
To date, Canada has spent $1 billion on humanitarian support for Syria, on top of the supports we provided government-sponsored refugees in Canada. Private Canadian sponsors also opened their hearts and homes to the newcomers, raising funds to give 18,000 a new life here, which wasn’t easy. Syrians had a tougher time than other communities: many spoke neither English or French and had difficulty finding housing for large families.
In short, we’ve done a lot. But Canada should now follow the lead of our European counterparts and end refugee applications from Syria. It’s not just about people who are already here, but there is concern that supporters of the Assad regime, including “terrorist fighters,” could now seek to escape. And while Syria’s transitional government, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, promises to treat minorities humanely, it could provoke another wave of refugees — at a time where Canada is already bracing for a tsunami of illegal migrants from the U.S., and our government is already preparing to spend a billion dollars to secure our borders.
Couple this with other Liberal Party failures.
What can go right?
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