Bob Newhart is one of the greatest comedians of all time. I’m not sure how active he is these days (he’s 94), but his deadpan delivery of comedy routines back in the day was priceless — such as in 1997, when his Dr. Switzer character advised a patient troubled by a persistent fear of being buried alive in a box to simply “Stop it!”.
But a worthy rival to Newhart surfaced this week in the unlikeliest of places: Canada’s House of Commons. In offering up the details of her government’s latest budget, Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland put on a display of comedic genius. With a perfectly straight face she said:
“We are making life cost less.”
A genuine side-splitter, that was. An absolute howler. A jest for the ages.
“Making life cost less.” Bahahahahahaha!!
This with inflation at twenty year highs, with people struggling to pay for groceries and to put gas in the car (and sometimes choosing between the two), with more than half of Canadians living paycheque to paycheque and just one unexpected expense away from disaster, and with our national debt more than doubling in the last decade to $1.4 trillion (the annual interest costs, at $54 billion, are more than the feds spend each year on health care).
Freeland continued her comedy routine:
“Millennials and Gen Z Canadians, we want them to look forward to the future with a sense of anticipation, not angst.”
Angst? What angst? She was joking (again), surely. Young adults can’t actually be that worried about inflation and all that debt. Nor can they be overly fussed about whether or not they can ever buy a home. Because what’s the point of angst, when things are hopeless?
Home prices under this Liberal administration have skyrocketed so far out of reach that the best shot at ownership for non-trust-fund-endowed young adults is to hope that doctors unlock the key to immortality — because it’ll take roughly 300 years to save up a downpayment on that crappy half-duplex in East Van.
But never fear, millennials and Gen Z-ers! The Libs have solutions to the very problems they’ve spend nine years creating. And, surprise(!), it’s more of the same: more borrowing and printing money with reckless abandon and dispensing it with epileptic glee.
More than $50 billion in new spending! Free daycare! Free dental care! Free phamaceuticals! Free school lunches! Free, free, free!
“We are doing this,” Freeland said, “Because a fair chance to build a good, middle class life — to do as well as your parents, or grandparents, or better — has always been the promise of Canada.”
Ah, yes the middle class.
Remember the eminent Bill Morneau, Ms. Freeland’s predecessor as finance minister? In 2017 and 2018 he couldn’t open his mouth without the words “middle class” spilling out unbidden. (The full phrase, on auto-repeat, was “the middle class, and those working hard to join it.”)
Morneau eventually left government (in disgust, it’s been said, at the policies he was forced to parrot by his own government) and disappeared almost as completely as the French villa he once misplaced.
But he surfaced this week to excoriate his successor’s budget. Per the CBC: “Bill Morneau slams Freeland's budget as a threat to investment, economic growth.” (The CBC, naturally, was allocated $42 million of gravy in this budget — on top of the $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars they already burn through each year — to help offset job cuts, even as its stupendously well-paid executives dished out fat taxpayer-funded bonuses to themselves for continuing to mismanage a media outlet that no one watches or listens to anymore.)
It turns out that despite all the striving to join it, and despite the continuous, effusive commitment of the Trudeau government to all those strivers, the middle class isn’t doing so hot: it’s shrinking instead of growing. And not because people have climbed upwards to join the rich. The mobility is downward: we’ve scored bragging rights in the wrong direction, with 14 per cent of us classified as poor, versus the OECD average of 11 per cent.
But again: per Freeland this week, she and her government have solutions to all the problems they’ve created. Hardy har har. Really funny stuff. Get this woman a gig on late night after she’s finished in politics. Which she certainly will be next fall, along with the rest of her cronies, notwithstanding their latest gambit to soak the rich.
It’s not enough to print money and to borrow great gobs of it, you see. The rich must be taxed, and taxed, and taxed. Because they’re “not paying their fair share”, don’t you know… And we can’t have all the above-mentioned “free” stuff without pilfering dough from those greedy bastards. (The fact that the top twenty percent of Canadian earners already pay fifty percent of the taxes is a reality best ignored.)
Hence the move to increase the “inclusion rate” on capital gains, which we’re assured will affect only 0.13 per cent of Canadians. Barely mentioned is the impact on more than 300,000 corporations, many of them small businesses run by plumbers, electricians, accountants, and the like — hard-working individuals doing their level best to earn a living for their families and their employees and to build somewhat of a nest egg for their retirement, since they have no access to the gold-plated indexed-to-inflation taxpayer-funded pensions enjoyed by civil servants and especially by politicians. (The Libs, unsurprisingly, have just proposed knocking next year’s election date back by a week so as to maximize the number of MPs eligible to feed at that trough after they’re kicked out of office.)
In Prime Minister Trudeau’s view, the economy is “tipped” in favour of all those small business owners, and “We’re going to make them pay.”
(Full disclosure: doctors, of which I am one, are among those getting nailed. Physicians negotiated the ability to incorporate years ago in lieu of fee increases, as a mechanism for saving for retirement — like private-sector plumbers and electricians, we have no government-provided benefits. That’s all I’ll say about that here, because the topic of doctor pay, in my experience, is about as popular as a big fart in a small elevator.)
It’s fitting, perhaps, in the context of the capital gains grab, that the arcane term “inclusion” is front and centre. This administration is absolutely welded to the notion of “inclusivity”, along with “diversity” and “equity”. It’s all “DEI” all of the time. Check out this chart from this week’s budget document, which lays out how much our government is spending to “support inclusion” and “combat hate.”
It’s working out great, isn’t it? The country has never been so divided, or so angry.
And meanwhile, we’re DIE-ing economically. Respected economist Jack Mintz in the Financial Post yesterday:
“Factor out population growth and Canada’s real GDP “growth” per capita has been negative 2.5 per cent — a number mentioned nowhere in the budget. Even Carolyn Rogers, deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, recently called our weak economic performance an economic emergency — and bank officials are always extremely careful about their choice of words.”
Mintz marked the budget with a big fat “F”. And that’s not “F” for funny.
As Warren Kinsella put it so aptly on Twitter yesterday:
A diaper the size of the universe wouldn’t suffice to contain the fiscal incontinence of this administration. I use the diaper analogy advisedly — because the behaviour and performance of a government headed by a man who believes that “budgets balance themselves” and who doesn’t “think about monetary policy” can only be described as infantile.
“Budgeting” is generally understood, by normal people, as a mechanism for carefully assessing revenue and expenses, to ensure that there is enough of the former to cover the latter.
But not so with these clowns. These aren’t normal people. With them it’s an opportunity to arrogantly display how wildly they can spend other people’s money in the process of lying and bribing their way to re-election.
And in the process we’re being buried alive in an immense box of debt.
Like most Canadians, I desperately wish the Liberals would “stop it!”
A couple of years back the government, in all its great wisdom, decided to greatly tighten up the rules governing the amount of money your corporation could make at the lower tax rate. If you were making money as a doc, incorporated, later in career so retirement investments were making a lot per year your tax rate went as high as 75% if you dared to work a lot and make a lot of money. I know numerous docs who said f-it, I just won't bother working as much.
Docs who work part time were not affected. It was the hard-working, productive ones who were. When 75% of your income disappears, at some point people say "uncle" and just give up. We are punishing hard work and productivity.
I've had an attitude correction over the last few years. Back in the day I was--not happy exactly--but willing to pay taxes believing it was my duty as a citizen of the country to do my bit to keep it running. But I've been thoroughly cured of that and my new attitude is dripping with resentment at the smirking morons who have their hands in our wallets and bank accounts and throw what they steal at wars and raises for themselves and drugs that have created a health crisis like we haven't seen before. Collective resistance is needed. Unfortunately, I actually know some people (who I thought were intelligent) who turn a blind eye to the corruption. Unbelievable.