27 Replies to “It’s Probably Nothing”

  4. Cut jobs-
    Increase taxes and energy cost-
    Spend more money for Liberal Provisional Government Projects.
    –
    Nowhere near 19 trillion but give the Camp Counselor a few more years to work on it.

  6. Excessive debt drains taxpayer dollars down the interest rate hole. This is a fact.
    However while pondering the chart Kate posted it just occurred to me that there is something more insidious going on. Debt allows governments to create policy that on the surface appears to work but is in fact fundamentally flawed. Overpaid civil servants, subsidies for green energy, lack of accountability for First Nations, these are all policies that are ultimately fueled with debt and that are fundamentally flawed. In other words the Trudeau motto should be “Bad policy? Not to worry, just print money.”
    Here in BC we have another good example. Government-owned BC Hydro is massively in debt and this has served to mask just how politicized the corporation has become, and how poorly it has been managed. The current CEO of BC Hydro is a political hack with a degree in political science – what more do you need to know.
    It should be illegal for governments and crown corporations to incur debt except for capital expenditures, and only if those expenditures pass a rigorous accounting analysis. The exception to this would be if the country were at war.
    My children and future grandchildren are getting saddled with interest payments for bad policies that they did not even vote for.
    Were I running for Conservative Party leader these are the sorts of things I would say.

  7. Didn’t you know that government debt doesn’t really exist ? My Marxist college professor “taught” our class that governments can simply print more money … and the debt simply “goes-away”. And … he added … we should cut all military spending

  8. The debt has increased steadily for the last ten years no matter who is in power. Colour me shocked! Debt is the one bi-partisan effort that politicians eagerly get behind.

  9. Yes, and to the Marxist prof, no worries let’s look at real (after inflation) data to cut through the noise. It’s not a pretty story.
    Justin Trudeau and his father are bookends of the same problem. The fatal conceit of government virtue that leads to ruinous borrowing when the economy and the taxpayer refuse to play along with elitist visions of a just society where government refuses to get out of the way.
    There were two major run ups in debt in the last 90 years or so. First was the sharp, but short lived debt to help pay for WW2.
    Short lived so consistent with liberalism. But the progressive forces of envy and redistribution lurked, looking for a standard bearer. Enter PET.
    It was his fiscal policy funded by debt that fueled the second great run up. No war, no major crisis in fact, just a bunch of boomers coming in to young adulthood. Ah, but liberalism had failed to make us all equal because of this pesky freedom thing, which was oh so British anyway.
    It was replaced by Rousseauian top down governance, too lofty in thought to deal with trivialities like economics and national defense.
    PET ran up the debt drastically, while increasing taxes somewhat, most notably sales taxes. Since the government ran unchecked deficits for nearly thirty years, debt service charges grew, from 11.6% of government expenditures in 1975, at the apex of the debt run up, to 26% in 1990.
    Harper, while he ran deficits and increased debt, got debt service charges down below 10% of expenditures. He was handed a bad hand and improved it.
    IOW, PET’s debt was NEVER TRULY REPAID, just rescheduled and re-serviced. Even when the economy boomed in the 1990, as actual federal debt to GDP dropped, debt service charges remained a significant expenditure, one quarter of federal revenues in 1990.
    Mulroney managed only to staunch the bleeding by at least not having to borrow just to meet programmed spending obligations.
    With the hangover of the PET debt still with us, despite the boom 1990s, even with Harper balancing her books after the world debt implosion, pushing the debt snowball uphill, Justin Trudeau wants to send her back down the mountain, hoping like his father the budget will balance itself.
    Trudeau, Mulroney, Chretien, and to some extent Harper, could rely on a bunch of boomers increasing their productivity, their wealth and their tax bills.
    Trudeau the younger cannot depend on that – the opposite in fact – as aging boomers decrease productivity through retirement/slowing down, consume their wealth and become drains on public coffers through pension and medical entitlements.
    He is playing a good hand poorly, not learning from his father’s misjudgment, indeed emulating it.
    Unlike their parents, boomers are carrying more debt, especially consumer debt, regrettably Canadians are not doing any better than their governments.
    Here it is in long form, a companion to the piece Kate posted.
    https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/federal-fiscal-history-canada-1867-2017.pdf

  10. There is no way to ever stop debt is there. Even if we managed to somehow trick them into a system where government employees would not get paid when there was a deficit, they would still do it. Unions would have to go, then again, you don’t pay people on strike…

  11. Last I read the average per capita debt by Canadians is 15% more than the USA. This in an economy that is no where close to being as fundamentally strong. ie Canada is a price taker with margins considerably poorer.
    Never read the Fraser report but wonder if the debt shown includes government obligated debt guarantees to crown corps. Also doubt if OAS long term cost are included. Global debt estimates are + $80 Trillion of which the USA owns $20 trillion. Doesn’t that give you a warm & fuzzy considering the quality of leadership the world has currently.

  16. Check page 4 of the attached article. Alberta went from $35 in the bank to a $10b debt.
    Ontario was also fairly debt free until the Wynne/McGuinty fiscal debacles.

  17. Canada’s assets per capita are much higher than the us – minerals, energy and bio assets.

  18. This has been going on for years. PET started the big spending in 1974. Yet we are still here doing pretty well. There is too much blather about the debt. The economy has not collapsed and will not do so any time in the future. According to all the experts this should have happened over 30 years ago, it did not.

  19. when you spend your savings, and then take out a loan, and spend that…………..
    I’ll explain that for you, you are an economic illiterate

  20. I guess Gordon isn’t interested in the lost productivity and potential of the nation, saddled to this day with debt service payments out of the PET borrowing binge to finance consumption, with nothing to show except unsustainable debt and hamstrung governments.
    Then again statist governments are like heroin addicts: the least they need is the most they can get. Look how well California is doing right now.
    Paying your household bills with credit card debt. Overspending now to get squeezed later. What could go wrong?
    I hear $40b comes in handy for the feds; that’s what their debt service topped out at, with PET deficits at $90b in todays dollars.
    Yes I know we owe it to ourselves, so we have to pay back ourselves. I guess the neo SJWs are fine with this wealth exchange from poor to rich.
    Oh right, it’s about the middle class in crisis. Screw the poor. In fact do more, borrow, raise their taxes, then nail them with carbon taxes.

  21. “Last I read the average per capita debt by Canadians is 15% more than the USA.”
    Yeah? The U.S. has approx. 10x Canada’s pop. and a debt of 20 $Trillion.
    http://www.usdebtclock.org/
    That’s just the U.S. government, not the federal and state debts combined.
    Yet the chart at top has the federal and provincial debts combined and it’s only 1.36 $Trillion.
    If you’re correct, then the Fraser Institute is in error.

  22. Budgets?
    Growing the Middle Class?
    Go Hair Apparent, this Turdeu is a piker: $1360 billion?, time he and his band of aged thieves got down to selling out our great great grandchildren.
    Following in Papas footsteps, I am sure if they “Invest in our futures” they can really destroy this country.
    Venezaula , however it is spelt, is our future.
    However hopefully our real owners will take over and impose order before too many city dwellers starve.

  23. I can understand debt on a personal level when one gets a loan to buy something like a house or vehicle. Loans were for durable goods that would still have value after the loan was paid.
    Debt for most Canadians today seems to be something different. There seems to be a lot of folks getting deeper into debt every month when they don’t have enough income to cover loan payments plus an ever increasing credit card balance because they use credit cards to pay for everything. Is that increasing indebtedness when expenses exceed income the same as “deficit” at a national level?
    I’ve seen a number of studies which showed that people who use cash for personal expenses usually avoid going deeper into debt and save more. I’ve also met many credit card users who are so deep into debt that they would never be able to pay it all down, but the banks just keep upping their credit limit. There’s an attitude that if you’re always going to be in debt, then it doesn’t matter how deep you are, so you might as well spend it on the good life while it lasts.
    How does that translate on a national level to make a country go economically crazy like Argentina or Venezuela? What could happen in Canada to place our economy in that position?

  24. “However hopefully our real owners will take over and impose order before too many city dwellers starve.”
    You haven’t been following the UN Agenda 21 program.
    Starving the city dwellers is their preferred tactic, it isn’t even a byproduct.
    How is it, do you suppose, that the Elites can reduce the global population to their target of 900 million?
    The Elites will accomplish their goals by PRIVATION. Starving and denying the masses water, food, heat, and light.
    Where once people’s fake representatives said, “We are all Americans,” after the 911 attack, we will all become in fact Africans who do not have the essentials of life due to enforced rationing of the essentials of life.
    Wait. Somehow this will all be reversed by President Trump.
    Yes, please…

  25. So what if more city dwellers starve? That’s where the great bulk of non-productive burdens on society are found. What’s wrong with a natural culling of those who can’t feed themselves? That’s happened throughout history, and it’s long overdue. It doesn’t even require a global agenda conspiracy to succeed, merely commonly shared goals like Sloth, Gluttony and Lust combined with Greed, Pride, Envy, and Wrath,

  26. from this we see it matters not a hoot who or what party is in office.
    party. how apropos. like they’re having a ‘party’ @ OUR expense. and have been since 1867.
    does this have any bearing on the looming hyperinflation and total collapse of the Ponzi scheme world economy?

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