Category: Canadian Taxpayers Federation

The Strange Politics Around Canada’s Milk Production

Canadian Taxpayers Federation 48 Comments

Here’s a bizarre story about nervous nuns, cute cows, and the byzantine way Canadian governments manage milk production:

As inflation soars, dairy farmers say price increases are necessary to cover ballooning costs.

But industry advocates argue that no other industry is able to pass on its cost increases directly on to the consumer. Canada’s controversial supply-management system protects dairy, poultry and egg farmers from international competition by regulating supply and imposing massive border tariffs on imports.

Supply management also forces farmers to pay millions in marketing costs to provincial milk boards. This week, a portion of that money found its way to the upper right-hand corner of the Maple Leaf’s jerseys as the Dairy Farmers of Ontario (DFO) became the NHL team’s first sweater branding partner. DFO refuse to say how much the deal cost.

h/t James MacMaster

Vancouver Isn’t So Awesome

Canadian Taxpayers Federation 22 Comments

From the website VancouverIsAwesome.com comes a story that shows that it sure ain’t that awesome any longer:

I really didn’t want to be a grump in my first column of the new year.
But after receiving 1,086 mostly redacted pages on Dec. 23, 2021 from the City of Vancouver that never answered the question I posed in December 2020, I’m confident I’ve earned the right to be a wee bit prickly in today’s entry.

The question: Can you tell me how much the city paid to buy the Balmoral and Regent hotels from the Sahota family?

The answer in December 2020: No, we can’t.

I laugh at Canadians who sincerely believe that there is little to no corruption in their country.

Pants on Fire

Canadian Taxpayers Federation The Libranos 31 Comments

Well, well, well…

From the Taxpayers Federation

Despite repeated denials last summer, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation paid $250,000 for a study that would include an examination of “tax policy that privileges home ownership,” according to documents exclusively obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

In Canada, homeowners do not currently pay tax when they sell their primary residence, the home they are living in.

Last summer, a story from online news site Blacklock’s Reporter stated the research was examining the idea of a home equity tax.

In the wake of the story being published on Jul. 17, 2020, both the CMHC’s communications department and then-CEO Evan Siddall issued multiple statements about the story being false.

Siddall directly attacked the reporting and Blacklock’s in multiple statements.

A series of emails between Kershaw and Siddall were also obtained by the Taxpayers Federation. They show Siddall was aware of the focus on home taxation changes before the study even received funding.

Read the whole thing.

Given that the Canadian government is now funded by money printing and debt the only reason for this additional tax is to punish home ownership. You can use your imagination as to why that might be.

And The Teddy Goes To…

Canadian Taxpayers Federation Political Animal You Might Be A Liberal 21 Comments

Your tax dollars at play.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation today held its 23rd annual Teddy Waste Awards ceremony in a special virtual presentation, celebrating the best of the worst in government waste uncovered in the past year. […]

 
“Former governor general Julie Payette blew hundreds of thousands of dollars on her inauguration and bizarre housing renovations before resigning under a cloud of controversy,” said CTF Federal Director Aaron Wudrick. “And the Quebec government’s remarkable ability to crash ferries into docks has soaked taxpayers for millions.
 
“Meanwhile, taxpayers in Toronto spent $160,000 to install bike lanes, and then another $80,000 to rip the same lanes out again just five months later. And no one will be surprised that the Phoenix Pay System, after years of being an enormous financial sinkhole, has earned the distinction of a lifetime achievement award.”

“Government” Is Simply The Name They Give To The Money They Throw Away Together

Canadian Taxpayers Federation 6 Comments

Someone in the Yukon had a brilliant idea: Buy gold and throw in a creek at a taxpayer-funded publicity stunt. The Yukon government jumped on board and spent $139,000 to promote and stage the Gold Rush II initiative where organizers threw gold into a creek as part of a tourism influencer campaign. Since the original gold rush cleaned out most of the gold, the organizers started with a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to buy some gold. The Klondike Visitors Association (KVA) set a goal to raise $100,000, but fell a bit short, raising just over $4,500.Despite this setback, the KVA used the crowdfunded money to buy 3.5 ounces of gold and the event went ahead, with the Yukon government spending $139,000 to execute and promote the event. Organizers planned to send invitations to more than 20 media outlets, but only three social media influencers and one reporter showed up.

It’s that time of year again: The Canadian Taxpayers Federation Teddy Awards. (pdf, for some reason.)

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Is every teacher really a hero?

Baiting The Left Canadian Taxpayers Federation 29 Comments

Anyone who has gone through the education system in Canada has had a mixed bag of teachers. My own public high school education in central Vancouver consisted of great math teachers, an incredible Physics teacher, and some very dedicated shop teachers. But I also experienced an English teacher who was drunk every morning and some Chemistry and French teachers who clearly should have never been teaching children.

Conrad Black pokes a few holes in the neverending union & media narrative that the Ontario education system is perfect, if only it weren’t for the stingy Ford government not giving them endless amounts of money:

The renewed agitation by teachers in Ontario highlights the debacle of the whole public teaching and school administration apparatus that is possibly the greatest and most universal public policy failing in modern Western civilization. It is one of the richest and most distressing ironies of our times that all of our Western societies consecrate more and more funding resources to education to produce steadily less educated and ostensibly less informed and less usefully intelligent graduates of secondary schools and graduate university programs. Not surprisingly, we are also focusing on fewer and fewer real subjects of authentic study. As my learned and much-harassed friend Jordan Peterson has often said, any course calling itself something that ends with the word “studies” is not a real subject. It is just a part of a larger subject and generally implies the exclusion of most of the real subject (and I write this as a former lecturer at McGill University in “French Canada Studies,” which was in fact the history of Quebec).

How much larger will Canada’s debt get?

Baiting The Left Canadian Taxpayers Federation 11 Comments

The Calgary Herald’s Licia Corbella points out some uncomfortable facts:

Let’s look at the difference in the tax burden between a Canadian child born in 2017 compared with their parent born in 1987.

Assuming that the parent makes the average Canadian salary of about $50,000 annually, the parent’s lifetime taxes paid are $586,726. But that parent is also expected to receive transfers or entitlements such as child benefits, EI, elderly benefits, social assistance, health and education, totalling $510,294, which results in a relatively low lifetime tax burden of $76,432.

The child, however, is expected to pay more than $3 million in lifetime taxes and receive $2.311 million back in transfers, for a tax burden of $735,919 — an almost 10-fold increase over their parents.

Why Is There Always A Big Screen TV?

Canadian Taxpayers Federation Chief Big Screen TV Great Moments In Socialism 10 Comments

Financial Post;

The First Nations Financial Transparency Act is simple: It requires First Nations to publish salaries and expenses for chief and council as well as basic financial documents online — the kind of information the rest of us can get with a Google search. The overwhelming majority of First Nations follow the law, but Onion Lake is one of six bands that have never complied. The previous Conservative government withheld non-essential funding from those bands, but the new Liberal government suspended all enforcement.
Charmaine’s victory enforces the legislation and for her it’s a very personal victory. The stay-at-home mom went on a 13-day hunger strike to demand accountability from her leaders during the summer of 2014. They told her she’d never get anywhere. She now has judicial validation.
The most fascinating parts of this ruling are the arguments Onion Lake left out. Rather than contesting matters of fact, Onion Lake asked the court to stay Charmaine’s application until other court proceedings conclude. Justice B.A. Barrington-Foote rejected the stay application.

Good for her.

Bombardier

Canadian Taxpayers Federation Insufferable Twits 29 Comments

Okay, maybe paying exorbitant bonuses to management after taking $1.3B in gov’t handouts wasn’t the best of public relations exercises.
In an email from Michael Chong today:*

There are times for government to intervene to protect sectors of our economy, such as when the government rescued our auto manufacturing industry in 2009.
Aerospace technology is another high-tech, R&D intensive sector important to Canada’s national economy.

Uh huh. Tell that to Viking Air of Victoria and Calgary. They’re the ones who rescued the de Haviland Canada type certificates for the DHC-1 to DHC-7 from Bombardier, who got it them from Boeing, who got them from the Gov’t of Canada. They’re actually producing new variants of the venerable DHC-6 (Twin Otter) and an upgrade program for the DHC-2 (Beaver).
Like all gov’t “investment” to “protect sectors of our economy” it is nothing but crony capitalism and vote buying.

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