There appears to be no end in sight for the Trudeau government’s pandemic spending spree.
In the first two months of its fiscal year, the federal government ran a deficit of $23.8 billion, according to the Finance Department’s regular fiscal monitor.
While the government points out that the $23.8 billion budgetary deficit is a significant drop from the $86.8 billion recorded over the same months in 2020 – when the pandemic first began and the government started implementing various COVID-19 support programs – critics are wondering when the government will reduce spending.
“Of course it’s good to see a smaller budget gap but this is still a massive deficit so the feds shouldn’t be patting themselves on the back,” said the Federal Director with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation Franco Terrazzano.
“We need to make sure all the temporary and costly COVID spending remains temporary because taxpayers can’t afford a repeat of 2020.”
Canada’s federal debt surpassed $1 trillion dollars this year following a frenzy of pandemic spending by the ruling Liberal government. Further, in its latest budget, the government revealed a whopping deficit of $354 billion with no plan to pay down the debt and balance the books.
“Unfortunately, the Trudeau government doesn’t seem to be taking the $1-trillion debt problem seriously because we continue to see massive spending announcement after massive spending announcement,” said Terrazzano.
In its most recent Fiscal Sustainability Report, the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) warned that the federal government will not return to a balanced budget until 2070 if politicians do not curb spending.
In its estimate, the PBO says the government is projected to tack on an additional $2.7 trillion in debt before balancing the budget in 2070. Interest charged will cost Canadians approximately $3.8 trillion by 2070.
The use of fentanyl, cannabis and methamphetamines spiked across Canada during the early stages of the pandemic, according to a government report.
Statistics Canada’s Canadian Wastewater Survey found that the increase in drug use is a contributor to the spike in overdose deaths last year.
In its report, government researchers analyzed the chemicals in wastewater in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver.
The report found that Vancouver had a per-capita load of fentanyl four times higher than any other city in the report. Edmonton saw the highest per-capita loads of Methamphetamines. Detectable cannabis was the highest in Halifax.
Increased isolation, poverty and a lack of social services caused by lockdowns led to a sharp increase in overdoses. Multiple provinces reported an alarming number of overdose-related deaths in 2020.
In Alberta, a record number of 95 young people under the age of 25 died from accidental opioid overdoses in 2020.
In Ontario, deadly opioid overdoses were up 75% following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 when compared to deaths the year prior. 2,050 people died of opioid overdoses between March and December 2020.
In the six months after the pandemic began, British Columbia recorded more overdose deaths than deaths from homicide, car accidents, suicide or the coronavirus combined.
Canadians have been victims of some of the strictest public health orders in the world, rivalling communist countries like China and Cuba. A number of government reports have led Canadians to question how effective lockdowns are.
A Statistics Canada report revealed that more Canadians under the age of 65 died from the “indirect consequences” of the pandemic than the COVID-19 virus itself.
Statistics Canada also reported that most of the people who died from COVID-19 in Canada were over the age of 85 and had dementia, Alzheimer’s, chronic heart disease or other pre-existing “cardiovascular and respiratory conditions.”
One of the “independent” senators recently appointed by the Trudeau government made multiple donations to the Liberal Party of Canada.
On Thursday, the government announced the appointment of five members into the Red Chamber. Amina Gerba was hand-picked by the prime minister to represent Quebec, alongside Michèle Audette, Clément Gignac, David Arnot and Karen Sorensen.
Gerba, described as an “ambassador for Afro-optimism” in her Government of Canada website biography, donated $500 to the Liberal Party in 2019, $454.80 to the Ahuntsic–Cartierville Federal Liberal Association in 2019 and $250 to cabinet minister Mélanie Joly’s nomination campaign in 2015, according to Elections Canada records. Gerba also made donations to the New Democrats in 2015.
The Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments (IABSA) claims new Senate appointments are “recommended by the IABSA, and chosen using the merit-based process open to all Canadians.”
This process is supposed to “ensure Senators are independent, reflect Canada’s diversity, and are able to tackle the broad range of challenges and opportunities facing the country.”
However, the government made no mention of Gerba’s support of the Liberal Party at the time of her appointment.
Many opposition politicians criticized Trudeau when he first founded the IABSA in 2016. The board was supposed to avoid the partisanship associated with Senate appointments, but many argued that it merely offers Trudeau more discretion on who gets selected.
In 2017, independents voted with the government 94.5% of the time.
True North reached out to Senator Amina to inquire about her connections to the Liberals but did not hear back in time for publication of this article.
This isn’t the first time an “independent” senator was found to have ties to the Liberal Party. In June, Trudeau appointed Bernadette Clemen – a former two-time Liberal candidate.
Both in 2011 and in 2015, Clement ran as a candidate for the Liberal Party of Canada in Ontario and lost both times to former Conservative MP Guy Lauzon.
Earlier this week, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney called out the Prime Minister for his recent Senate appointment in Alberta, claiming Trudeau showed “contempt for democracy” by appointing a Banff mayor Karen Sorenson to represent the province ahead of the senate elections.
“The Prime Minister knows full well that Alberta will be holding elections for Senate nominees in October of this year. I personally informed him of our forthcoming Senate elections at our July 7, 2021 meeting in Calgary,” Kenney said in a statement.
“[I] told him that the Alberta Legislature had adopted a motion calling on the Prime Minister not to fill the two current senate vacancies, but to wait for Albertans to choose their own preferred Senate candidates.”
COVID-19 has shone a light on a fundamental divide within Canada: the growing government bureaucracy and those forced to pay for it.
This contrast is illustrated by Statistics Canada’s latest jobs report. The private sector, including those who are self-employed, has shed 520,400 jobs since COVID-19 hit us, while the number of government jobs across the country has increased by 180,000.
Of those new government jobs, 52,900 are public administration bureaucrats.
These new government positions spur on a higher tax burden for many families saddled with pay cuts and job losses and for businesses that were ordered to shut down.
Unfortunately, this isn’t new. This bureaucrat surge follows years of increases.
“Ottawa’s public service has swelled by roughly 10,000 bureaucrats per year under Trudeau, to roughly 380,000 today,” wrote Postmedia reporter Jesse Snyder in May.
We just endured months of government lockdowns, so let’s do a thought experiment.
What does a gym owner who’s fighting to keep their business lights on need more: tax relief and red tape reductions, or more bureaucrat mouths to feed?
On top of the government job gains, Canadian taxpayers also have to pay for pay raises for politicians and thousands of bureaucrats during the pandemic.
Members of Parliament pocketed not one, but two pay raises during COVID-19. The pay hikes range from $6,900 for a backbench MP to $13,800 for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Before these pay raises, Trudeau and his ministers were already within the top one per cent of Canadian income earners.
This is in stark contrast to politicians in New Zealand who quickly stood in solidarity with taxpayers.
“We acknowledge New Zealanders who are reliant on wage subsidies, taking pay cuts and losing their jobs as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic,” said New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. “I can confirm that myself and government ministers and public service chief executives will take a 20 per cent pay cut for the next six months.”
Back home in Canada, government bureaucrats gobbled-up pay raises alongside of politicians.
Documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation show more than 18,000 provincial government bureaucrats and post-secondary employees received a raise during lockdowns last year in Alberta.
Same goes at city hall.
Nearly 14,000 employees at the city of Calgary and more than 34,000 employees at the city of Toronto received a raise last year. How many other cities and provinces handed-out pay raises while taxpayers struggled through lockdowns?
It’s a similar story at the federal level, where the feds agreed to hike the pay for thousands of its employees.
It’s tough to track down any government bureaucrat that took a pay cut during the lockdowns. In fact, the federal government has no records of its employees ever receiving a pay cut, according to research from the think tank Secondstreet.org.
Fortunately, there are some politicians, such as Alberta’s Jason Kenney, who are trying to make the government payroll fairer to the taxpayers who pay for it.
Premier Kenney is proposing a three or four per cent wage reduction for employees. By comparison, any private sector worker lucky enough to take that hair cut over the last five-plus years in Alberta was one of the fortunate ones.
However, instead of being willing to help shoulder the burden of the downturn, government union bosses are lighting their collective manes on fire.
Soon, Canadians will have to grapple with an important question: how are we going to pay back the mountain of government debt? The answer can’t be to make the private sector bear the entire burden.
We need politicians and bureaucrats to share in the difficult times and take a cut.
Franco Terrazzano is the Federal Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
The Interior Health Authority (IHA) has violated the privacy of more than 100,000 British Columbia residents.
The IHA targeted unvaccinated individuals and sent letters that displayed recipients’ vaccination status outside the envelope. The personal health information has now been compromised without the recipients’ consent.
Many unvaccinated citizens have complained about the letters.
Leader of the BC Libertarian Party Keith MacIntyre was one of the recipients of the IHA letter and expressed concern. Worried that the privacy breach could lead to personal conflicts, MacIntyre said that vaccination status “shouldn’t be emblazoned on the front of the envelope.”
The letters were written by the Provincial Health Officer of BC Dr. Bonnie Henry. In the letter, she tells recipients that “Interior Health Staff are saving a vaccine for you… I’m hoping we can count on you.”
The IHA told Castanet Media that they “worked with provincial partners to send letters to postal codes in communities with lower vaccination rates. The intent of the letter was to inform eligible people that the first and second doses of vaccines are available to them.”
Despite the vaccination status being clearly visible on the outside of the envelopes, IHA claimed that “receipt of a letter in no way indicates a person’s immunization status, as we recognize that some recipients will have already received their first or second dose prior to receiving the letter, or may not be able to be immunized for medical or other reasons.”
This isn’t the first time BC residents’ personal health information has been compromised during the COVID-19 pandemic. In June 2021, the BC government posted a tweet that asked citizens to disclose the names of their unvaccinated friends and family publicly.
“There are consequences for people who are not immunized,” said Henry at a BC COVID-19 update on July 27, 2021.
One consequence may be segregation based on vaccination status. As it stands, BC and the federal government have said vaccine passports will not be mandatory to access public services. However, Henry appears to support businesses instating vaccine requirements for customers.
“If I was running a nightclub, I’d want to make sure my staff are protected. And yes, we can absolutely say, ‘to come in here you have to be immunized,” Henry said.
Conservative MP Candice Bergen says the legacy media is providing cover for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
On Wednesday, multiple media outlets reported on how Trudeau was “deeply disappointed” by the Montreal Canadiens’ decision to draft Logan Mailloux.
Mailloux was charged after taking a photo of an 18-year-old woman during a consensual sexual encounter in Sweden and sending it to his teammates without her consent. Mailloux has since publicly apologized and requested that no NHL teams draft him.
In a series of tweets, Bergen pointed out how in the mainstream media’s coverage of Trudeau’s reaction to the incident, none of the media outlets acknowledged the prime minister’s past transgressions with women.
1/5 Unbelievable to watch the media in Canada. Both women and men in the media continue to provide cover for Trudeau on his treatment of women by refusing to ask him about how he’s groped women.
“[It’s] unbelievable to watch the media in Canada. Both women and men in the media continue to provide cover for Trudeau on his treatment of women by refusing to ask him about how he’s groped women,” the Manitoba MP tweeted.
Bergen proceeded to call out a number of mainstream media outlets and journalists, including the Winnipeg Free Press, CTV News, CBC News and Global News.
“Hey @EvanLSolomon how come @CTVNews excluded mention of Trudeau groping a former journalist? Don’t you think that’s relevant to his comments?” Bergen tweeted.
“Hey @CBCCanada – why are you running interference for Trudeau? Why not mention that he was accused of groping a woman? Relevant to his sincerity, no?”
In 2018, Trudeau was accused of groping a female reporter during the Kokanee Summit in Creston, B.C. in 2000 when Trudeau was 28-years-old. An article in the Creston Valley Advance accused Trudeau of groping and inappropriately handling a female reporter.
In the article, Trudeau is quoted saying, “I’m sorry. If I had known you were reporting for a national paper I never would have been so forward.”
When the allegations resurfaced in 2018, Trudeau said, “I apologized in the moment because I had obviously perceived that she had experienced it in a different way than I acted or I experienced it.”
In recent years, despite Trudeau’s claim that he is a “male feminist,” a number of Liberal MPs and staff have been accused of inappropriate behaviour, sexual harassment or other predatory behaviours towards women.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is fed up with the legacy media’s fear-mongering when it comes to their coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Premier Kenney was asked about his thoughts on how so-called health experts are warning that the pandemic is still ongoing, despite high vaccination rates and low case counts in Alberta.
“As Dr. Hinshaw has said, we are moving from a pandemic to an endemic state of COVID-19. We have seen our numbers come down dramatically in Alberta. We should salute that,” Kenney said during a press conference on Wednesday.
“Let me be blunt. I think it’s time for [the] media to stop promoting fear when it comes to COVID-19 and to start actually looking at where we’re at with huge vaccine protection.”
On Wednesday, Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw announced that the province would be lifting many of its remaining COVID-19 restrictions, including measures relating to quarantine, isolation and masks.
A number of Kenney’s critics have come out against the public health recommendations, including Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi. Nenshi said Hinshaw’s decision is the “height of insanity.” Nenshi has been highly critical of the Alberta government’s COVID-19 response, and has opposed previous moves to lift or ease health restrictions, despite their devastating impact on Alberta’s economy.
While many public health orders are being lifted, the Premier says Albertans will need to learn to live with COVID-19.
“COVID continues to exist. As I’ve said before, the virus will continue to circulate. Numbers will go up and they’ll go down, but what matters most is that the widespread protective effect of vaccines is real,” Kenney said.
“We should stop listening to people who deny the powerful protective effect of vaccines.”
According to the latest government statistics, there are currently 1520 active cases of COVID-19 in Alberta. Among eligible Albertans age 12 or older, 75.7% have now received a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine while 64.6% have now had two doses.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a fake feminist. Everybody knows it – he’s not fooling anybody. But that didn’t stop him from weighing in the Montreal Canadiens controversy involving prospect Logan Mailloux.
Time and time again, the Trudeau Liberals have demonstrated that they’re anything but feminists. A number of Liberal MPs have been entangled in sexual harassment scandals and have blamed their victims instead of taking responsibility – including Justin Trudeau.
On the latest episode of The Candice Malcolm Show, Candice Malcolm calls out Trudeau’s hypocrisy and lays out the facts.
The university named after the seventh Prime Minister of Canada announced on Thursday that they will be caving to the woke mob by launching the Laurier Legacy Project to explore the “complex legacy” of the university’s namesake.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier is often credited as being one of Canada’s greatest statesmen. As the first francophone Prime Minister, he is seen as one of the significant unifiers in Canadian history. During his 15 consecutive years serving as Prime Minister, most notably, he oversaw the establishment of Saskatchewan and Alberta into confederation.
In a press release, the university said that the Laurier Legacy Project will be “a multi-faceted public history initiative that will explore the times and legacy of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.”
The press release acknowledges that Laurier was indeed a well-respected “nation-builder”, however it qualifies that statement by mentioning that his policies on immigration and Indigenous relations were “complex”.
One of the main goals of the Laurier Legacy Project is to allow students and community members the chance to further their understanding of “Sir Wilfrid Laurier as a nation-builder and as a contributor to systems of racism and discrimination.”
The project will involve two postdoctoral fellows and one visiting professor. The visiting professor will be an Indigenous scholar who will be working toward “Indigeneity or decolonization in a historical context or in the context of the historical legacies of current day issues.”
One postdoctoral fellow will be tasked with researching Laurier and his legacy. The other will go through archival research of Wilfrid Laurier University and its antecedent institutions from 1911 to present day.
“This is a time when many are asking difficult questions about our founding colonial institutions, including universities,” the Associate Vice President of Equity and Diversity Barrington Walker said. “The Laurier Legacy Project will take a critical and research-based look at the histories of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, his era, and our institution.”
Other Ontario universities have launched similar social justice projects in recent years.
Ryerson University in Toronto launched the Standing Strong Task Force at the beginning of the year to examine the legacy of Egerton Ryerson, one of Canada’s most influential educational leaders and the founder of Ontario’s education system.
The mandate of the Standing Strong Task Forcewas to consult with community members about how to “reconcile the legacy of Egerton Ryerson” and to “examine how other universities have addressed the challenges of monuments and statues”.
Although the goal of the task force was to decide the fate of the Egerton Ryerson statue, vandals jumped the gun three months before the task force was to deliver their verdict and toppled the statue.
In July of 2020, Queen’s University in Kingston launched the ‘Building Name Consultation Process’ to consult on removing John A. Macdonald’s name from the law school building. Later that year, the building name was changed.
Ryerson University’s Standing Strong Task Force is set to deliver their final report in September.
The Laurier Legacy Project is set to take place over the next two years and result in a final scholarly and public education workshop in 2023, conveniently timed for Wilfrid Laurier University’s 50th anniversary.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau showed “contempt for democracy” by appointing a Senator to represent Alberta ahead of the province’s Senate elections.
“The Prime Minister knows full well that Alberta will be holding elections for Senate nominees in October of this year. I personally informed him of our forthcoming Senate elections at our July 7, 2021 meeting in Calgary,” Kenney said in a statement.
“[I] told him that the Alberta Legislature had adopted a motion calling on the Prime Minister not to fill the two current senate vacancies, but to wait for Albertans to choose their own preferred Senate candidates.”
My statement on Justin Trudeau’s Senate appointments today. Another slap in the face to Alberta. pic.twitter.com/7CqHuZcdUy
On Thursday afternoon, Trudeau announced the appointment of five new members of the Senate of Canada.
The mayor of Banff, Alberta Karen Sorensen was hand-picked by Trudeau to represent the province. She has resigned from her position as mayor following the appointment.
“I am humbled and incredibly honoured to be appointed to the Canadian Senate. After 17 years being privileged to serve the people of Banff, I am exhilarated to have this amazing opportunity in service to Canada,” Sorensen said in a news release.
The government claims the five new members of the Senate were “recommended by the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments, and chosen using the merit-based process open to all Canadians.”
While senators are appointed on the prime minister’s recommendation, Kenney said there’s an established convention to appoint senators chosen by Albertans in a democratic process.
“Alberta’s tradition of electing Senate nominees goes back to the 1980s. We have had four Senate elections in the past, and give nominees to the Senate selected by Albertans in these elections went on to be appointed and to represent Albertans in Parliament democratically,” Kenney said.
Kenney tweeted that Trudeau’s senate appointments were “another slap in the face to Alberta.”
