Canada's federal borrowing is out of control

Crystia Freeland is out of her depth

A recent Bloomberg article reported the following:

When Ms. Freeland was born in 1968, the national debt was under $20 billion. Now Canada's borrowing in the current fiscal year is estimated by Ms.Freeland to be $242 billion. There is not much doubt the actual figure will be more than that, since the Trudeau government has no concept of restraint, led by a Prime Minister who said “the Budget will balance itself” during his 2014 campaign. Since his election in 2015, Canada has added over $600 billion to the national debt and with interest rates rising will soon have to pay somewhere around $30 billion a year in interest alone.

Propped up the socialist in the New Democratic Party, Trudeau’s minority government spend money like a drunken sailor with no regard for the burden that will place on our children who will have to pay for it. He has given billions to battery makers to build plants in Canada - grants that exceed the total cost of each plant - on the assumption that electric vehicles (EV’s) will predominate vehicle sales and the investments will be profitable for Canada, a pipe dream really. It is pretty clear now that the early adopters of EV’s have exhausted that component of demand, the infrastructure for charging EV’s is inadequate, that battery metals needed to meet the rosy projections don’t exist and sufficient mines capacity to supply the copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium cannot be brought into production within the Liberal dream of a total shift from internal combustion engine (ICE) to EV vehicles by 2050. That shift is driven by a belief (unsupported by evidence and contradicted by the laws of physics) that CO2 causes climate change (it certainly does not).

EV’s are terrific advances and will be mainstream one day - when the costs of an EV can compete with ICE powered vehicles both in terms of initial outlay and ongoing operating and maintenance costs as well as the costs of fuel (be it gasoline, diesel or electricity). Today, the economics just don’t work for most people.

The Canadian economy will crash into reality within a few years. Stupid immigration policies encouraging more people to come to Canada than we can house demonstrates the lack of foresight of a Liberal government and ensures our children may never own a home. Stupid energy policies and even more stupid fiscal and monetary policies have fueled persistent inflation making it difficult for most Canadians to keep food on the table and a roof over their family’s head. And it will get worse.

The way out of this morass is simple if unpleasant for Liberals. Boot Trudeau out. Elect Pierre Poilievre and hope his party makes him Prime Minister. A Poilievre led government will expand output of oil & gas which will bring inflation down; cut the size of the federal government and begin to move towards a balanced budget; get rid of needless regulation choking our energy and mining industries and frustrating housing construction; and, unwind the “woke” crap that Trudeau has inflicted on Canadians. Keep that in mind next election, which can’t come too soon for me.